Revised Version of the Bible, The

In 1870 the Convocation of Canterbury appointed a commission to revise the King James Version of the Bible. The intention was not to make a new translation but to make necessary changes called for by Hebrew and Greek manuscripts not available at the time of the Authorized Versions, and also to clarify some of the ambiguities and archaic language of the seventeenth-century version. The style of the older version, however, was to be followed as closely as possible. The Revised Version of the NT was published in 1881, the OT in 1885, and the Apocrypha in 1895. This was the first revision of the King James Version after two hundred and sixty years. It was subsequently followed in 1901 by a somewhat revised American version of the same translation, called the American Standard Version.