As a historian who has written about battles over Bible translation, I’ve seen a lot of Bibles. But the latest arrival, the NRSVue Gift Bible, is especially intriguing. Bound in blue faux leather, it contains the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVue), the recently released overhaul of the 1989 NRSV, sponsored by the National Council of Churches.
Like its predecessor, the NRSVue is an ecumenical project involving Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox scholars. While not a completely new translation, the version incorporates about 12,000 substantive edits and 20,000 total changes, according to the preface.
Some of the revisions reflect new manuscript discoveries, as in Solomon’s speech 1 Kings 8:16, which has been expanded based on evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Other revisions continue the NRSV’s project of rendering the biblical language more sensitive or inclusive. In Matthew 4:24, for example, Jesus no longer heals “demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics” (NRSV) but “people possessed by demons or having epilepsy or afflicted with paralysis” (NRSVue). As biblical scholar Hal Taussig explained in reviewing the new version, this change “brings a modern sensibility to bear, because we now believe that an illness or symptom is something a person has, not who they are.”
Similarly, in Galatians 4:22, Hagar is no longer a “slave woman” (NRSV) but an “enslaved woman” (NRSVue). This emendation, noted Abraham Smith, one of the NRSVue translators, distinguishes between “a person’s identity and a condition imposed on that person.”
A more controversial revision appears in Paul’s list of sins in 1 Corinthians 6:9. Here the Greek word arsenokoitai, translated as “sodomites” in the NRSV, now appears as “men who engage in illicit sex.” Contrast this with the English Standard Version (2001), a conservative evangelical translation published by Crossway, which renders the same term as “men who practice homosexuality.” The meaning of arsenokoitai has been debated hotly for years. See John Boswell’s classic, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980), which denied that Paul’s term refers to all homosexual activity.
Predictably, the NRSVue’s rendering of 1 Corinthians 6:9 has already drawn fire from conservatives. A post on Catholic Answers by Peter Wolfgang accused the translators of rewriting scripture to conform to a liberal agenda. A post on The Gospel Coalition by Mark Ward called the NRSVue’s wording “dangerously wrong.”
Given such opposition from conservatives, one might conclude that the NRSVue Gift Bible was published by a liberal, mainline press. But the publisher of this gift edition is Zondervan, the evangelical powerhouse in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which first struck gold in the 1970s with the New International Version, the evangelical rival to the NRSV’s predecessor, the Revised Standard Version (1952).
Has Zondervan gone liberal? Not really. The reality has more to do with capturing market share than with repudiating Zondervan’s evangelical roots.
I tell the backstory in my first book, In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible. The ideological fault line in Bible translation first ruptured in the battle over the RSV, which came to symbolize everything that conservative Protestants hated about the liberal National Council of Churches.
When the RSV was released 70 years ago, in September 1952, NCC officials presented the first copy to President Harry Truman at the White House. New Bible translations were still a novelty then, and the NCC hoped that the RSV would become the new “authorized version,” like the old King James Bible. But evangelicals rejected the version because of some of its modifications, most notably Isaiah 7:14, in which the “virgin” (KJV) in the alleged prophecy of Christ’s virgin birth appeared as “young woman.”
In reality, the RSV translators were on solid ground. Isaiah 7:14 was not, in its original context, a prophecy of the virgin birth. The disputed word, ‘almah, simply means “young woman,” not virgin, which has its own word in Hebrew (betulah). (See my earlier blog post on this issue.) But evangelicals charged the RSV with threatening the deity of Christ by altering the supposed prophecy of his miraculous birth.
Eventually, evangelicals published a rival, the New International Version, which restored the “virgin” to Isaiah 7:14 and incorporated other conservative preferences. The NIV was spectacularly successful and became a cash cow for its publisher, Zondervan. As Daniel Vaca has shown in his illuminating history, Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America, Zondervan embraced a strategy of “niche” editions of the NIV catering to different constituencies. These included the Student Bible, the Women’s Devotional Bible, the Adventure Bible, the Teen Study Bible, and the Men’s Devotional Bible, each of which sold more than a million copies by 1999.
Zondervan’s embrace of the NRSVue reflects the same strategy—in this case, targeting the niche market of mainline Protestants (or anyone who appreciates the NRSV for its academic, ecumenical credentials). In fact, Zondervan first pursued this niche when it published several editions of the older NRSV, for which it even commissioned a special typeface by a Danish designer. (See “A Note Regarding the Type” at the end of the NRSVue Gift Bible.)
For Zondervan, the profit motive trumped ideological purity. To a limited extent, money was also a motive for the National Council of Churches. In offering the license for the NRSVue to multiple publishers, the NCC made a pragmatic decision that helped keep its Bible translation work afloat.
That work, once carried on by an in-house Bible Translation and Utilization Unit, has now largely been outsourced to the NCC’s subsidiary, Friendship Press, and to scholars from the Society of Biblical Literature. The NCC is but a shadow of its former self, occupying an office suite in Washington, D.C., since vacating its fabled “God Box,” the 19-story Interchurch Center at 475 Riverside Drive in New York City, in 2013.
Gone are the glory days of presenting a new Bible translation to the U.S. president at the White House. The NRSVue joins a vastly more crowded Bible market than the RSV entered 70 years ago. But I hope this latest installment in the RSV lineage won’t be drowned out by the more dominant evangelical options. The NRSVue still embodies the RSV’s ecumenical appeal and academic reliability with a commitment to making the Bible’s language—within reason—more inclusive. If you ask me, that’s a worthy niche.
© 2022 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved
Bibliographical Note
NRSVue Gift Bible (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2022). Hal Taussig, “A New Edition of the Bible, with 20,000 Revisions, Should Spark 20,000 Thoughtful Conversations,” Los Angeles Times, December 30, 2021. Abraham Smith, “NRSV Updated Edition,” Perspective Online, January 4, 2022. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 335-53. Peter Wolfgang, “New Frontiers in Politically Correct Bible Translation!” Catholic Answers, January 28, 2022. Mark Ward, “Does the NRSV Compromise on Homosexuality?” The Gospel Coalition, July 7, 2022. Peter J. Thuesen, In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 67-155. Daniel Vaca, Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019), 202-7.
Illustration credits: RSV committee chair Luther A. Weigle presenting the RSV to President Harry Truman at the White House on September 26, 1952; photo from Peter J. Thuesen, In Discordance with the Scriptures, courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos. NRSVue Gift Bible (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2022), photo by Peter J. Thuesen.