Translating God's Word
The anxieties about translation derive from deep-seated fears about the vulnerability of the Bible: what guarantees that a particular set of translators is acting in good faith (and for which faith)? Why is a new translation being produced, for whom, by whom, and why now?
In the late 16th and early 17th centuries—as colonizers were seizing land and carving out European territories in North America—"official" English translations of the Christian Bible were produced in the thick of the Protestant Reformation. In the 1580s, English-speaking Roman Catholics produced the Douay-Rheims Bible, a translation from the Latin Vulgate to bolster Catholic faith in the face of English reform. The Douay-Rheims version remained the standard Roman Catholic Bible for English-speaking Catholics in the United States until the New American Bible was produced almost two centuries later.
Meanwhile, English Protestants produced their own "official" translation; unlike the Douay-Rheims, the translators commissioned by King James worked from the "original" Hebrew and Greek text, or at least as they understood those texts in the 17th-century. (This "return to originals" would become a key impetus for new English versions in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries as new manuscript discoveries allowed for a revision of Greek and Hebrew "originals.") This Authorized (or, more commonly, "King James") Version became a standard Protestant version for centuries, much beloved and well-known for its mellifluous, Shakespearean language. For much of U.S. history, the King James Version has held pride of place not only religious but in cultural and social life; it is likely that famous biblical passages you know as proverbs (e.g., "The wages of sin is death") or comforting excerpts ("The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want") come from the King James Version.
From early on in U.S. history, particularly in spaces where reading of the Bible was public and compulsory (as in public schools) the version read could provoke animus and even conflict: a fraught intersection of biblical, Christian, and political identity. (These typically Protestant versus Catholic conflicts naturally leave aside other biblical readers, such as Jews, who began producing their own English translations in the early 20th century.)
In the late 19th century, an officially sanctioned body of translators in the United Kingdom, with some input from U.S. scholars, produced a scholarly update of the Authorized (King James) Version known as the Revised Version. This new version responded to shifts in language, new textual discoveries, and the rising influence of text criticism (the academic study of the Bible that addressed its history of production and transmission). U.S. scholars adapted this more literal translation and it began appearing in the U.S. as the American Standard Version in the beginning of the 20th century (the ASV has since been updated multiple times in the 20th century).
The popularity of two "new" versions of the Bible, attentive to both confessional as well as scholarly concerns, opened the floodgates for new translations of the Bible. More than ever, a choice of translation could signal one's religious and even political affiliations.
Bible publication was also, of course, big business: the American Bible Society, founded as a modest charitable venture in the early 19th century to distribute Bibles, exploded in the 19th and 20th centuries into a multimillion dollar international non profit.
By the 1930s, the International Council of Religious Education (which would later merge with other organizations to become the National Council of Churches of Christ) had acquired the lucrative copyright to the American Standard Version and convened a commission of scholars to update the translation in light of new discoveries and knowledge about biblical texts and languages. The goal, as with the Revised Version fifty years earlier, was to produce a Bible that was both accessible to the believer and useful for the scholar. The result was the Revised Standard Version, which claimed a lineage going back to the King James Version but was in reality an entirely new translation. When the New Testament came out in 1946 it was met with tempered enthusiasm.
When the full version came out in 1952, the climate in the U.S. had shifted and the publication was met with suspicion and outright protest. As the Cold War heated up, the Bible became an increasing flashpoint for debates about U.S. identity, religion, and patriotism. An Air Force Reserve Manual published in 1960 (and quickly retracted in protest) even suggested that the Revised Standard Version was the work of atheist Communist infiltrators seeking to undermine patriotic U.S. Christianity.
Despite these early reactions, the Revised Standard Version has remained a staple of academic biblical study (revised since twice: the New Revised Standard Version appeared in 1989 and New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition in 2021); it has not, however, been routinely adopted in confessional settings, like churches or Bible study. One is more likely to find the King James Version (updated into a New King James Version in the 1970s), the evangelically produced New International Version (first published in 1978), or any number of denomination-friendly versions.
That new "versions" have continued to appear in English since the late 1500s attests to two, perhaps contradictory impulses in approaches to the Christian Bible: a desire to have the most "correct" (meaning both technically and theologically accurate) version possible within a community and the awareness that "the Word of God" remains continually open to new versions and new revisions.