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Goodspeed - Edgar J. Goodspeed of the University of Chicago produced The New Testament: An American Translation in 1923. He was convinced that most Bible versions were translated into "British English"; so he tried to provide a version free from expressions that might be strange to Americans. A companion work, The Old Testament: An American Translation, edited by J. M. Powis Smith and three other scholars, was issued in 1927. In 1938 Goodspeed's translation of the Apocrypha appeared. This was the final contribution to The Complete Bible: An American Translation.
The Revised Standard Version. The Revised Standard Version (RSV) is one of the last versions in the long line of English Bible translations that stem from William Tyndale. Although it is a North American production, it has been widely accepted in the whole English-speaking world.
The RSV was launched as a revision of the KJV (1611), RV (1885), and ASV (1901). Authorized by the International Council of Religious Education, it is copyrighted by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches in the USA. The New Testament first appeared in 1946, the two Testaments in 1952, and the Apocrypha in 1957. A new edition in 1962 incorporated 85 minor changes in wording.
A Catholic edition of the RSV New Testament appeared in 1964, followed by the whole Bible in 1966. In 1973 a further edition of the RSV appeared (including revisions made in the 1971 edition of the New Testament). This version of the Bible was approved for use by Protestants, Roman Catholics, and the Greek Orthodox Church, making it an English Bible for all faiths.
New Catholic Versions. Several new versions of the English Bible designed especially for Catholic readers have appeared during the 20 th century.
Knox - In 1940 Ronald Knox, an English priest with exceptional literary gifts, was commissioned by his superiors to undertake a new Bible translation. At that time it was out of the question for a translation for Catholic readers to be based on anything other than the Latin Vulgate. The Vulgate served as the base of Knox's version, but he paid attention to the original Greek and Hebrew texts. His New Testament appeared in 1945, followed by the Old Testament in 1949.
Knox had a flair for adapting his English expressions to the rigid restrictions of the Latin Vulgate style. But the progress of the biblical movement in the Catholic Church in recent years has made his translation outdated. No longer must all Catholic versions of the Bible be based on the Latin Vulgate.
The Jerusalem Bible - The Jerusalem Bible was originally a French translation of the Bible, sponsored by the Dominican faculty of the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique in Jerusalem. A one-volume edition of the work, with fewer technical notes, was issued in 1956. The English counterpart to this volume, prepared under the editorship of Alexander Jones, was published in 1966. The biblical text was translated from the Hebrew and Greek languages, although the French version was consulted throughout for guidance where variant readings or interpretations were involved.
The Jerusalem Bible is a scholarly production with a high degree of literary skill. While it is the work of Catholic translators, it is nonsectarian. Readers of many religious traditions use the Jerusalem Bible.
The New American Bible - The New American Bible (NAB) was launched as a revision of the Douai (or Douay) Bible for American readers. In the beginning the revision was sponsored by the Episcopal Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, and the resulting work was called the Confraternity Version. The translators were scholars who belonged to the Catholic Biblical Association of America.
The New Testament of this translation first appeared in 1941. While it was a revision of the Douai text, which was based in turn on the Latin Vulgate, the translators at times went back to the Greek text behind the Latin. They drew attention in their notes to places where the Greek and Latin texts differed.
As the project progressed, the translators moved away from the Latin Vulgate as their text, basing it instead on the Greek and Hebrew text. So radical was this fresh approach that a new name seemed appropriate for the version when the entire Bible was completed in 1970. It was no longer called the Confraternity Version but the New American Bible. This new name may have been influenced also by the title of the New English Bible, which had appeared earlier in the same year.
The New English Bible. When the copyright of the British Revised Version was about to expire (1935), the owners of the copyright, the Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, consulted scholars about the possibility of a revision to bring this translation up to date. Later the scope of the project changed so that an entirely new translation, rather than a revision of an old translation, was commissioned.
The initiative in this enterprise was taken by the Church of Scotland in 1946. It approached other British churches, and a joint committee was set up in 1947 to make plans for a new translation of the Bible into modern English. The joint committee included representatives of the principal non-Roman churches of Great Britain and Ireland, agents of Bible societies, and officials of Oxford and Cambridge University Presses. The translators' goal was to issue a version "genuinely English in idiom...a 'timeless' English, avoiding equally both archaisms and transient modernisms."
The New Testament of the New English Bible (NEB) was published in March 1961; the whole Bible, together with the Apocrypha, appeared in March 1970. Between 1961 and 1970 the New Testament received some further revision.
In one respect the New English Bible reverted to the policy of the translators of the King James Version; sometimes they rendered the same Hebrew or Greek word with different English words. This means the student who cannot use the Hebrew or Greek texts will be unable to use this version for detailed word study. Sometimes the NEB makes a useful distinction in its selection of words, as when "church" is reserved for the universal company of Christian believers and "congregation" is used for a local group of believers. But a useful distinction made by the RV, ASV, and RSV is sometimes obscured by the NEB. A good example is when the same word, "devil or devils," is used by the NEB for Satan as well as the beings which should more correctly be called "demons." Two different Greek words for these beings are used in the original texts, and there is no good reason why they should be called the same thing by the NEB.
Paraphrases and Simplified Versions. Some translators have attempted to bring out the meaning of the biblical text by using either simplified or amplified vocabularies. Other translations that fall into this category are those that use lists of words considered basic to the English language.
Williams - Charles B. Williams, in The New Testament in the Language of the People (1937), tried to express the more delicate shades of meaning in Greek tenses by using a fuller wording. Thus, the command of Ephesians 4:25, "Let every one speak the truth with his neighbor" (RSV), is expressed, "You must...each of you practice telling the truth to his neighbor."
Wuest - What Williams did for Greek tenses, Kenneth S. Wuest did for all parts of speech in his Expanded Translation of the New Testament (1956-59). In this translation, the familiar Bible phrase, "Husbands, love your wives" (Ephesians 5:25) appears as, "The husbands, be loving your wives with a love self-sacrificial in its nature."
Amplified Bible - In The Amplified Bible (1958-65), a committee of 12 editors working for the Lockman Foundation of La Habra, California, incorporated alternative translations or additional words that would normally appear in margins or footnotes into their translation of the text. One fault of this translation is that it gives the reader no guidance to aid in choosing the proper alternative reading for specific passages.
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