The Revised Standard Version
It’s History
Lecture 26
•	In __________the copyright of the American Standard Bible was acquired by the International Council on Religious Education
•	This involved some ________major denominations and formed part of the National Council of Churches
This Group
•	Set up the feasibility of making a new revision of the American Standard Bible
•	Because of the Great____________, money in the USA was not available until________.
•	The agreement was that a new translation was needed and that it should stay within the tradition established by ________________
The Goal of the Translation
•	Was to “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 ____________and _________________worship and preserves those qualities which have given the KJV a supreme place in English literature.
The Translator’s
•	Thirty-two scholars headed by Luther ______________of ___________Divinity School, were appointed, and each served free of charge.
•	They worked in two contingents, one for the _________and one for the___________.
The New Testament
•	Appeared on its own in ____________
•	The RSV in its entirety in September 30, _________under the title, The Holy Bible Revised Standard Version 
Bruce Metzger states:
•	That the __________“was launched with an unprecedented ________________campaign.”
The Apocrypha 
•	Was added in __________to help make it acceptable to both Roman ______________and Protestants.
The Oxford University Press 
•	Published an edition of the RSV in 1962 entitled “The Oxford _______________Bible.
•	The editors were Herbert G. May, Old Testament professor at the Graduate School of Theology, Oberlin College; and Bruce M.________________, professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.
This ______________Edition
•	Became a useful edition because it included brief _____________and essays by various scholars, as well as exegetical ________________on each page.
The ____________Edition
•	Was a Roman _____________Edition of the NT Revised Standard Version was published in Great ________________with several minor changes.
The _____________Second Edition
•	Of the NT was produced with a few modifications based on the _____________text, but most notable was the reinsertion of several passages into its text
•	1. Longer ending of _____________(16:9-20)
•	2. Woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11)

The _______________Edition
•	Was an ecumenical edition entitled, The Common Bible, which was accepted by the Roman Catholics, Protestant and ______________Orthodox churches.
May 19, 1977 Edition
•	Because the above editions did not contain all of the canon of all the denominations, an edition came out with the ______________________books included: (3 & 4 Macc. And Ps 151), making it a truly ecumenical Bible.
The Policies of the Revisers
•	The most significant change of the RSV from the KJV was the ___________________of the English language.
•	The translators attempted to retain the dignity of the language without ________________and were no longer restricted to one English word for a given Greek or Hebrew word.
Bruce offers the favorable Evaluation:
•	The latest revision makes full use of the most recent _____________and linguistic discoveries.
•	Archaisms have been removed, but the language is not the American ____________of the mid-twentieth century, but good literary English of a quality that is acknowledged as standard on both sides of the Atlantic.
Bruce continues:
•	It has largely superceded the ASV (or the British Revised Version) as a study version, and has gone a considerable way towards replacing the Authorized Version for general purposes of Bible reading.
Archaisms
•	Such as “speaketh” and “seeth” were replaced by “speaks” and “sees”.
The “_____________” and “_____________”
•	Were for the most part removed except in passages addressed to__________.
The Use of “___________” 
•	With the earthly life of Jesus was a difficult decision and “________” was used after the resurrection, even though critics maintained that such usage took away from Jesus’ divinity on earth.
•	The use of “you” for both plural and singular was also found to cause___________. (See Isa 7:11-14 & Luke 22:31-32 RSV)
The Appellation “_____________”
•	Has been substituted for the Authorized Version’s “___________” (1901) to designate the one true God of Israel.
Stylistic features
•	That are often thought of as Bible English have been removed or reduced, such as the _____________idiom, “and it came to pass” as well as the conjunction “and”, which frequently links ___________passages.
Quotation Marks
•	Have been introduced, though not without having to make some difficult decisions; for example the _________indicates John 3 that the words of Jesus end at verse 15 and verses 16-21 are the Words of the Gospel writer John, whereas, in the________, these verses are all attributed to Jesus.
Other Accommodations
•	Include dividing the text into sense paragraphs and printing _________-passages in a form that highlights their structure (which, in the case of OT, amounts to about __________percent of the text).

The Use of _____________
•	Is considerably more than the other versions.
The OT 
•	mainly follows the traditional ______________Hebrew text, except in the case of uncertain or incorrect wording
•	Then readings from other _____________are incorporated into the text, most of which have good textual support from various ancient versions.
Psalm 145:13
•	Used the _________and Syriac ____________to finish a missing verse beginning with a nun in the alphabetic acrostic.
•	The DSS Isaiah scroll was available for this edition and was used in about 13 times
The New Testament Text
•	Is based on the __________Greek text, described by Frederick Grant:
•	“The NT translator or reviser of today is forced to adopt the eclectic principle: each variant reading must be studied on its merits, and cannot be adopted or rejected by some rule of thumb, or by adherence to such a theory as the “_______________Text”.
Grant continues”
•	“It is this eclectic principle that has guided us in the present Revision. The Greek text of this Revision is not that of____________, or Nestle, or Souter; though the readings we have adopted will as a rule, be found in either in the text or the margin of the new (__________) edition of Nestle (Stuttgart, 1941).”
The RSV is a 
•	Fairly __________translation, the English is clear, _______________, and flows well, as seen in Matthew 5:13-16 and Matthew 6:9-13.
The Principles of 
•	The RSV translation can be found in two handbooks:
•	An Introduction to the Revised Standard Version of the _______(1946) and
•	An Introduction to the Revised Standard Version of the ________(1952)
The Reception of the RSV
•	Thomas Nelson and Sons published the RSC in _______and in general it enjoyed a positive reception both in the __________and in_____________.
T. W. Manson, 
•	former NT professor at University of Manchester, spoke highly of it in a radio broadcast: I like the RSV; and I like it because it is ____________and because it speaks directly to the man in the ___________in language he can reasonably be expected to understand.”
It’s Detractors
•	In a letter to Weigle someone asked, “Who is this Tom Nelson who has written a new Bible? I don’t want Tom ___________Bible. I want the Bible the way the Apostle James wrote it.”
•	(Presumably the writer of the letter felt that the Apostle ____________wrote the Bible)
Another Charge
•	Was leveled at it because its copyright owner was the National _____________of Churches.
•	Many felt these were theologically liberal.
•	_______________-and booklets were written criticizing this translation; a more dramatic demonstration is described by Bruce:

Bruce’s description
•	One American preacher was reported to have burned a copy of the RSV with a ______________________in his pulpit, remarking that it was like the devil because it was hard to burn. Anything more certainly calculated to make every family in the congregation acquire a copy for itself is hard to imagine; one could almost believe that the whole incident was an ingenious ______________stunt engineered by the sponsor of the new version.
Isaiah 7:14
•	Read “young____________” and caused some to believe it denied the virgin birth of Jesus
John 3:16
•	Was also ______________because it read, “For God so loved the world that he gave his ____________Son” and not “his only ________________Son”
Bruce’s Comments on the RSV success:
•	“But the committee of revisers which worked on the RSV was sufficiently broadly based to make it unlikely that the revision would promote any particular or _______________interest. And in fact it has found widespread acceptance in the years since its appearance in a great ______________of Christian communities.
Bruce continued:
•	Theologically ________________-as well as theologically______________. No change in Christian doctrine is involved or implied in the readings and renderings of the RSV.; every article of the historical faith of the Church can be established from it as from the older versions in whose tradition it stands.
An Evaluation:
•	This version has become one of the more popular in America, Canada, and England
•	It is under continual revision (__________&_____________)
•	It was once thought that the New English Bible would eclipse the RSV, but this has not been the case.
The RSV 
•	Is highly rated by Bruce who estimates that “for the _____________speaking world, as a whole, there is no modern version of the Bible which comes so near as the ______________does to making the all-purpose provision which the AV made for so many years.