Samuel Sharpe Bible

The Samuel Sharpe Bible was a long-running independent translation project that eventually produced a complete Bible, covering the whole of Scripture. Working directly from the original languages, it takes the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament as its base texts, and its method is critical and relatively literal. It stands as a fresh translation rather than a revision of an existing version, placing it among the individual English renderings undertaken in the nineteenth century, a period in which advances in textual scholarship encouraged translators to return to the manuscript evidence rather than simply amend the wording of earlier printed Bibles. A distinctive characteristic of the work is that it was revised repeatedly across decades, the translator returning to his text over the course of many years. Such privately made versions circulated alongside the established churchly Bibles and formed part of the background to later collaborative revision efforts.