HCSB interview

Will Lee at Antworth blog has posted a very informative interview with Ed Blum, the general editor of the HCSB. Dr. Blum gives a detailed response to the question of how the HCSB differs from the ESV.

Well, the ESV comes from the King James tradition. The King James was revised continuously until about 1750. In 1870 they did a major revision of the King James which never became really popular which was called the English Revised Version, and I think popularly known as the Revised Version. It actually came out in 1881. The Americans who worked on it weren’t happy with it, but they had signed an agreement not to publish for 20 years, so they came out in 1901 with the American Standard Version, their revision of the King James tradition. And that stayed in print until the mid 1930s and the National Council of Churches who owned the copyright started on the RSV. And the RSV NT was done in 1946, and the OT was finished in the early 1950s. Everybody thought the NT was fairly decent, but the OT, they had a number of Jewish scholars and they felt that it wasn’t quite what they wanted. So a group of Americans from the Lockman foundation took the old American Standard Version and made the New American Standard Version. That one began as a revision of the King James tradition. And then there was the revision done by Thomas Nelson; they did the NKJV. Then the NASB was revised again in 1995. The English Standard Version took the old RSV and revised about 7% of it. So it’s not a new translation; it’s a revision of the King James tradition. Although they worked on a lot of things, if you really compare them you’ll see that it’s still the King James tradition. They’ve taken King James word order, much of the vocabulary is still the same. The HCSB is a new translation from the original text. For example, the standard Hebrew lexicon that we used is the most recent one. The ESV is a lot closer to the NASB95 and the King James tradition. For example, how often do you use the word “shall”?

The entire interview has substantive, detailed answers like this. It would be well worth reading, if you are interested in comparing the most recently published English versions.

HT: Rick Mansfield, who summarizes the Blum interview very well.