Revised Version

The Revised Version (RV) grew out of a decision by the Convocation of Canterbury in 1870 to revise the King James Bible. British companies of revisers worked for more than a decade, with input from American scholars, and published the New Testament in 1881 and the Old Testament in 1885. It was the first modern English Bible after the King James to win wide acceptance.

The method was revision, not fresh translation: keep the King James vocabulary and cadence and change only where accuracy demanded it. Even so, the New Testament alone saw more than 30,000 changes, over 5,000 of them because of manuscripts judged to be better. The Greek text closely followed Westcott and Hort, resting on Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, and Edwin Palmer gathered the adopted readings into an edition of their own. The RV also set the text in paragraphs and laid out Old Testament poetry in lines.

On Midvash it sits between two neighbours: the King James, whose voice it inherits, and the 1901 American Standard Version, which is the American edition of the RV itself, nearly identical, with the best known difference being Jehovah where the RV keeps LORD. It suits readers who want to see what changed when nineteenth century textual criticism reached the English Bible. The honest limit is that the English is still archaic, many readers at the time felt the revision lost beauty, and its textual base has dated in light of twentieth century discoveries. The RV was also issued with the Apocrypha, but on Midvash those books are left out.

The Revised Version is in the public domain, so it can be read, quoted and shared here in full, without restriction.