A history of the American Standard Version

Made by Americans who were refused a vote on the English revision, held back fourteen years by a contract with two English presses, and printed at last with the name the King James had set in capital letters — the Bible the schools used and the people never came to love.

A history in 8 parts · about 31 min · 1870 – today

May 1881 · The Revised New Testament reaches America

The New Testament in the Sunday Paper

At ten o’clock on the morning of Saturday 21 May 1881, the composing room of the Chicago Tribune began setting the New Testament in type. The paper had arranged to take the text by telegraph and then thought better of it, reasoning that a book whose whole claim was accuracy could not be proofread off a clerk’s copy of a wire, so it waited for printed sheets and set from those. Ninety-two compositors worked on it, and five more corrected what the proofreaders caught. The last page was made up and stereotyped at ten that night, twelve hours after the first line, and on Sunday morning the Tribune’s buyers, sixty-three thousand of them by its own count, found folded into their five-cent paper the whole Revised Version of the New Testament, sixteen pages from the title page to the colophon. The book itself, the Tribune told them, was not on sale in Chicago that day at any price.

A few blocks away, Wilbur Storey’s Chicago Times did it by wire. It claimed that the Gospels, Acts and Romans, “about one hundred and eighteen thousand words,” had been telegraphed from New York, “by manyfold the largest dispatch ever sent over the wires.” Western Union’s own figure for that Friday night was 99,658 words of New Testament for all the Chicago papers together, over twenty-one circuits in under seven hours, which is a good deal less than the Times claimed. The Tribune, that Sunday and again on the Tuesday, said what its rival had really printed. By the Tribune’s account, the Times’s Saturday Gospels were largely the King James of 1611 from the fifteenth chapter of Mark onward, the angel troubling the pool at Bethesda included, because the Times had set the old text in advance and its corrections by wire gave out before the job was done. The Tribune called the result the Gospels according to St. Storey. Neither paper is a disinterested witness about the other, and Western Union was advertising itself.

New York had opened for it at four in the morning on Friday 20 May, when Thomas Nelson & Sons, the Oxford University Press’s agents on Bleecker Street, unlocked for the trade with sixteen clerks. By three that afternoon, the New York Times reported, they had disposed of a quarter of a million copies. The Herald put the orders at Nelson’s nearer 175,000, the New York Tribune said the first day’s sales exceeded 300,000, and Philip Schaff wrote in his journal that two hundred thousand were sold in New York that day. The cheapest copies cost fifteen cents. The two English presses, whose edition had appeared three days earlier, had taken orders for more than a million copies before publication, the American importers’ among them. The figures agree about the size of the thing and about little else.

A buyer who read the Tribune’s sixteen pages to the end reached a short list at the back, headed “List of readings and renderings preferred by the American Committee, recorded at their desire.” It asked for Holy Spirit wherever the book said Holy Ghost, for who in place of which when the word meant a person, for demon where the Greek meant a demon and the English said devil, and for some hundreds of particular readings, verse by verse. Behind it stood eight years of work by the American New Testament company, thirteen scholars at the finish, who had revised the whole book alongside the English and had been allowed no vote on a word of it. The heading was not the one they had sent. Theirs had said that the American company, “having in many cases yielded their preference,” presented these instances “in accordance with an understanding between the Companies.” The English had put their own in its place without asking, and “recorded at their desire” made the list read as a courtesy. The agreement had a second term: for fourteen years the Americans would publish no edition of their own. The American Standard Version began as that list at the back of the book, and it took twenty years to grow back into a Bible.

1870–1885 · The Revised Version, and how the Victorian revisers unpicked the King James

One of the Blemishes in the King James

The book the Tribune set in type had been started eleven years earlier, by a bishop who promised it would keep the old wording. On 10 February 1870 Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Winchester, moved in the Upper House of the Convocation of Canterbury for a committee on revising the Authorized Version of the New Testament, and before the vote the bishops amended the motion to take in the Old Testament as well. He would “deprecate exceedingly any attempt at a new translation,” he told them, and would “strongly oppose the striking out of archaisms.” The Convocation of York declined to take part, answering that the old version was accepted across the English-speaking world and that it “would deplore any recasting of its text.” So the Revised Version was the work of one of the Church of England’s two provinces, and Wilberforce, named permanent chairman of the New Testament company, attended one of its meetings, for a short time. His official biography blames his diocese. A letter that reaches us through a hostile witness says he stayed away because of the Unitarian.

The Unitarian was George Vance Smith, a minister from York, co-opted onto the company by a majority of one at a meeting of nine. On 22 June 1870, the morning the New Testament company first sat, the Dean of Westminster, Arthur Stanley, gave communion in Henry VII’s Chapel to those revisers who wished to come, Presbyterians, Nonconformists and Smith among them. More than fifteen hundred clergy signed a protest. The bishops resolved in February 1871 that nobody who denied the Godhead of Christ should sit on either company, the Lower House of Convocation declined to agree, and Smith stayed to the end.

Charles Ellicott, Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, had drafted the rules; he attended 405 of the company’s 407 meetings and presided at nearly all of them. The first rule was “to introduce as few alterations as possible into the Text of the Authorised Version consistently with faithfulness.” The fifth said that at the second, final revision nothing could change unless two thirds of those present agreed. The company met in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey, where Henry IV had died and the Westminster Assembly had sat, a room about forty feet by twenty, around a long table with the chairman’s desk at the middle of one side. They assembled at eleven, prayed, read the minutes, and went on until six with half an hour for lunch, four days a month, every month but August and September. In the first nine days they got through 153 verses. When the Greek was in question, F. H. A. Scrivener stated the evidence and Fenton Hort answered him, in what Ellicott remembered as “a kind of critical duel,” and the company voted. Hort and Brooke Foss Westcott had been handing their own new Greek text to the members privately, a few books at a time, since 1871, and it was published on 12 May 1881, five days before the revision it had helped to shape. The company voted its readings one at a time, and the result is its own text, which Hort’s son, no enemy of his father’s work, called “by no means identical” with it.

They finished at five in the afternoon of 11 November 1880, “after ten years and five months of labour,” and their preface explains what they had done to the King James. It admired the old version’s “simplicity, its dignity, its power,” and “the music of its cadences.” It also named a fault. The translators of 1611 had varied their English on purpose, and “the studied avoidance of uniformity in the rendering of the same words, even when occurring in the same context, is one of the blemishes in their work.” So wherever they could the revisers gave one Greek word one English word, and they turned the Greek aorist into a plain English past “even where the reader may find some passing difficulty in such a rendering.” At John 17:4 the King James’s “I have glorified thee on the earth” became “I glorified thee on the earth,” and at Luke 5:5 the revisers’ Peter “toiled all night, and took nothing.” Charity became love in 1 Corinthians 13, Easter became the Passover at Acts 12:4, and hell became Hades in ten places. The Lord’s Prayer asked to be delivered from the evil one, and its closing doxology moved to the margin. John 5:4 and Acts 8:37 went to the margin too, so that the verse numbers ran from three to five and from thirty-six to thirty-eight. At Revelation 22:19 the tree of life came back, where Erasmus, turning the last verses back into Greek from the Latin, had put a book. The three heavenly witnesses of 1 John 5:7 left the text without a note. The Unitarian noticed: the verse, he wrote, “is quietly dropped out of the text, not a word being said about it.”

How many changes there were depends on who counted. The thirty-six thousand that still circulates has two sources: Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln, spoke that year of a version “in which 36,000 changes have been made,” and an unnamed correspondent of The Guardian reckoned 36,191 in August, four and a half to a verse. Schaff, a reviser, thought the total swollen by punctuation and marginal notes. The 5,788 changes to the Greek come from Canon F. C. Cook, reporting Scrivener’s notes. John William Burgon counted the same notes and got 5,337.

Burgon, Dean of Chichester, answered in three long articles in the Quarterly Review between October 1881 and April 1882, collected in 1883 as The Revision Revised, and he wrote to wound. The revision was “the most astonishing, as well as the most calamitous literary blunder of the Age.” Without its doxology, he wrote, “we shall begin the Lord’s Prayer with ‘Our Father,’ and literally end it with — the Devil!” The line everyone remembers is Charles Spurgeon’s, from a note in his magazine The Sword and the Trowel in August 1881: “the men of the New Testament company are strong in Greek, but weak in English.” It is usually quoted as a verdict on the whole Revised Version. It was a few sentences about the only part then published, and the same note called the book “a valuable addition to our versions.”

The rush did not last. Schaff guessed that nearly three million copies were bought in Britain and America within a few months, and he recorded that afterwards the sale “fell off rapidly, and a reaction took place in favor of the old version.” The Old Testament followed in May 1885, after 792 days of sittings. No title page ever said the Revised Version was appointed to be read in churches. In 1899 the bishops of Canterbury resolved that reading it at the lectern was “not open to any well-founded objection,” which is permission rather than a mandate. The British and Foreign Bible Society, restricted until then to the King James, agreed to circulate it only on 9 October 1901, six weeks after the Americans had published their own.

1870–1881 · Philip Schaff and the American Committee of Revision

Fraternal Equality, Struck Out

Two weeks after the New Testament company first sat, Convocation voted to invite “the co-operation of some American divines.” Joseph Angus, a Baptist on the New Testament company, crossed that summer as a delegate to a conference of the Evangelical Alliance in New York, which the Franco-Prussian War put off until 1873. He carried a letter from Ellicott and an offer to help, and years later he told Schaff that his speaking to Ellicott about it had been “very informal,” and that Ellicott’s note “is really the beginning of everything.” The man who took it up was Philip Schaff, a church historian at Union Theological Seminary, born at Chur in Switzerland in 1819, who would lead the American revision of the English Bible as, in his son’s phrase, “one whose mother tongue was not English.”

Schaff’s plan, written in August 1870, proposed an American committee drawn from the principal denominations and working with the British “on terms of fraternal equality.” Stanley, writing for the English on 30 May 1871, asked him to omit the words, and to drop his articles on a joint meeting and on copyright as well. Schaff reported “full agreement,” and the constitution the Americans adopted that December kept both articles.

The Americans organized in Schaff’s study at the Bible House on Astor Place on 7 December 1871 and began work on 4 October 1872, more than two years behind the English. They rented Room 42 and bought their own furniture. The building belonged to the American Bible Society, which let many of its rooms to individuals and religious societies, and the committee’s own record took care to add that the Society was “in no way responsible for the revision” and was, by its constitution, “restricted to King James’s Version.” The members, some thirty of them, came from nine denominations: Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists and the Reformed, with one Lutheran, one Quaker and one Unitarian, Ezra Abbot of Harvard, the best textual critic among them. Nobody asked a Roman Catholic. Both companies met on the last Friday and Saturday of each month from September to May, and in the New Testament company Theodore Dwight Woolsey, once president of Yale, read the English revision aloud verse by verse while Bishop Alfred Lee of Delaware read the King James beside it. The revisers drew no salaries, only their fares to New York. The money came from gifts, $47,561 of it by 1885, and a donor of ten dollars received a memorial copy of the finished New Testament.

What they never received was a vote. The English companies refused one in 1873 and again in 1875; they were precluded, they said, by their own rules and “by the terms of their agreement with the University Presses,” which had bought the copyright and were paying the English revisers’ expenses. Schaff crossed to argue it in person. “Have the greatest contest of my life,” his journal reads for 15 June 1875, after three hours in the Jerusalem Chamber on whether the Americans were “simply advisers, or fellow-revisers and fellow-authors.” The companies offered a compromise that July, and in January 1876 the Presses made it hang on a price they had first named in 1874, five thousand pounds for the American rights. The Americans called any money arrangement “premature, and at present entirely impracticable,” and in June the Presses forbade the English companies to send them anything more. For a year no English revision crossed the ocean, and the American committee, split about twelve against twelve that spring on whether to go its own way, revised Hebrews and part of Isaiah with nothing to compare them against.

The settlement, dated 3 August 1877, was the third draft of a memorandum Schaff had begun at New Year with James Cartmell for the Presses, and its final wording was the Presses’. Where the two sides still differed at the end, “the American Committee will yield its preferences for the sake of harmony,” provided the differences were printed in an Appendix “during a term of fourteen years from the date of publication.” In return the Americans would support the English editions, “not only by abstaining from issuing any editions of their own, but by recognizing the editions of the University Presses as the authorized editions,” for “the period of fourteen years.” The Presses struck out a clause the Americans had asked for, which would have let the American Bible Society publish sooner.

They achieved more than the Appendix shows. Bishop Lee counted 904 American suggestions taken into the English text or margin, one man’s estimate and by his own account incomplete, and by his reckoning the Americans gave up at least 680 of their own preferences for the sake of the bargain. The Americans cut the Appendix down themselves, by a majority at New Haven in July 1880, over Woolsey’s protest: “If the Appendix is to be so small as Dr. Crosby suggests, I shall feel I have spent my time in vain.” Then the English rewrote its heading without asking. The committee made no public protest, but it put one in its minutes in October 1881: the heading “ought to have been printed according to promise, exactly as written, and not so changed as to represent its appearance as a favor instead of a right.”

1881–1901 · The fourteen years, a rival edition, and 26 August 1901

A Wait Held to Be More Honorable

The Revised Version had no copyright in the United States. The American committee had talked of securing one to protect the text and decided against it, even for the Appendix, the only part of the book that was theirs; so American publishers were free to print the whole and rearrange it as they liked, and they did. Within months there were Americanized New Testaments with the Appendix readings moved up into the text. One was edited by Roswell Hitchcock, the president of Schaff’s own seminary; another, from the American Baptist Publication Society, was printed from plates a New York congregation had paid for. The committee had said before publication that it would recognize no editions but the Presses’, and it could do nothing more.

The agreement did not say when the fourteen years began. Its fourth article said from the date of publication and its seventh said only fourteen years, and the Revised Version had been published twice, the New Testament in 1881 and the Old in 1885. “Strictly interpreted,” Matthew Brown Riddle of the New Testament company wrote afterwards, “it would have permitted the American Company to publish the New Testament in 1895. But as the Revised Old Testament did not appear until 1885, it was felt that it would be more honorable to wait until fourteen years after that date.” They counted to the summer of 1899.

The wait cost them the men. The committee met every year until 1891, and Schaff asked the Presses in 1887 and again in 1888 to publish an American edition, or to let the revisers do it, and was refused both times. He died on 20 October 1893. “With your father’s death the prospect of success in the solicitation of funds for a seemly edition disappeared,” Joseph Henry Thayer wrote to his son two years later, “and our diminishing numbers and taxed leisure have held the whole project in suspense to this hour.” By 1897 nine of the thirty-two members were alive, three of them from the New Testament company.

That year Thomas Nelson & Sons made an offer. In 1881 Nelson had been the Oxford Press’s own agents in New York, the firm that opened at four in the morning; by now it was a rival, and it offered to publish the Americans’ text, pay their expenses and sell the book at a price within reach. At the first meeting, in April 1897, when Nelson’s offered to pay the revisers as well, Thayer is said to have answered, “If I took money for this work, I would be ashamed to meet President Woolsey in Heaven!” Riddle is the only witness, and Woolsey had died in 1889. The contract was signed on 24 June 1897. About two days earlier, by Thayer’s own hedged recollection, a man claiming to represent the Oxford agency had called on him at Cambridge, Massachusetts, to ask on what terms Oxford could have the book, alone or jointly. Thayer spent 1898 and the spring of 1899 outside Leipzig choosing the cross-references and headings, pasting slips onto sheets and mailing them home.

The Presses got there first. On 10 November 1898, just before the fourteen years ran out, Oxford and Cambridge published their own edition with the Appendix readings set into the text, and some American booksellers advertised it as the American Revised Version until protests had the title withdrawn. George E. Day, secretary of the Old Testament company, disowned it within the month as “prepared by Englishmen who have no authority to represent the American Revisers.” Henry Frowde of the Oxford Press replied that the agreement of 1877 bound only the Americans: “Neither it nor any other engagement precludes or precluded the Presses from publishing what they have published.” He was right about the contract, and the Sunday School Times, which took the Americans’ side through the whole quarrel, admitted it. Thayer’s charge, sent from Germany in February 1899, was that the Presses had violated “the laws of ordinary courtesy.”

The New Testament editors held their last meeting on 19 April 1900. William Henry Green, chairman of the Old Testament company, had died that February. In the summer of 1901 Timothy Dwight and Thayer sailed for Europe and left Riddle to see the Appendix through the press alone. “The last proof of the last page was corrected in the room at Castine, Maine, where these lines are penned,” he wrote seven years later, “and sent off July 15, 1901.” Nelson put the book on sale on Monday 26 August 1901, a quarto in long primer type, from a dollar and a half to nine dollars.

Its title page did not say American Standard Version. It said the text had been newly edited by the American Revision Committee, and beneath that, Standard Edition, standard in the printer’s sense of the fixed text from which every other printing is set. On the back, the two secretaries signed an attestation that this and editions conforming to it were “the only editions authorized by the American Committee of Revision.” One of the names was George E. Day’s, and on 20 May 1881 Day had signed the notice authorizing the Oxford and Cambridge editions. Thayer died on 26 November, three months after publication. “It has now been sixteen years,” The Independent observed, “so they have kept their promise.” The New York Times, which had reported the Revised New Testament’s first day as news, listed the American one under Books Received.

1901 · Why the American Standard says Jehovah, and what else it changed

Jehovah Is My Shepherd

The Old Testament preface opens with the change it expected to be “unwelcome to many.” Where the King James printed LORD in capital letters, the American revisers printed the Name. They had been brought, they wrote, to “the unanimous conviction that a Jewish superstition, which regarded the Divine Name as too sacred to be uttered, ought no longer to dominate in the English or any other version of the Old Testament.” The Name meant “not merely the abstractly ‘Eternal One’ of many French translations, but the ever living Helper of those who are in trouble,” and it was “now restored to the place in the sacred text to which it has an unquestionable claim.”

The reverence the preface dismissed is one the New Testament, as it has come down to us, shares. Every Greek copy of it that survives has Kyrios, Lord, where it quotes scripture that carries the Name, and never the Name itself, and the American Standard shows the consequence on its own pages. At Psalm 110:1 it reads “Jehovah saith unto my Lord”; at Matthew 22:44, where Jesus quotes the verse, it reads “The Lord said unto my Lord,” because the Greek there says Kyrios and the revisers translated what was in front of them. The form Jehovah is itself a Christian reading of a Jewish page. Hebrew Bibles set under the four consonants of the Name the vowels of Adonai, Lord, or of Elohim, God, where Adonai already stands beside it, to tell the reader what to say aloud. Christian scholars read the consonants and the vowels together as one word; the form turns up in a Christian book by 1303, perhaps a generation earlier, and Petrus Galatinus made it current in 1518. In the text of the American Standard this site carries, the Name is printed 6,885 times as Jehovah and four times more in capitals, in 5,822 verses, and not once in the New Testament. It stands in every book of the Old Testament but Esther and Ecclesiastes, which never use it.

The capital letters the Americans set aside came into English with Tyndale, who had the habit from Luther’s Old Testament of 1523. His Pentateuch of 1530 prints Iehouah a handful of times, Exodus 6:3 among them, and its glossary tells the reader that LORD in great letters stands for the Name. The King James kept both habits, LORD and GOD in capitals nearly seven thousand times and Jehovah in seven verses, four where the Name stands alone and three in place names like Jehovah-jireh. The English revisers of 1885 followed “the usage of the Authorised Version” and printed the Name in only a few passages more. The first class of preferences in the Americans’ Old Testament Appendix asked for Jehovah “wherever it occurs in the Hebrew text.”

The rest of the changes were smaller and more numerous. Holy Ghost became Holy Spirit throughout, which freed the word for Matthew 14:26, where the disciples see Jesus on the water and cry out, in the American Standard, “It is a ghost.” Sheol went into the text wherever it stands in the Hebrew; the English, the preface noted, had used it “twenty-nine times out of the sixty-four.” Demon replaced devil for the Greek daimonion. For persons the Americans wrote who instead of which, so that the American Standard’s Lord’s Prayer opens “Our Father who art in heaven,” and wist and wot became knew and know. Justice replaced judgment “wherever the Hebrew word plainly has this abstract sense,” well beyond what the Appendix had asked. Saviour kept its u “in deference to sacred associations,” Riddle explained, while honor and labor lost theirs. The Americans removed the English revisers’ arrow-snake at Isaiah 34:15 as “an animal unknown to zoology, the term having obviously been adopted through a too literal translation of the German word ‘Pfeilschlange,’” and put a dart-snake in its place. They also put back the page headings the English had dropped as commentary, and set the verse numbers into the text, where, Edgar Goodspeed complained in 1925, they “absurdly interrupt it.”

One verse where the Americans put justice had a long afterlife. The King James has “let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream” at Amos 5:24. The English revisers made it roll down and put “Or, everflowing” in the margin; the Americans made it “let justice roll down as waters” and kept the margin, and in 1952 the Revised Standard Version moved the margin into the text, “like an everflowing stream.” In the three places Martin Luther King Jr. is best remembered for using the verse, he quoted it three ways. At the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery in December 1955, justice “runs down like water,” the King James’s verb. In the letter from Birmingham jail in April 1963 he quoted the Revised Standard to the word. At the Lincoln Memorial that August he said “until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Roll down came from the English revisers of 1885, justice from the Americans of 1901, like waters from the Revised Standard, and a mighty stream from the King James, which every revision before 1952 had kept. Every phrase of the sentence is in one of those Bibles, and the whole of it in none of them.

1901–1944 · Sunday schools, a copyright changing hands, and a second publisher

The People Love the King James

In October 1901 Clyde Votaw of the University of Chicago called the new book “by far, and in every respect, the best English translation of the Bible in existence, both for scholars and for people.” A page earlier he had complained that it had not gone nearly far enough: “there seems really no reason why a hundred changes should not have been made where the American Revisers have made one.” Within months the Sunday School Times was printing its weekly lessons from the American Standard. The American Bible Society, whose rooms the revisers had rented and whose constitution had allowed it only the King James, amended the constitution in 1904 so that it could publish the American Standard too. Nelson advertised hard: fifty dollars for the best bookseller’s Easter window of American Standard Bibles in 1908, and by 1912 “eight sizes of type and over 200 styles of binding,” from thirty-five cents. It charged the Sunday-school papers nothing to print the text, and the papers printed it. In April 1915 the Sunday School Times gave the week’s golden text, the verse a class learned by heart, in the American Standard’s words: “Jehovah is my shepherd.”

The pews were another matter. “The masses to-day still read the Authorized Version,” A. T. Robertson, the Southern Baptist Greek scholar, wrote in 1924. “The schools, ministers of culture, and many Sunday-school teachers use the Revised Version,” English or American, “but the people love the King James Version.” “Ministers no longer apologize for reading it in the pulpit,” he added.

In February 1929, meeting at the Hotel Sherman in Chicago, the International Council of Religious Education, the body that drew up the International Sunday-school lessons, approved a contract under which Nelson assigned it the copyright; the assignment is dated 27 February. The contract made the Council’s new American Standard Bible Committee “for all practical purposes” the successor of the American Committee on Revision, forbade any change to the text for five years and allowed changes after that only at ten-year intervals. The Council renewed the copyright in its own name on 3 April 1929, for twenty-eight years. The Revised Standard Version’s own preface dates the transfer to 1928, which is when it was proposed. It was a custodian’s arrangement and not a plan to replace the book. The committee, with Luther Weigle of Yale in the chair and Goodspeed, James Moffatt and Robertson among the scholars elected in 1930, met five times in three years and ran out of money. In February 1937 the Council voted for a thorough revision after all, and Nelson advanced thirty-five thousand dollars toward it, and more as the work went on. From 1944 half of the American Standard’s royalties above an agreed minimum went to repay Nelson’s advances, $44,500 by then, so the buyers of the old revision helped to pay for its replacement.

The same year the American Standard found a second publisher, one that wanted it for the word its replacement had already voted to drop. The Watch Tower Society of Jehovah’s Witnesses bought from Nelson the right to make printing plates of the book for the sake of the Name, and by the Society’s own count printed 1,039,482 copies over the next forty-eight years.

1937–1960 · The Revised Standard Version, and the Bible wars

One Page at Rocky Mount

The revision the Council commissioned is the Revised Standard Version, and its title page traces its line from 1611 through the revisions of 1881 to 1885 and 1901. The first thing it gave up was the Name. The committee voted on Jehovah in 1930, in 1937 and in 1951, and George Dahl of its Old Testament section recorded that the vote was unanimous every time. The preface of 1952 gives two reasons: that the form does not represent any pronunciation of the Name ever used in Hebrew, and that a proper name for the one God, as if there were others to tell him from, has no place in “the universal faith of the Christian Church.” Its New Testament, published on 11 February 1946, had named the other fault it meant to correct in the revisions of 1881 and 1901, which it called “mechanically exact, literal, word-for-word.”

The whole Bible was published on 30 September 1952, nearly a million copies in its first run, and that evening, by the count its sponsors kept, services to mark it were held in 3,418 communities across the United States and Canada. Four days earlier Weigle had carried the first copy of the whole Bible to President Truman in the Rose Garden, and Truman said that he had been raised on his mother’s Bible of 1881, with the Revised New Testament printed beside the King James.

Within weeks the argument had narrowed to one verse. At Isaiah 7:14 the Revised Standard read “a young woman shall conceive,” with “Or virgin” at the foot of the page, and to many readers that was an attack on the virgin birth. The reading was not new. The Revised Version of 1885 and the American Standard of 1901 both printed “a virgin” in the text and “Or, maiden” in the margin, where it had stood for sixty-seven years. The Revised Standard swapped the text and the margin, and it kept virgin at Matthew 1:23, where the Gospel quotes the verse.

On Sunday 30 November 1952, at Temple Baptist Church in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, the Rev. Martin Luther Hux preached for two hours on “The National Council Bible, the Master Stroke of Satan.” Then he took his congregation out into the cold, where each of them was given a small American flag and a truck was waiting. From its bed Hux held up a copy he had marked with the word fraud, tore out the leaf with Isaiah 7:14 on it, and set it alight. “I never said I would burn the Bible,” he told the reporters. “I said I would burn a fraud.” Time, in its issue of 8 December, reported that he had “publicly burned a page,” and the ministers of Rocky Mount told their local paper they deplored it.

The story as usually told, of a whole Bible burned with a blowtorch in a pulpit and the ashes mailed to the committee, joins two episodes. The earliest telling found with a blowtorch in it is Bruce Metzger’s, in a lecture printed in 1993, forty years on. The ashes came in January 1953, by registered mail, in a metal box from another preacher, Bill Denton of the Furnace Street Mission in Akron, Ohio, with a letter describing them as the ashes of “a book which was once called the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible.” The committee kept the box. Were copies burned in pulpits? A Seventh-day Adventist editor wrote in February 1953 that some opponents had “gone so far as to burn it in their churches,” and named nobody. Peter Thuesen, who read the committee’s papers and more than two hundred attacks on the book, names two burnings: Hux’s page and Denton’s book.

The quarrel soon moved from the verse to the translators. The National Council of Churches owned the Revised Standard and drew the royalties, and to its enemies the Council was a nest of modernists. Carl McIntire’s pamphlet against the new Bible became, in Thuesen’s judgment, the most influential of the attacks, and Circuit Riders, an anticommunist outfit in Cincinnati, put out a booklet titled Thirty of the Ninety-five Men Who Gave Us the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. In January 1960 the charge surfaced in a training manual for the Air Force Reserve, which told its readers that “of the 95 persons who served in this project, 30 have been affiliated with pro-Communist fronts, projects, and publications.” About 3,200 copies went out before the Air Staff stopped it on 11 February, and the Secretary of the Air Force repudiated it. The New York Times called the manual “venomous nonsense” on 19 February; six days later the House Committee on Un-American Activities held a hearing in its defense. Bruce Metzger, in the same lecture that supplied the blowtorch, gave Senator McCarthy the credit for the manual. McCarthy had died in May 1957.

By 1962 the Revised Standard was selling a million copies a year. Catholic scholars in Britain prepared an edition of it in 1965 and 1966, and its successor of 1989, the New Revised Standard Version, reads “the young woman” at Isaiah 7:14. The Bible wars is a later name for the affair; writers at the time called it a controversy.

1957–today · The NASB, the World English Bible, and the American Standard on this shelf

Four Words in Five

The Council’s renewal ran out in 1957, and the American Standard became anyone’s to print. Two years later the Lockman Foundation of La Habra, California, begun in 1942 with the gift of a citrus ranch, set out to rescue the American Standard. The preface to the Foundation’s New American Standard New Testament of 1963 says that the 1901 version was “fast disappearing from the scene.” The rescue kept the American Standard’s literalness and dropped its idiom: the New Testament put you where the old book had thee, except in prayer to God, and the Old Testament, when the whole Bible followed in 1971, printed LORD again where the old book had printed the Name. The Amplified New Testament of 1958 began from the American Standard, and so did Kenneth Taylor’s paraphrase, the Living Bible. The Revised Standard, the New Revised Standard of 1989 and the English Standard Version of 2001 all trace their descent through the 1901 book in their prefaces, and the word Standard in their names is the word from its title page. The Holman Christian Standard Bible and the International Standard Version use the word too, and neither descends from the 1901 book.

The one that kept closest began in a car. In March 1994, by his own account, Michael Paul Johnson, driving from Longmont to Boulder in Colorado, prayed about the lack of a modern English Bible that anyone could copy freely. He started translating John himself, worked out that at his pace he would be about a hundred and fifty years old at the end, and turned to the American Standard instead. He wrote two small programs, one to list its archaic words and one to replace them, and the conversion ran in about fifteen minutes. The result, public domain from the first, was called ASV 97 and then the World English Bible; volunteers revised it book by book for another twenty-three years, and its editors declared it complete in 2020. It prints Yahweh where the American Standard prints Jehovah, or Yah where the Hebrew has the short form. Its New Testament follows the Byzantine majority of Greek manuscripts instead of the revisers’ text, so it puts back the doxology of the Lord’s Prayer, Matthew 17:21 and Romans 16:24, and, like the American Standard, leaves out Acts 8:37 and the heavenly witnesses, which most Greek copies lack. At Isaiah 34:15, where the Americans had put a dart-snake, it has the arrow snake back, the animal unknown to zoology.

Counted word by word in the texts on this site, eighty-eight words in every hundred of the American Standard are the King James’s, and eighty-one in every hundred of the World English Bible are the American Standard’s. The World English Bible is what this reader opens to unless you choose another, so four words in five of the Bible a reader meets here first are the American revisers’ English, and most of that was the King James’s before it was theirs.

In May 1881 the American preferences took up a few columns at the back of a five-cent newspaper, “recorded at their desire.” On this site, unless you ask for something else, they are what the page says: the Holy Spirit, demons, Sheol left as Sheol, and the Name printed as a name.

1870 – today

The whole thing, in order

1. 1870Wilberforce moves the revision in February; the English companies first sit in June; Convocation invites the Americans in July.
2. 1871The American Committee organizes in Schaff’s study at the Bible House, 7 December.
3. 1872The Americans begin work in a rented room on Astor Place, 4 October.
4. 1875Schaff argues for a vote in the Jerusalem Chamber for three hours; the companies offer a compromise, which the Presses tie to a price.
5. 1876The University Presses forbid the English companies to send any more proofs to New York.
6. 1877The agreement of 3 August: an Appendix for fourteen years, and no American edition.
7. 1881The Revised New Testament, 17 May in England and 20 May in New York; two Chicago papers print it whole on the 22nd.
8. 1883Burgon collects his attacks as The Revision Revised.
9. 1885The Revised Old Testament, with the American preference for Jehovah in its Appendix.
10. 1893Philip Schaff dies, 20 October.
11. 1897The surviving revisers sign with Thomas Nelson & Sons, 24 June.
12. 1898Oxford and Cambridge publish their own Americanized Bible, 10 November.
13. 1901The American Standard Edition goes on sale, 26 August; the Bible Society in London takes up the Revised Version in October.
14. 1904The American Bible Society changes its constitution so that it can publish the American Standard.
15. 1929The International Council of Religious Education takes the copyright and renews it.
16. 1937The Council votes for a thorough revision, paid for by an advance from Nelson.
17. 1944The Watch Tower Society begins printing the American Standard for the Name.
18. 1946The Revised Standard New Testament, 11 February.
19. 1952The Revised Standard Version, 30 September; one page burned at Rocky Mount, 30 November.
20. 1957The copyright lapses.
21. 1960An Air Force Reserve manual repeats the charge against the Revised Standard’s translators, and is withdrawn.
22. 1971The New American Standard Bible, complete.
23. 1994A drive to Boulder begins the World English Bible.
24. 2020The World English Bible declared complete.

Who says so

A note on sources

This is a secondhand history, assembled from the works named below and the documents they print, and where they disagree the disagreement has been left in the prose.

The American side of the story comes largely from the committee’s own papers, which Philip Schaff compiled and printed, and from Matthew Riddle’s account of 1908. The British side of the quarrels over the vote, the proofs and the heading of the Appendix survives chiefly as the Americans chose to print it. The Chicago weekend rests on two newspapers accusing each other of fraud and a telegraph company describing its own achievement. The account of Rocky Mount follows Peter Thuesen’s reading of the North Carolina papers of 1 December 1952 and Time’s report of 8 December.

Several figures are one person’s reckoning, and the sentences say whose: the copies ordered and sold in 1881, the thirty-six thousand changes, the 904 American suggestions, the 3,418 communities of 1952. The counts of the Name and the two word shares were made on the electronic texts this site carries, the same count the film on the texts page reports, and they describe those texts rather than a printed copy of 1901.

Further reading

• Philip Schaff, A Companion to the Greek Testament and the English Version (1883) — The American Committee’s president on the whole revision, with its documents, its Appendix and the first year’s sales. Partisan, and the indispensable source. Free online.
• Matthew Brown Riddle, The Story of the Revised New Testament, American Standard Edition (1908) — The New Testament editor who saw the last proof off from Castine, on the fourteen years, the Nelson contract and the making of the edition. Short, and the only witness to several things on this page.
• Samuel Newth, Lectures on Bible Revision (1881) — A member of the New Testament company on how the Jerusalem Chamber worked, down to the seating plan and the number of verses a day.
• Samuel Hemphill, A History of the Revised Version of the New Testament (1906) — A critic of the revision who dates and sources everything, which makes him the best guide to its quarrels. Free online.
• John William Burgon, The Revision Revised (1883) — The case against the Revised Version at full volume. Read it for what the revisers changed as much as for what he thought of them.
• Peter J. Thuesen, In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible (1999) — The American revisions from 1881 to the fight over the Revised Standard, and the book that sorts out what happened at Rocky Mount.
• David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (2003) — The long view, which places the Revised and American Standard versions in the line from Tyndale to the twentieth century.

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