The Revised Version (RV) or English Revised Version (ERV) of the Bible is a late 19th-century British revision of the King James Version. It was the first and remains the only officially authorised and recognised revision of the King James Version in Great Britain. The work was entrusted to over 50 scholars from various denominations in Great Britain. American scholars were invited to co-operate, by correspondence. Its New Testament was published in 1881, its Old Testament in 1885, and its Apocrypha in 1894. The best known of the translation committee members were Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort; their fiercest critics of that period were John William Burgon and George Saintsbury.
The New Testament revision company was commissioned in 1870 by the convocation of Canterbury. Their stated aim was "to adapt King James' version to the present state of the English language without changing the idiom and vocabulary," and "to adapt it to the present standard of Biblical scholarship." To those ends, the Greek text that was used to translate the New Testament was believed by most to be of higher reliability than the Textus Receptus. The readings used were compiled from a different text of the Greek Testament by Edwin Palmer.
While the text of the translation itself is widely regarded as excessively literal and flat, the Revised Version is significant in the history of English Bible translation for many reasons. At the time of the RV's publication, the nearly 300-year-old King James Version was the main Protestant English Bible in Victorian England. The RV, therefore, is regarded as the forerunner of the entire modern translation tradition. It was also considered more accurate than the King James Version in a number of verses.
The Revised Version of the New Testament translators, 1881
The revisers were charged with introducing alterations only if they were deemed necessary to be more accurate and faithful to the Original Greek and Hebrew texts. In the New Testament alone more than 30,000 changes were made, over 5,000 on the basis of what were considered better Greek manuscripts. The work was begun in 1879, with the entire work completed in 1885. (The RV Apocrypha came out in 1895.)
The 1885 Revised Version was the first post-King James Version modern English Bible to gain popular acceptance. It was used and quoted favorably by ministers, authors, and theologians in the late 1800s and throughout the 1900s, such as Andrew Murray, T. Austin-Sparks, Watchman Nee, H.L. Ellison, F.F. Bruce, and Clarence Larkin, in their works. Other enhancements introduced in the RV include arrangement of the text into paragraphs, formatting Old Testament poetry as indented poetic lines instead of prose, and the inclusion of marginal notes to alert the reader to variations in wording in ancient manuscripts. The Apocrypha in the Revised Version became the first printed edition in English to offer the complete text of Second Esdras, inasmuch as damage to one 9th-century manuscript had caused 70 verses to be omitted from previous editions and printed versions, including the King James Version.
In the United States, the Revised Version was adapted and revised as the "Revised Version, Standard American Edition" (the American Standard Version) in 1901. The American Standard Version is largely identical to the 1885 Revised Version, with minor variations in wording considered to be slightly more accurate. One noticeable difference is the much more frequent use of the form "Jehovah" in the Old Testament of the American Standard Version, rather than "the Lord" that is used more so in the 1885 Revised Version, to represent the Divine Name, the Tetragrammaton.
The 1885 Revised Version and the 1901 American Revision are among the Bible versions authorized for use in services of the Episcopal Church and also of the Church of England.