The ‘King James’ Bible, first published in London in 1611, was for 270 years the only English Bible generally accepted by Protestants as authoritative. However, by the second half of the nineteenth century Bible scholars began to recognize that a revision was greatly needed. There are four reasons why this was so:
- Many English words had changed in meaning since Elizabethan times
- A number of ancient biblical manuscripts had been discovered since 1911
- The scientific method had been applied to the examination of biblical materials, making it possible to be more accurate in their use
- Scholars knew a great deal more about the Hebrew and Greek languages
In 1870 the Church of England initiated a move to produce a revision of the King James Version, and interdenominational teams of translators were appointed in both England and the United States. The English New Testament Company began work in the historic Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey on 22 June 1870. The New Testament of this, the Revised Version, was published in London on 17 May 1881. The Old Testament was published in 1885. The American translators, however, had certain preferences which were not included in the English publication and thus continued their work for several more years. The result was the American Standard Revised Version, published by Thomas Nelson & Sons in New York in 1901.
Since World War II there have been numerous new translations of the Bible into English. One of these, like the King James Version and the Revised Version, was also translated in part in the historic Jerusalem Chamber. In 1946, the various church bodies and Bible Societies in Great Britain recognized that not just a revision of the King James but an entirely new translation of the Bible in modern English was necessary. The actual work of translation was entrusted to four panels dealing with the New and Old Testaments, the ‘Apocrypha’ and the literary revision as a whole. The joint committee began meeting in 1948, again in the Jerusalem Chamber. The result of their work was the New English Bible, the New Testament first appearing in 1961 and the entire Bible with Apocrypha in 1970. Donald Coggan, the archbishop of Canterbury at the time, was particularly interested in the project and his portrait in Lambeth Palace shows him holding a copy.