English Revised Version

The English Revised Version stands as the first officially authorized large-scale revision of the King James Version, and it marked a turning point toward the modern English Bibles built upon critical texts. Undertaken in Britain in the later nineteenth century by committees of scholars, with American collaborators whose preferences would afterwards issue in the American Standard Version, it covers the complete Bible, with the Apocrypha following later. The revisers worked from the Hebrew and Greek, drawing on the Masoretic Hebrew text and a Westcott-Hort-era critical Greek New Testament. Its philosophy is that of formal and critical revision, and it is classified as a substantial revision, taking the King James Version as both predecessor and base translation. Among its distinctive features, it replaced Textus Receptus readings with older critical Greek evidence and modernized some of the English, setting a pattern for the revision tradition that followed.