News from the SBL annual report this week is that SBL is planning to oversee a review and revision of the NRSV translation. What really surprised me about this was how prominently textual criticism is in the explanation. From the report:
SBL to Provide a Review and Update to the New Revised Standard Version
At the 2017 SBL-AAR Annual Meeting, the National Council of Churches (NCC) announced an update of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), an English translation of the Bible owned and licensed by the NCC. This update will be managed by the Society for Biblical Literature, following a partnership approved by Council earlier in 2017. Scholars have produced a considerable amount of work in text criticism since 1989, the year the NRSV was published. The last three decades have provided significant new discoveries, including new manuscript witnesses, developments in textcritical methodology, and philological insights. A thirty-year review is not only necessary in the light of this scholarly work but will result in an English translation that is based, without exception, on the most up-to-date textual analysis. The update will focus on three areas:The SBL editorial board includes Sidnie White Crawford (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Ronald Hendel (University of California-Berkeley), Michael W. Holmes (Bethel University), Robert S. Kawashima (University of Florida), Jennifer W. Knust (Boston University), Judith H. Newman (University of Toronto), and Eugene Ulrich (University of Notre Dame). In addition to the editorial board, more than fifty scholars will contribute to the review, which will be conducted over the next three years.
- Text-Critical and Philological Advances: The primary focus of the thirty-year review is on new text-critical and philological considerations that affect the English translation. The philological review will draw upon the fruits of historical-critical scholarship that affect expressions in English. For the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, text-critical developments in the last thirty years have been especially significant. The publication of the Judean Desert biblical texts and fragments has revealed a number of readings that differ from the medieval Hebrew traditions in the Masoretic Text, which was the basis of the NRSV.
- Textual Notes: SBL’s initial review of the NRSV suggested that the current text-critical footnotes are neither complete nor consistent. There are cases when the translation silently adds words not conspicuously in the sources or does not indicate when a reading is not following the sources. To address this deficiency, reviewers will be asked to identify text-critical issues that should have been documented in the notes but were not.
- Style and Rendering: The translation philosophy of the NRSV will be maintained, including its overarching commitment to being “‘as literal as possible’ in adhering to the ancient texts and only ‘as free as necessary’ to make the meaning clear in graceful, understandable English.” That being said, when a reviewer judges a particular translation awkward, inaccurate, or difficult for general readers to understand, the reviewer may suggest a more elegant rendering.
Participants will draw upon new tools developed after the NRSV was published, including The SBL Greek New Testament, edited by Michael W. Holmes (2010); SBL Press’s The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition, edited by Ronald Hendel (2015–); and the German Bible Society’s Biblia Hebraica Quinta (2004–), The Greek New Testament, Fifth Revised Edition (2014), and twenty-eighth edition of Nestle-Aland’s Novum Testamentum Graece, as well as volumes from GBS’s Editio Critica Minor [sic] produced by the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung and based on recent New Testament methodological developments reflected in the INTF’s Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (see Tommy Wasserman and Peter J. Gurry, A New Approach to Textual Criticism: An Introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method [SBL Press, 2017]).
