New Testament: A Revised Translation

Known as the Revision by Five Clergymen, this undertaking is a representative private clerical revision project that immediately preceded the official Revised Version. Its scope was limited to selected books of the New Testament, its revisers working from Greek and English and taking as their base text the King James Version, compared against critical Greek texts then coming into wider use. The work is classed as a revision rather than a fresh translation, with the King James Version as both its predecessor and its base translation, and its guiding philosophy was that of conservative critical revision: correcting and clarifying where scholarship seemed to require it while retaining the familiar diction of the received English Bible. Its distinctive character lies in its partial rather than complete coverage, which makes it chiefly useful today for tracing the growing institutional pressure to revise the KJV in the nineteenth century.