The Bible in

Translation

Ancient and English Versions

Bruce M. Metzger

©2001 by Bruce M. Metzger

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Book House Company

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516–6287

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

cover illustration: St. Jerome in His Study, by Albrecht Dürer (1514)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Metzger, Bruce Manning.

The Bible in translation : ancient and English versions / Bruce M. Metzger.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN 0-8010-2282-7

1. Bible—Versions—History. 2. Bible. English—Versions—History. I. Title.
BS450 .M46 2001
220.5’09—dc21 2001037427

For information about Baker Academic, visit our web site:

www.bakerbooks.com/academic

Contents

Preface

Part 1: Ancient Versions

1. Ancient Versions of the Old Testament Made for the Use of Jews

The Septuagint

The Jewish Targums

2. Ancient Versions Intended Chiefly for Christians

The Syriac Versions

The Latin Versions

The Coptic Versions

The Gothic Version

The Armenian Version

The Georgian Version

The Ethiopic Version

The Arabic Versions

The Sogdian Version

The Old Church Slavonic Version

The Nubian Version

Part 2: English Versions

3. English Bibles before the King James Version

The Beginnings of the English Bible

The Wycliffite Bible (1382; 1388)

Tyndale and the First Printed English New Testament (1526)

Coverdale and the First Complete Printed Bible in English (1535)

Matthew’s Bible (1537)

Taverner’s Bible (1539)

The Great Bible (1539)

Edmund Becke’s Bibles (1549; 1551)

The Geneva Bible (1560)

The Bishops’ Bible (1568)

The Rheims-Douay Bible (1582–1610)

4. The King James Bible (1611)

5. Between the King James Bible and the Revised Version

Edward Harwood’s New Testament (1768)

Charles Thomson’s Bible (1808)

Noah Webster’s Bible (1833)

Julia E. Smith’s Bible (1876)

6. The British Revised Version (1881–85) and the American Standard Version (1901)

7. Early Modern-Speech Versions

The Twentieth Century New Testament (1901; 1904)

Weymouth’s New Testament in Modern Speech (1903)

Moffatt’s Translation of the Bible (1913; 1924–25)

Smith and Goodspeed’s American Translation (1923; 1927)

8. The Revised Standard Version (1952)

9. The Jerusalem Bible (1966)

10. The New American Bible (1970)

11. The New English Bible (1970)

12. The New International Version (1978)

13. Jewish Translations

Translations Sponsored by the Jewish Publication Society (1917; 1985)

Heinz W. Cassirer’s New Testament (1989)

David H. Stern’s Complete Jewish Bible (1998)

14. Revision after Revision

The New American Standard Bible (1971; updated ed. 1995)

The New Jerusalem Bible (1985)

Revised New Testament, ...