Stop 5. The twigs and leaves: where your Bible sits

Follow the Protestant branch to the top. It splits into three twigs. Each leaf is one translation.

First, learn how to read a leaf. A leaf can be a revision. A revision grows from an older English Bible. The NKJV is a revision of the KJV. A leaf can also be a fresh translation. A fresh translation is made straight from Hebrew and Greek, with no English Bible in between. Leaves on the same twig share roots. They are not copies of each other.

The Received Text line (left twig). In 1516, a scholar named Erasmus printed the first Greek New Testament. He worked fast, from a handful of late Greek copies. The KJV was finished in 1611 by 47 scholars. For the New Testament, it used Erasmus’s Greek. For the Old Testament, it used the standard Hebrew text. The scholars also read earlier English Bibles, such as Tyndale’s.

That is the KJV’s whole root: two tips on the tree, the standard Hebrew text and the later Greek copies. It never saw the Dead Sea Scrolls, found in 1947, or the oldest Greek books, which scholars did not have until 1844 and later. That is no fault of the translators. Those books were out of their reach. The church kept using Erasmus’s Greek for about 200 years because it was the first one printed. The NKJV and the Spanish Reina-Valera follow the same roots.

The Revised line (middle twig). These Bibles trace back to the Revised Version of 1881 and the American Standard Version of 1901. Later came the RSV, NASB, NRSV and ESV. Their translators used the older Greek copies found after the KJV, and they check the Scrolls at hard spots.

Fresh translations (right twig). The NIV (New International Version), the CSB (Christian Standard Bible), the NET (New English Translation) and others were made new from Hebrew and Greek. Like the revised line, they weigh all the Greek copies and check the Scrolls. The NET sits at the top of this twig. We will come back to it.