Religion: New Bibles

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On a June day last year, a group of scholars stood up from their work in a book-cluttered room of the Yale Divinity School to say a short prayer together. It was an important moment for learning and for Protestantism. After 14 years of patient work, their 32-man committee had completed the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, the most important English translation of the Scriptures since a slightly larger group of English scholars handed their three-year work to King James I in 1611.

This week the Revised Standard Version was published in the U.S. (Nelson; $6) in a first printing of 1,000,000 copies. A conservative-looking maroon buckram volume on the outside, the new Bible has some surprises for the conservative reader inside. Such familiar Biblical words as "Jehovah" and "Calvary," for example, are nowhere to be found; the editors held them to be medieval usages, without particular justification, and replaced them with "Lord," and "the place which is called The Skull." Such familiar circumlocutions as "And it came to pass . . ." have also disappeared.

Since many Protestants object to changing a jot or a tittle of the King James wording, Chairman Luther Weigle, dean emeritus of Yale Divinity School, and his fellow translators prepared a full statement of their guiding principles. Its substance: not only is the text of the King James version weighed down with old words and phrases, not used in modern English, but the Greek and Hebrew texts on which it is based were often faulty and sometimes misleading. "The Greek New Testament they used," says Dean Weigle, "had five to six thousand errors."*

The translators of the Revised Standard Version have benefited by a whole modern cycle in Biblical scholarship. In the last 70 years, scholars and archaeologists have dug out of the sands of Egypt and the Holy Land a score of manuscripts, most of them far earlier than anything the17th century translators of the Bible knew about.

Although the committee had the backing of the National Council of Churches—and themselves represented most major Protestant denominations—they approached their translations not as theologians, but as scholars seeking the most authoritative text. Some of their changes are sure to rouse controversy. In Isaiah 7:14—"Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son"—they have substituted "young woman" for virgin, on the basis of a 2nd century text. In Luke 2:14 the angels no longer say ". . . on earth peace, good will toward men." The Revised Standard Version: ". . . and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased."t

Some changes were obvious. To make sense in 20th century English, "Libertines" became "Freedmen," "feeble minded" was changed to "faint-hearted," and "mortify" to "put to death." All the poetic passages in the Old Testament (40% of the whole including the Psalms) were translated in blank verse.