RSV Common Bible Preface
Common Bible, Preface (1973)
This edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible is the outgrowth of the ecumenical concerns of contemporary Christianity. The Revised Standard Version has played a significant pioneering role in the efforts to achieve a common English Bible, i.e., an English translation receiving general ecumenical approval and acceptance. A first step was taken at the initiative of the Catholic Biblical Association of Great Britain when, with Catholic ecclesiastical approval and by agreement with the Revised Standard Version Bible Committee and the Division of Christian. Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., there was published the Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version Bible (1966). In it the Deuterocanonical Books are placed among the books of the Old Testament in accord with usual Catholic practice, that is to say, distributed throughout the Old Testament in the order followed in the Latin Vulgate. An important feature of the RSV Catholic Edition is the acceptance of the common English spelling of Biblical names in place of that based on the Latin Vulgate which had previously obtained in Catholic Bibles. At the present day, nearly all Bibles in the English language, whatever their origin, adopt the same spelling. In 1965 the Oxford Annotated RSV Bible with Apocrypha, with notes and without changes in the biblical text received the Imprimatur of Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston. It is the first edition of the English Bible to have received both Catholic and Protestant approval. This helped to accustom Roman Catholics to having the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical Books gathered together in a group—a practice initiated by the Reformers. Since the appearance of the Oxford Annotated RSV there has been an increasingly mutual welcome and use of responsible contemporary English Bible translations.
To facilitate the use of the RSV as a common Bible, the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. has approved the present ecumenical edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Old and New Testaments with a new improved arrangement of the Apocrypha, i.e., placed between the Testaments and with the Deuterocanonical Books separately arranged and clearly indicated. It is published as the RSV Common (Ecumenical) Bible not to preempt the title, but in recognition of our common Biblical heritage.
The Revised Standard Version Bible (Origins, Nature, Publication)
The Revised Standard Version Bible is an authorized revision of the American Standard Version of 1901, which was a variant of the English Revised Version of 1881–1885 and a revision of the King James Version of 1611.
The first English version of the Scriptures made by direct translation of the original Hebrew and Greek, and the first to be printed, was the work of William Tyndale (New Testament, 1525 or 1526, Pentateuch, 1531). Tyndale’s work met bitter opposition but became the foundation of subsequent English versions, notably those of Coverdale, 1535; Thomas Matthew (probably a pseudonym for John Rogers), 1537; the Great Bible, 1539; the Geneva Bible, 1560; and the Bishops’ Bible, 1568. In 1582 a translation of the New Testament, made from the Latin Vulgate by Roman Catholic scholars, was published at Rheims.
The translators who made the King James Version took into account all of these preceding versions, and comparison shows that it owes something to each of them. It kept felicitous phrases and apt expressions, from whatever source, which had stood the test of public usage. It owed most, especially in the New Testament, to Tyndale. It is worth recalling what was explicitly stated in the Preface to the English Revised Version of the NT (1881), namely that the King James translators made use of the Rheims Version of the New Testament (1582) of which a second edition had appeared before the KJV project began. Thus some very familiar expressions in the RSV can be traced back through KJV to the Rheims NT, e.g., “to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain,” (Phil. 1.21).
The King James Version had to compete with the Geneva Bible in popular use; but in the end it prevailed, and for more than two and a half centuries no other authorized translation of the Bible into English was made. The King James Version became the “Authorized Version” of the English-speaking peoples.
The King James Version has with good reason been termed “the noblest monument of English prose.” Its revisers in 1881 expressed admiration for “its simplicity, its dignity, its power, its happy turns of expression . . . the music of its cadences, and the felicities of its rhythm.” It entered, as no other book has, into the making of the personal character and the public institutions of the English-speaking peoples. We owe to it an incalculable debt.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the development of Biblical studies and the discovery of many manuscripts more ancient than those upon which the King James Version was based, made it evident that its defects were so many and so serious as to call for revision of the English translation. The task was undertaken, by authority of the Church of England, in 1870. The English Revised Version of the Bible was published in 1881–1885; and the American Standard Version, its variant embodying the preferences of the American scholars associated in the work, was published in 1901. In 1928 the copyright of the latter was acquired by the International Council of Religious Education, and thus passed into the ownership of the Churches of the United States and Canada which were associated in this Council through their boards of education and publication. The Council appointed a Committee of scholars to have charge of the text of the American Standard Version and to undertake inquiry as to whether further revision was necessary. In 1937 the revision was authorized by vote of the Council, which directed that the resulting version should “embody the best results of modern scholarship as to the meaning of the Scriptures, and express this meaning in English diction which is designed for use in public and private worship and preserves those qualities which have given to the King James Version a supreme place in English literature.” The Revised Standard Version of the New Testament was published in 1946, and the entire Bible appeared on September 30, 1952, St. Jerome’s Day in the liturgical calendar.
In response to the request of the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, October., 1952, the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., the successor to the International Council of Religious Education, organized a committee of scholars to undertake revision of the English translation of the Apocrypha; and its publication was authorized December 12, 1952. The Revised Standard Version of the Apocrypha was published on September 30, 1957. For general discussion of the Apocrypha and the Deuterocanonical Books, see below.
The committee of translators, the Revised Standard Version Bible Committee, is a continuing committee, having charge of the text of the Revised Standard Version Bible, and recommending and making-such revisions or new translations as may be authorized by the NCCCUSA. In 1954 it approved the proposal for the Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version, giving its consent to the necessary changes, (see above p. i). In 1959, in connection with the study of criticisms and suggestions from various readers a few changes were authorized for subsequent editions, most of them corrections of punctuation, capitalization, or footnotes. Some of them are changes of words or phrases made in the interest of consistency, clarity, or accuracy of translation.
The Revised Standard Version Bible Committee has become both ecumenical and international, with Protestant and Catholic members, who come from Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. An outstanding Jewish scholar was an active member of the Old Testament Section for the 1952 edition.
The Second Edition of the translation of the New Testament (1971) profits from textual and linguistic studies published since the Revised Standard Version New Testament was first issued in 1946. Many proposals for modification were submitted to the Committee by individuals and by two denominational committees. All of these were given careful attention by the Committee.
Two passages, the longer ending of Mark (16.9–20) and the account of the woman caught in adultery (Jn. 7.53–8.11), are restored to the text, separated from it by a blank space and accompanied by informative notes describing the various arrangements of the text in the ancient authorities. With new manuscript support two passages, Lk. 22.19b–20 and 24.51b, are restored to the text; and one passage, Lk. 22.43–44, is placed in the note, as is a phrase in Lk. 12.39. Notes are added which indicate significant variations, additions, or omissions in the ancient authorities (Mt. 9.34; Mk. 3.16; 7.4; Lk. 24.32, 51, etc.). Among the new notes are those giving the equivalence of ancient coinage with the contemporary day’s or year’s wages of a labourer (Mt. 18.24, 28; 20.2, etc.). Some of the revisions clarify the meaning through rephrasing or reordering the text (see Mk. 5.42; Lk. 22.29–30; Jn. 10.33; 1 Cor. 3.9; 2 Cor. 5.19; Heb. 13.13). Even when the changes appear to be largely matters of English style, they have the purpose of presenting to the reader more adequately the meaning of the text (see Mt. 10.8; 12.1; 15.29; 17.20; Lk. 7.36; 11.17; 12.40; Jn. 16.9; Rom. 10.16; 1 Cor. 12.24; 2 Cor. 2,3; 3.5, 6; etc.).
The Revised Standard Version Old Testament
The problem of establishing the correct Hebrew and Aramaic text of the Old Testament was in 1937–52 very different from the corresponding problem in the New Testament. For the New Testament we have a large number of Greek manuscripts, preserving many variant forms of the text. Some of them were made only two or three centuries later than the original composition of the books. Extant manuscripts of the Old Testament (with the exception of the Qumran [Dead Sea] texts of Isaiah and Habakkuk and some fragments of other books) are all of late date and based on a standardized form of the text established many centuries after the books were written. The situation has been modified by the further discovery of numerous Qumran and related -manuscripts and fragments, such as those from caves #4 and #11, still largely unpublished and their import yet to be digested. The picture of the variant recensions of the Hebrew and Aramaic text before the standard text was established is now much more complex, when the textual data are correlated with the ancient versions.
The present revision is based on the consonantal Hebrew and Aramaic text as fixed early in the Christian era and revised by Jewish scholars (the “Masoretes”) of the sixth to ninth centuries. The vowel signs also, which were added by the Masoretes, are accepted in the main, but where a more probable and convincing reading can be obtained by supplying different vowels, this reading has been adopted. No notes are given in such cases, because the vowel points are less ancient and reliable than the consonants.
Departures from the consonantal text of the best manuscripts have been made only where it seems clear that errors in copying had occurred before the text was standardized. Most of the corrections adopted are based on ancient versions (translations into Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, and Latin), which were made before the time of the Masoretic revision and therefore reflect earlier forms of the text. In every such instance a footnote specifies the version or versions from which the correction has been derived, and also gives a translation of the Masoretic Text.
Sometimes it is evident that the text has suffered in transmission, but none of the versions provides a satisfactory restoration. Here we can only follow the best judgment of competent scholars as to the most probable reconstruction of the original text. Such corrections are indicated in the footnotes by the abbreviation Cn, and a translation of the Masoretic Text is added.
The discovery of the meaning of the text, once the best readings have been established, is aided by many new resources for understanding the original languages. Much progress has been made in the historical and comparative study of these languages. A vast quantity of writings in related Semitic tongues, some of them only recently discovered has greatly enlarged our knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic. Sometimes the present translation will be found to render a Hebrew word in a sense quite different from that of the traditional interpretation. It has not been felt necessary in such cases to attach a footnote, because no change in the text it involved and it may be assumed that the new rendering was not adopted without convincing evidence. The analysis of religious texts from the ancient Near East has made clearer the significance of ideas and practices recorded in the Old Testament. Many difficulties and obscurities, of course, remain. Where the choice between two meanings is particularly difficult or doubtful, we have given an alternative rendering in a footnote. If in the judgment of the Committee the meaning of a passage is quite uncertain or obscure, either because of corruption in the text or because of the inadequacy of our present knowledge of the language, that fact.is indicated by a note.
A major departure from the practice of the American Standard Version is the rendering of the Divine Name, the “Tetragrammaton.” The American Standard Version used the term “Jehovah”; the King James Version had employed this in four places, but everywhere else, except in three cases where it was employed as part of a proper name, used the English word LORD (or in certain cases GOD) printed in capitals. The present revision returns to the procedure of the King James Version, which follows the precedent of the ancient Greek and Latin translator and the long established practice in the reading of the Hebrew Scriptures in the synagogue. While it is almost if not quite certain that the Name was originally pronounced “Yahweh,” this pronunciation was not indicated when the Masoretes added vowel signs to the consonantal Hebrew text. To the four consonants YHWH of the Name, which had come to be regarded as too sacred to be pronounced, they attached vowel signs indicating that in its place should be read the Hebrew word Adonai meaning “Lord” (or Elohim meaning “God”). The ancient Greek translators substituted the word Kyrios (Lord) for the Name. The Vulgate likewise used the Latin word Dominus. The form “Jehovah” is of late medieval origin; it is a combination of the consonants of the Divine Name and the vowels attached to it by the Masoretes but belonging to an entirely different word. The sound of Y is represented by J and the sound of W by V, as in Latin. For two reasons the Committee has returned to the more familiar usage of the King James Version: (1) the word “Jehovah” does not accurately represent any form of the Name ever used in Hebrew; and (2) the use of any proper name for the one and only God, as though there were other gods from whom He had to be distinguished, was discontinued in Judaism before the Christian era and is entirely inappropriate for the universal faith of the Christian Church.
The Revised Standard Version New Testament
The King James Version of the New Testament was based upon a Greek text that was marred by mistakes, containing the accumulated errors of fourteen centuries of manuscript copying. It was essentially the Greek text of the New Testament as edited by Beza, 1589, who closely followed that published by Erasmus, 1516–1535, which was based upon a few medieval manuscripts earliest and best of the eight manuscripts which Erasmus consulted was from the tenth century, and he made the least use of it because it differed most from the commonly received text; Beza had access to two manuscripts of great value dating from the fifth and sixth centuries, but he made very little use of them because they differed from the text published by Erasmus.
We now possess many more ancient manuscripts of the New Testament, and are far better equipped to seek to recover the original wording of the Greek text. The evidence for the text of the books of the New Testament is better than for any other ancient book, both in number of extant manuscripts and in the proximity of the date of some of these manuscripts to the date when the book was originally written.
The revisers in the 1870’s had much of the evidence that we now have for the Greek text, though several of the most ancient of all extant manuscripts were not discovered until 1931 (e.g., the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri). There are now also the still more ancient Bodmer Papyri, published 1956–61, which have been taken into account for the second edition of the RSV New Testament. But they lacked the resources which discoveries within the past eighty years have afforded for understanding the vocabulary, grammar, ‘and idioms of the Greek New Testament. An amazing body of Greek papyri has been unearthed in Egypt since the 1870’s—private letters, official reports, wills, business accounts, petitions, and other such trivial, everyday recordings of the activities of human beings. In 1895 appeared the first of Adolf Deissmann’s studies of these ordinary materials. He proved that many words which had hitherto been assumed to belong to what was called “Biblical Greek” were current in the spoken vernacular of the first century A.D. The New Testament was written in the Koine, the common Greek which was spoken and understood practically everywhere throughout the Roman Empire in the early centuries of the Christian era. This development in the study of New Testament Greek has come since the work on the English Revised Version and the American Standard Version was done, and at many points sheds new light upon the meaning of the Greek text.
The Revised Standard Version, The Apocrypha/The Deuterocanonical Books
These are the books or portions of books which appear in the Latin Vulgate, either as a part of the Old Testament or as an appendix, but which are not in the Hebrew Bible. With the exception of 2 Esdras these books appear in the Greek version of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint. The Deuterocanonical Books consist of the Apocrypha, except for r and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh. In view of the importance of the Apocrypha in the present edition it will be in place to say something here of their origin. These books were written mostly between the second century B.C. and the first century A.D. and, though a number of them were originally written in Hebrew, they seem to have circulated chiefly in the Greek version outside Palestine, especially in Egypt. The books were perhaps less acceptable to the Jerusalem Jews of the Pharisaic tradition, but they were certainly used in Palestine inasmuch as fragments have been found at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls. A few other writings were sometimes included in the Greek manuscripts, such as Psalm 151, 3 and 4 Maccabees, and the Psalms of Solomon.
The first Christians were Aramaic-speaking Jews of Palestine who were familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures, but, very soon, those of Greek speech, whether Jew or Gentile, far outnumbered those who spoke Aramaic, and the Bible they used was normally the Greek Septuagint translation with its extra books. This was in effect the Christian Old Testament and it remained their only text for the greater part of two centuries.
Towards the end of the first century A.D., at Jamnia, the Jews decided that only books written in Hebrew and not later than Ezra were to be considered as inspired and canonical. Though some of the books then included are -now known to have been written after the time of Ezra, the criteria did serve to exclude the extra literature referred to above. The need for a decision was prompted in part by the growing controversies with the Christians and the use they made of the Scriptures.
In the absence of any definition of the Canon by Christian authorities, the clearly defined Hebrew Canon was always liable to exert an influence on Christian thinking. In the fourth century a number of prominent Fathers expressly declared that these extra books were non-canonical and so less authoritative than the books of the Hebrew Canon, and were to-be read only for edification. Nevertheless, side by side with the expression of these opinions, Christians continued to use Greek and Latin Bibles with the extra books, which moreover were distributed throughout the Old Testament and not gathered into a single group. The great controversy over the canonical character of these books towards the end of the fourth century, in which Augustine and Jerome were the champions respectively for and against, eventuated in the decision of the Councils of Africa, approved by Rome, that the Christian Canon of the old Testament consisted of the books of the Hebrew Canon together with seven others namely Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, Tobit, Judith, and 1 and 2 .Maccabees, and parts of two others, namely, Daniel and Esther, which were included in the Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate. In addition to these books, three others, namely I and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh, though not included in the Canon by the Councils, were nevertheless regarded as enjoying a position of esteem in view of their widespread Christian usage, especially in the liturgy. For this reason, they were included in editions of the Vulgate. In spite of the decisions of the Councils, including that of the Council of Florence (A.D. 1441) in favour of the longer Canon, doubts about the extra books of the Greek and Latin Bibles continued to be expressed from time to time up to the Reformation.
In the sixteenth century the Reformers rejected those books in the Vulgate which they did not find in the Hebrew Canon. Thus in Luther’s German translation of the Bible (1534) the Apocrypha (with 1 and 2 Esdras omitted) stand between the Testaments with the title: “Apocrypha, that is, books which are not held equal to the sacred Scriptures, and nevertheless are useful and good to read.”
We are glad to say, with the King James translators: “Truly (good Christian Reader) we never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make a bad one a good one . . . but to make a good one better.”
This ecumenical edition has been prepared with the consent and cooperation of the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ, and in consultation with the RSV Bible Committee. Publishing privileges for this edition have been granted to all licensed publishers of the RSV Bible Special indebtedness to the Reverend Dr. Reginald C. Fuller, Chairman of the Catholic Biblical Association of Great Britain, must be recognized, for providing valuable leadership in the formulation and working out of numerous details of this edition, in close consultation with the Reverend Professor Herbert G. May, Chairman of the Revised Standard Version Bible Committee, and Dom Bernard Orchard, O.S.B., General Secretary of the World Catholic Federation for the Biblical Apostolate. The Division of Christian Education expresses appreciation to Lady Collins for her role in the initiation of this project. The import of this ecumenical edition can be measured in part by the wide endorsement given to it. His Eminence, Cardinal Koenig, Archbishop of Vienna, as President of the World Catholic Federation for the Biblical Apostolate, has given it endorsement for general use. The Reverend Dr. Gerald E. Knoff, Associate General Secretary for Christian Education, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., gives it his wholehearted approval. Endorsement has also been received from the Greek Orthodox Archbishop Athenagoras of Thyateira and Great Britain, Exarch of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Dr. A. M. Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, has stated that the RSV is sanctioned by the Church of England for use in church services.