New Greek/English Interlinear New Testament - Flipbook - Page 20
PREFACE TO THE NRSV
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Catholic members, an Eastern Orthodox member, and a Jewish member who serves
in the Old Testament section. For a period of time the Committee included several
members from Canada and from England.
Because no translation of the Bible is perfect or is acceptable to all groups of
readers, and because discoveries of older manuscripts and further investigation of
linguistic features of the text continue to become available, renderings of the Bible
have proliferated. During the years following the publication of the Revised Standard
Version, twenty-six other English translations and revisions of the Bible were produced
by committees and by individual scholars—not to mention twenty-five other translations
and revisions of the New Testament alone. One of the latter was the second edition of
the RSV New Testament, issued in 1971, twenty-five years after its initial publication.
Following the publication of the RSV Old Testament in 1952, significant advances
were made in the discovery and interpretation of documents in Semitic languages related
to Hebrew. In addition to the information that had become available in the late 1940s
from the Dead Sea texts of Isaiah and Habakkuk, subsequent acquisitions from the same
area brought to light many other early copies of all the books of the Hebrew Scriptures
(except Esther), though most of these copies are fragmentary. During the same period
early Greek manuscript copies of books of the New Testament also became available.
In order to take these discoveries into account, along with recent studies of documents
in Semitic languages related to Hebrew, in 1974 the Policies Committee of the Revised
Standard Version, which is a standing committee of the National Council of the Churches
of Christ in the U.S.A., authorized the preparation of a revision of the entire RSV Bible.
For the New Testament the Committee has based its work on the most recent
edition of The Greek New Testament, prepared by an interconfessional and international
committee and published by the United Bible Societies (1966; 3rd ed. corrected, 1983;
information concerning changes to be introduced into the critical apparatus of the
forthcoming 4th edition was available to the Committee). As in that edition, double
brackets are used to enclose a few passages that are generally regarded to be later
additions to the text, but which we have retained because of their evident antiquity and
their importance in the textual tradition. Only in very rare instances have we replaced
the text or the punctuation of the Bible Societies’ edition by an alternative that seemed to
us to be superior. Here and there in the footnotes the phrase, “Other ancient authorities
read,” identifies alternative readings preserved by Greek manuscripts and early versions.
Alternative renderings of the text are indicated by the word “Or.”
As for the style of English adopted for the present revision, among the mandates given
to the Committee in 1980 by the Division of Education and Ministry of the National
Council of Churches of Christ (which now holds the copyright of the RSV Bible) was
the directive to continue in the tradition of the King James Bible, but to introduce
such changes as are warranted on the basis of accuracy, clarity, euphony, and current
English usage. Within the constraints set by the original texts and by the mandates of
the Division, the Committee has followed the maxim, “As literal as possible, as free
as necessary.” As a consequence, the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) remains
essentially a literal translation. Paraphrastic renderings have been adopted only sparingly,
and then chiefly to compensate for a deficiency in the English language—the lack of a
common gender third person singular pronoun.
During the almost half a century since the publication of the RSV, many in the