American Bible Union New Testament

The American Bible Union New Testament stands as the largest organized American effort to revise and translate Scripture undertaken before the American Standard Version. In scope it embraced the whole of the New Testament together with portions of the Old Testament, drawing on the original languages, with Hebrew and Greek serving as its source languages and the original-language texts as its base. Its guiding approach was one of formal, denominationally independent scholarship, and it is classed as a fresh revision or translation, taking the King James Version as its predecessor and base translation. Among its distinctive features, the work was issued piecemeal, appearing as individual books and in revised editions over many years rather than as a single completed Bible. It belongs to the current of nineteenth-century revision activity that sought to bring the traditional English text into closer accord with the original texts, work later carried forward by the revised versions.