Why English Carries What It Carries

When the modern Christian opens her Bible, she usually opens it without thinking about how it got there. The Bible is the Bible. It’s the same book her grandmother read, the same book the apostle Paul wrote, the same book that has been sitting on shelves and pulpits and bedside tables for centuries. The leather softens. The pages thin. The Bible is one of the few books in the modern world that feels given — handed down from somewhere outside the chain of human work, somehow already in the language she reads.

The page she opens to isn’t given that way. The page she opens to is the product of a long, costly, contested, sometimes bloody history of translation. The Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament have, over two thousand years, been carried across into Latin, into Old English fragments, into Middle English, into Early Modern English, and finally into the various modern English versions sitting on the shelves of Christian bookstores today. Every step of that carrying was done by human hands. Every step involved choices. Every step left fingerprints on the page. The English Bible the modern reader holds in her lap isn’t the original. It’s a faithful translation produced by people who, in some cases, paid for their work with their lives.

Knowing the history of how that happened — knowing the lineage of the book she is reading — is one of the most quietly transformative recoveries available to the modern Christian. It doesn’t destabilize her Bible. It honors the people who made her Bible possible. It also lets her read the Bible with eyes open about what is, and isn’t, on the page in front of her.

the breadcrumbs already on the page

There are details on the pages of any English Bible — and certainly any modern Christian’s experience moving between English Bibles — that hint at the history underneath.

The older translations say thou, thee, and thine; the modern ones say you and your. This isn’t a theological choice. It’s a snapshot of English at the moment the King James translators were working in 1611, when thou was still the singular and you was still the plural in everyday English speech. The KJV preserved the distinction because it was useful — God speaking to one person (thou) sounds different from God speaking to a community (you) — even though the distinction was already starting to fade in everyday speech. By the time modern translations were being made, thou had become a relic. The modern Bibles use you because you is what English now does.

The King James translation of 1 Corinthians 13 reads and now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. Almost every modern translation has love where the KJV has charity. Why? Because charity is the older English word for what the Greek calls agapē — and in 1611, charity still carried the full weight of self-giving love. Charity has narrowed over the centuries into something closer to almsgiving or generous donation. The Greek word the KJV was carrying hasn’t narrowed. The English word has. Modern translations restored love because the English word love now carries what charity used to.

The KJV of Isaiah 7:14 reads the virgin shall conceive; the NRSV reads the young woman is with child. The two translations aren’t in disagreement about what Isaiah meant. They’re making different choices about how to handle the Hebrew word almah, which can mean young woman or virgin depending on the context, and which the Septuagint translators centuries before Christ rendered with the Greek word parthenos — specifically virgin — in the verse Matthew later quoted. The KJV inherited the Septuagint-influenced reading. The NRSV chose to translate the Hebrew word more literally and let the cross-reference to Matthew handle the Christian theological tradition. Neither is wrong. Both are choices.

A Catholic Bible includes books — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and others — that a Protestant Bible doesn’t. The Eastern Orthodox Bible includes a few more still. These aren’t books Catholics added or Protestants removed. They’re books that were in the Greek Old Testament the early church used (the Septuagint), and that Jerome reluctantly translated into the Latin Vulgate, and that the Reformation Protestants moved out of the Old Testament proper into a separate section or removed altogether. Different traditions made different choices about a question the Greek-speaking Jewish community itself had never quite settled.

Each of these details — and many smaller ones — is a trace of the long history of translation. The history is worth knowing.

how the book got into English

The standard accessible treatment of this history is The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions by Bruce M. Metzger, the Princeton Theological Seminary New Testament scholar who chaired the translation committee for the New Revised Standard Version. Baker Academic published the book in 2001. Metzger lived from 1914 to 2007 and was widely regarded as one of the most influential New Testament scholars of the twentieth century; the book draws on his lifetime of textual-critical work and his direct experience on three major translation committees. What follows is the lineage Metzger and other historians of the English Bible trace.

The first major translation of the whole Christian Bible into a single Western language was Jerome’s. Jerome was a fourth-century scholar who had been commissioned by Pope Damasus to produce a revised Latin Bible — the existing Latin translations of the Old and New Testaments were uneven and inconsistent, and the bishop of Rome wanted a clean unified text. Jerome spent decades on the project, working in Bethlehem, learning Hebrew specifically for the Old Testament, and finishing his translation around the year 400. The result was the Vulgate — the common Bible, in the everyday Latin of late antiquity. For the next thousand years, the Vulgate was the Bible of Western Christianity. When a medieval European priest read the scriptures aloud, he was reading Jerome’s Latin. When a medieval theologian quoted scripture, he was quoting Jerome’s Latin. The Bible of the Western Christian tradition, for a full millennium, was the work of one fourth-century scholar in Bethlehem.

In the late 1300s, an Oxford theologian named John Wycliffe (c. 1328-1384) decided that the Bible should be available to ordinary English-speaking people in their own language. Wycliffe wasn’t the first translator into English — fragments of Old English biblical translation go back to the Anglo-Saxon period — but he was the first to organize a complete English Bible. With a team of collaborators, Wycliffe produced a translation of the entire Bible from the Latin Vulgate into Middle English, finished in the 1380s, with a revised version (often associated with Wycliffe’s assistant John Purvey) appearing around 1395. The translation was hand-copied; the printing press hadn’t yet been invented in Europe. Wycliffe’s followers, called Lollards, took the hand-copied Bibles around England and read them aloud to ordinary people who couldn’t read for themselves. The church responded with severe measures. Lollards were persecuted, some burned at the stake. Decades after Wycliffe’s death, the Council of Constance condemned him as a heretic in 1415 and ordered his bones exhumed and burned; the order was carried out in 1428 under Pope Martin V, and his ashes were scattered in the river Swift. The first complete English Bible cost lives. It also didn’t die. Wycliffite Bibles continued to circulate in hand-copied form for over a century.

Then the printing press arrived, and a generation later, so did William Tyndale (c. 1494-1536). Tyndale was an English scholar trained at Oxford and Cambridge, a gifted linguist who eventually became fluent in eight languages, and a Reformation-minded priest who shared Wycliffe’s conviction that the English-speaking laity should have the Bible in their own language. Tyndale broke from his predecessors in one critical way: he translated not from the Latin Vulgate but directly from the Greek (for the New Testament) and the Hebrew (for the portions of the Old Testament he was able to complete before his death). When the bishop of London refused to authorize the project, Tyndale fled to Germany, where Luther’s reformation had created safer conditions for vernacular Bible work. His New Testament, printed in 1525-1526, was smuggled into England in bales of cloth. Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall ordered every copy that could be found burned at St. Paul’s Cross in London. Tyndale kept translating. In 1535, betrayed by an English agent in Antwerp, he was arrested and imprisoned in the castle of Vilvoorde, near Brussels. On October 6, 1536, he was strangled and burned at the stake. His reported last words were Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.

Within a few years, the King of England’s eyes had been opened. In 1539, Henry VIII authorized the Great Bible, the first English Bible authorized to be read aloud in the churches of England — which was, in its New Testament, very largely Tyndale’s own translation. Tyndale’s translation choices would shape every subsequent English Bible. He coined English words for biblical concepts that had no English equivalent — Passover, atonement, scapegoat. He coined English phrases that have become so embedded in the language that modern English speakers don’t realize their origin — let there be light, the salt of the earth, the powers that be, fight the good fight, a stranger in a strange land, the apple of his eye, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. In 1535, while Tyndale was still alive and working, an English Reformer named Miles Coverdale produced the first complete printed English Bible — drawing on Tyndale’s work for the portions Tyndale had finished and on Latin and German sources for the rest. Coverdale was the translator who, faced with the Hebrew word hesed, invented the English word lovingkindness to carry what no single existing English word could carry. The Coverdale Bible was followed by the Matthew Bible (1537), the Great Bible (1539), the Bishops’ Bible (1568), and most importantly the Geneva Bible (1560) — produced by English Protestant exiles in Calvin’s Geneva during the reign of the Catholic queen Mary I. The Geneva Bible was the Bible of the English Puritans, the Bible the Pilgrims brought on the Mayflower, and the Bible Shakespeare quoted from. Its extensive marginal notes — argumentative, theologically pointed, Reformed in flavor — made it controversial with English kings who preferred less politically active scripture.

In 1604, the new English king, James I, commissioned a fresh English translation that would, he hoped, replace the Geneva Bible’s polemical notes with something more ecclesiastically settled. Fifty-four scholars were appointed, of whom forty-seven actually engaged in the work, and they labored for seven years across six teams in Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge. The result, published in 1611, was the King James Bible — also called the Authorized Version — and it would stand as the standard English Bible for over three hundred years. The King James translators worked carefully and self-consciously, drawing on the original Greek and Hebrew texts available to them, on the Latin Vulgate, on the Geneva Bible, on Tyndale, and on earlier scholarship. Modern statistical analysis of the King James New Testament suggests that something on the order of eighty-three percent of its wording is Tyndale’s, with the Old Testament around seventy-six percent Tyndale’s for the portions Tyndale had translated. The KJV is, in a real sense, Tyndale’s Bible with refinements. When a modern Christian reads the King James Version, she’s reading the English of a sixteenth-century martyr who never saw his work published in his own country.

Three hundred years on, the KJV had drifted from ordinary English speech, and the manuscripts available to scholars had multiplied. In 1881-1885, the Revised Version was published in England — the first major revision of the KJV. The American Standard Version followed in 1901. The Revised Standard Version (RSV) appeared between 1946 and 1957, the work of another generation of biblical scholars that included the young Bruce Metzger. The pace then accelerated. The New International Version (NIV), produced by a committee of evangelical scholars and published in stages between 1973 and 1978 (with significant revisions in 1984 and 2011), aimed at a balance between formal accuracy and readable contemporary English. The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of 1989, also chaired by Metzger, updated the RSV with more inclusive language and the latest manuscript evidence. The English Standard Version (ESV) of 2001 revised the RSV in a more formally literal direction, especially favored among evangelical Reformed readers. The Christian Standard Bible (CSB, 2017), the New American Bible Revised Edition (NABRE, 2011, Catholic), the New Living Translation (NLT, 1996/2015), the Common English Bible (CEB, 2011), the NET Bible, and many others have followed. The modern Christian, looking at the shelf of any Christian bookstore, sees not one Bible but a long lineage of Bibles — each the product of a translation committee, each making choices, each in conversation with the translations before it. None is the original. All are doors.

what the lineage shows the reader

The recovery this chapter is after isn’t a destabilizing one. The claim isn’t that the modern English Bible is unreliable, or that the King James was a mistake, or that the modern translations are politically suspect. The claim is that the English Bible has a history, that the history is recoverable, and that knowing it makes the reader a more honest reader.

A few specific things become available once the lineage is in view.

The translations differ from each other because they were made by different translators working with different priorities. The NIV’s smoother phrasing, the ESV’s formal cadences, the NRSV’s gender-inclusive language, the NLT’s contemporary idiom — these are translation philosophies, not theological agendas. When a modern Christian compares her NIV with her husband’s ESV and finds different wording, she isn’t seeing two different Bibles. She’s seeing the same Hebrew and Greek text rendered into English by two different teams making two different sets of choices. Both are translations. Both are faithful. Both are doors.

The KJV isn’t the original Bible. It’s one translation in a long lineage — a beautiful one, an enormously influential one, an English-language masterpiece that shaped four hundred years of Christian worship and English literature, but a translation nonetheless. The KJV translators themselves said so. In the preface to the 1611 edition, they wrote that no translation is perfect and that future scholars would improve on their work. The notion that the KJV is the only faithful English Bible — a notion sometimes called King James Only-ism in modern American evangelical contexts — isn’t what the King James translators themselves believed about their own work. The KJV is part of a tradition, not the end of it.

The modern translations aren’t soft, or compromised, or theologically liberal. The NIV was produced by evangelicals committed to inerrancy. The ESV is favored by evangelical Reformed readers for its formal literalism. The NRSV, sometimes characterized as a liberal translation, was produced by a scholarly committee using the most current manuscript evidence available; its theological reputation has more to do with its inclusive-language choices than with its underlying textual decisions. The Catholic NABRE preserves the deuterocanonical books and translates from the same Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic sources used by Protestant translations. The differences between modern translations are differences of translation philosophy — formal equivalence (word-for-word) versus dynamic equivalence (meaning-for-meaning) — not differences of theological reliability.

The deuterocanonical books aren’t Catholic additions. The dispute over their canonical status goes back to the early church and ultimately to the Hellenistic-Jewish community itself, where the Greek Septuagint included books the Hebrew Bible did not. Jerome included them in the Vulgate, with reservations. Augustine treated them as scripture. The Reformation moved them to a separate section or excluded them altogether, following the Hebrew canon used by post-temple Judaism. Both decisions have ancient precedent. The modern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions preserve the longer canon; the modern Protestant tradition uses the shorter canon. A modern Christian who reads only her Protestant Bible can pick up an NRSV with Apocrypha or an NABRE and see what those texts say. None of it is hidden. None of it is sinister. All of it is the result of choices made by Christian communities across centuries about which books to include in the canon they read.

Every English Bible is a door. Every English Bible was built by people working with the texts available to them, the manuscripts known to their generation, the linguistic tools of their century, and the deep conviction that the scripture they were carrying across should be available to the people who would read it. When a modern Christian opens her Bible — whether it’s a KJV she inherited from her grandmother, or an NIV she was given at her confirmation, or an ESV she picked up at seminary, or an NABRE her Catholic friend lent her — she is reading the work of saints. Saints who learned languages. Saints who lived in exile. Saints who were strangled in castle yards. Saints who sat on committees and argued for years over the rendering of a single word. Saints who built words like lovingkindness because no existing English word would do. The Bible the modern reader holds in her lap was carried into English at the cost of human lives, and refined across centuries by people who wouldn’t let it stay locked. Knowing the history is part of receiving the gift. The reader can walk through any door. Every door opens onto the same long house. And the long house — built over two thousand years by hands that knew what they were doing — is still standing.