Updated American Standard Version
Giving Bible readers what God said not what translators think God meant
The King James Only movement asserts that the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible is superior to all other translations of the Bible. Adherents of the King James Only movement believe that the KJV is the greatest English translation ever produced, needing no further improvements, and they also believe that all other English translations which were produced after the KJV are corrupt. Is this true?
Jerome’s Latin name was Eusebius Hieronymus. He was born about 346 C.E. Jerome’s translation of the Hebrew Scriptures was considerably more than simply some revision of a text that existed in his day. For centuries it altered the direction of Bible study and translation. “The Vulgate,” said historian Will Durant, “remains as the greatest and most influential literary accomplishment of the fourth century.”
Hands down, the Greek Septuagint version is the most important of the early versions of the Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures. In fact, it is the first translation. The Greek Septuagint is abbreviated as the Roman numeral LXX (meaning, “Seventy”).
William Tyndale (c. 1490-1536) devoted himself early to Scripture studies, and by the time he had reached the age of about thirty, he had taken for the work of his life the translation of the Bible into English.
It is challenging to enter this next era of the English Bibles without talking about Desiderius Erasmus and the Textus Receptus (Received Text) that would impact English Translations for centuries to come. Erasmus is credited with saying, “When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.”
While the Wycliffe Bible is not the first English Bible, it is the first complete English Bible. It came to us through the efforts and influence of John Wycliffe (c. 1330-1384), a Catholic priest and a professor of theology at Oxford, England, called the “morning star of the Reformation" because of the religious principles that he developed through his investigation of Scripture and witnessed about, a great risk to himself.
With Wycliffe (1320-1384), we reach a landmark in the history of the English Bible in the production of the first complete version of both the Old Testament and the New Testament. It belongs to the last period of Wycliffe’s life, that in which he was engaged in open war with the Papacy and with most of the official chiefs of the English Church.
In Britain, as elsewhere, missionary work proceeded almost entirely by means of the spoken word. Any translation of the Scriptures consisted of a free and extemporaneous rendering of the Latin text into the vernacular speech.
Bible translation goes back to 280 to 150 B.C.E., when (seventy-two, according to tradition) translators gave us the Hebrew Old Testament books in Greek. From those days forward, translators have lived hazardous lives in trying to bring us the Word of God in the common languages of man. This has often been from the religious organizations themselves, who have caused the suffering and death of many translators. Is it any different today? How so?
The New American Standard Bible (NASB) is an English translation of the Bible. Published by the Lockman Foundation, the first NASB text—a translation of the Gospel of John—was released in 1960.