The English Revised Version

In 1857, liberal churchmen petitioned the Government to revise the Authorized Version but were refused permission. A general distrust of revising the sacred text was prevalent and Archbishop Trench, later a member of the Revision Committee called the issue, "A question affecting . . . profoundly the whole moral and spiritual life of the English people . . . (with) vast and solemn issues depending on it." (33) At length, however, the Southern Convocation of the Church of England was appealed to and consented to a revision.

The Revision Committee, was divided from its beginning in 1871, the majority of two-thirds being those in favor of applying German methods of higher criticism to the revision process. The first chairman, Bishop Wilberforce resigned, calling the work a "miserable business" and protesting the presence of a Unitarian scholar who had been surreptitiously elected to the committee. (34) Dr. G. Vance Smith, who denied the Divinity of Christ, had nevertheless participated in a communion service at Westminster Abbey upon the invitation of Bishop Westcott just prior to the first committee meeting. In The Revision Revised, Dean John Burgon, the brilliant textual scholar and Anglican clergyman. reports that committee members were bound to a pledge of silence having received each a copy of the New Greek Text created by Westcott and Hort, which altered the Textus Receptus in 5,337 places,

"…a ‘confidential’ copy of their work having been already entrusted to every member of the New Testament Company of Revisionists to guide them in their labours, -- under pledge that they should neither show nor communicate its contents to any one else."(35)

In 1881, the English Revision Committee cast upon the world a New Greek Text and an English Bible which, in the words of one reviser contained "between eight and nine changes in every five verses, and in about every ten verses, three of these were made for critical purposes." The English Revised Version is generally acknowledged to be the predecessor to the NIV, NASB and other modern translations.