When I was in college, around 2010, I would often hear that the NRSV translation of the Bible represented something of a scholarly standard. Since 2025, publishers are now forbidden from publishing, and websites are forbidden from displaying that translation online.
This suppression of the NRSV has come not from some kind of traditional censorship, but is the work of the National Council of Churches of Christ, which has produced an updated text, the NRSV-UE, and have pulled the older text from circulation in order to focus on the new one. (The NRSV-CE is a partial exception to this rule, but my understanding is that it will still be phased out once an imprimatur can be obtained for the NRSV-UE.)
This is why I am leery of making extensive use of any copyrighted translation of the Bible. The idea that we are all expected to use a particular text until the law is used to pull that text from circulation and replace it with a new one, seems to me to run counter to the idea of the Bible as a culturally significant shared text.
This is not to say that the folks at the National Council of the Churches of Christ are bad people, or that the NRSV-UE is a bad translation, or that this represents some kind of atrocity of censorship. You can go buy a used NRSV if you like. But still, this kind of thing leaves me uneasy.
This is why I find myself using the ASV. Not because the ASV is superior, but because I can confidently use the ASV text, knowing that it is beyond the reach of copyright law and that no one has the legal power to scrub it from the internet and drop it down the memory hole.
What I would really like to see is a public domain Bible in reasonably current English which is translated with a careful eye to both English style and the results of mainstream biblical scholarship.
No such thing exists yet, but the building blocks are there. All one would have to do is to update the text of the ASV appropriately. Some work along these lines has already been completed, in the form of what is now known as the World English Bible.
However, I have not seen any sustained review of the WEB text from the standpoint of mainstream biblical studies. Perhaps it is time.
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