The History of the English Bible: The Era Between the King James Bible and the Revised Version

Many people mistakenly believe that there were no further translations being produced between the King James Bible and the Revised Version.

The reality is that several English translations were produced in both Britain and North Americaduring the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Daniel Whitby produced a paraphrase of the King James Version in 1703 and there was a translation by Edward Wells in 1724 which was a revision of the Authorized Version and was called the “Common Translation Corrected.”

Then, in 1729, Daniel Mace also produced a corrected translation of the King James and the Primitive New Testament was published in 1745 by William Whiston.

What is interesting about his work is that his text is based upon more ancient Greek MSS, which was the Western text and so consequently, his translation was the only English one that ever was based upon the Western text.

Even the great theologian John Wesley published a translation and in the same year Edward Harwood a bizarre translation in which the Lord’s prayer did not begin with “Our Father, which art in heaven,” but rather it began with “Thou great governour and parent of universal nature.”

Thus, he produced the first gender-inclusive translation.

Helen Spurrell was the first women to produce a translation in 1885 when she published her version of the Old Testament which was translated from an unpointed Hebrew text meaning a Hebrew Bible that had only consonants and no vowels.

There were many other translations being published during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Charles Thompson, Samuel Sharpe, Isaac Leeser, A. Benisch, J. N. Darby, Robert Young, Joseph Bryant Rotherham, Thomas Newberry, W. J. Conybeare and J. S. Howson, and Henry Alford produced their own translations.

However, all of these translations had something in common, namely they were all produced by an individual rather than a committee.

The great scholar Henry Alford wrote “It is impossible that one man’s work can ever fulfill the requisites for an accepted Version of the Scriptures.”

He was in fact praying that a committee would be formed to revise the Authorized Version and this did in fact take place a year later.

Alford was very concerned about the textual base of the King James since he knew that it was inadequate because he was very much aware of recent archaeological discoveries of manuscripts which improved knowledge about the original text.

A translation was needed in order to keep up with these new manuscripts.

There were two major problems with the King James which demanded that a new translation be produced.

First there were problems with its textual base and secondly there were problems with the English translation.

The Greek text of the King James was greatly inferior to the text base of modern translations in that it was based mainly on the Stephanus text of 1550, the third edition which relied on Erasmus’ third edition of the Greek New Testament published in 1522.

The Stephanus text was modified a bit by Theodore Beza who put the text through eleven editions and his ninth edition was used in preparing for the King James.

This Greek text was later known as the Textus Receptus which misses the wording of the original in approximately 5,000 places, however most of these places cannot be translated but a few of them are major.

Therefore, all of these Greek texts which served as the text base of the King James are essentially the same or in other words, they are all basically the third edition of Erasmus.

It is extremely important to know something about the Greek text that stands behind the King James in order to understand the history of the English Bible and to put it bluntly the first production of the Greek New Testament was sloppy.

A Roman Catholic priest and a humanist from Holland named Erasmus took it upon himself to publish the first Greek New Testament in Europe.

On March 1, 1516 he published the first Greek New Testament and then, 20 months later, Luther read Erasmus’ Greek text and in particular Romans, he got saved which resulted in the Reformation.

Luther himself said he would have never challenged the Pope if he hadn’t read the Greek New Testament.

Speaking of the Reformation, the Reformers such as Luther and Calvin emphasized the need for pastors and Bible students to go back to the original languages.

The Church was in bondage for centuries to man-made tradition and faulty interpretation and the way out of this bondage was to go back to the original Greek and Hebrew text.

Luther rebuked pastors in training who did not desire to learn the original languages, he wrote “In proportion as we value the gospel, let us zealously hold to the [biblical] languages. For it was not without purpose that God caused his Scriptures to be set down in these two languages alone—the Old Testament in Hebrew, the New in Greek. Now if God did not despise them but chose them above all others for his word, then we too ought to honor them above all others. If through our neglect we let the languages go (God forbid!), we shall lose the gospel too. It is inevitable that unless the languages remain, the gospel must finally perish. When our faith is held up to ridicule, where does the fault lie? It lies in our ignorance of the languages; and there is no way out than to learn the languages. It is also a stupid undertaking to attempt to gain an understanding of Scripture by laboring through the commentaries of the fathers and a multitude of books and glosses. Instead of this, men should have devoted themselves to the languages. Since it becomes Christians then to make good use of the Holy Scriptures as their one and only book and it is a sin and a shame not to know our own book or to understand the speech and words of our God, it is a still greater sin and loss that we do not study [the biblical] languages, especially in these days when God is offering and giving us men and books and every facility and inducement to this study, and desires his Bible to be an open book. How sternly God will judge our lethargy and ingratitude [if we do not learn Greek and Hebrew]!”

Now, interestingly, Erasmus’ Greek text went through five editions and all of them were Latin-Greek diglots.

The reason for this is that his desire was not to produce a Greek New Testament but rather to demonstrate his Latin translation was better than Jerome’s Latin Vulgate which was produced 1000 years earlier and was the authorized Bible of the western church ever since it was produced.

One of the major problems with Erasmus’ edition of the Greek New Testament was that it was based upon only a half dozen manuscripts and none was earlier than the tenth and twelfth century.

In comparison, at the beginning of the twenty-first century we have over 5,600 MSS with some as early as the second century.

Furthermore, Erasmus admitted that his first edition of the Greek New Testament was poorly edited and in fact one scholar wrote that it was the most poorly edited book in the world.

The leadership of the Roman Catholic church complained that the Comma Johanneum of 1 John 5:7-8 was not in Erasmus’ text which led them to consider his text in error.

Erasmus responded to this criticism by not including it because he could not find any Greek manuscripts which had it.

With regards to the problems with the King James, we know that the 47 scholars who worked on the King James knew Latin better than Greek and Hebrew and they committed many errors in relation to the definite article since Latin does not have one but Greek does.

Furthermore, hundreds of archaisms or antiquated expression appear in the King James Bible and by 1881, over 300 words in the Authorized Version had changed their meaning in English.

Ultimately the reign of the King James Bible came to an end with the discovery of new manuscripts and also by 1881 the English speaking world was ready for a new English translation that was based upon the best manuscripts.

This led to the production of the British Revised Version in 1881 and the American Standard Version in 1901.