New Testament

The Commonly Received Version of the New Testament was an early Baptist effort to revise the King James Version New Testament into American English. Its scope was limited to the New Testament, and it drew on both Greek and English source material: the Received Greek text together with a King James base. It is accordingly classified as a revision rather than a fresh translation, with the King James Version serving as its predecessor and base text. Among its distinctive features, the rendering of baptism terminology was a central denominational concern, reflecting long-standing Baptist arguments that the Greek vocabulary of baptism should be translated rather than transliterated. As a formal, denominational revision, it belongs to the nineteenth-century American movement to adapt the inherited English Bible to contemporary usage, a current that anticipated the later revision projects undertaken on both sides of the Atlantic.