A Protestant Bible is a Christian Bible whose translation or revision was produced by Protestant Christians. Typically translated into a vernacular language, such Bibles comprise 39 books of the Old Testament (according to the Hebrew Bible canon, known especially to non-Protestant Christians as the protocanonical books) and 27 books of the New Testament, for a total of 66 books. [2] Some Protestants use Bibles which also include 14 additional books in a section known as the Apocrypha (though these are not considered canonical) bringing the total to 80 books. [3] [4] This is in contrast with the 73 books of the Catholic Bible, which includes seven deuterocanonical books as a part of the Old Testament. [5] The division between protocanonical and deuterocanonical books is not accepted by all Protestants who simply view books as being canonical or not and therefore classify books found in the Deuterocanon, along with other books, as part of the Apocrypha. [6] Sometimes the term "Protestant Bible" is simply used as a shorthand for a bible which contains only the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments.
It was in Luther's Bible of 1534 that the Apocrypha was first published as a separate intertestamental section. [7] Early modern English bibles also generally contained an Apocrypha section but in the years following the first publication of the King James Bible in 1611, printed English bibles increasingly omitted the Apocrypha. However, Lutheran and Anglican churches have still included the Apocrypha in their lectionaries. [8]
The practice of including only the Old and New Testament books within printed bibles was standardized among many English-speaking Protestants following a 1825 decision by the British and Foreign Bible Society. [9] More recently, English-language Bibles are again including the Apocrypha, and they may be printed as intertestamental books. [10] In contrast, Evangelicals vary among themselves in their attitude to and interest in the Apocrypha but agree in the view that it is non-canonical. [11]
The first proto-Protestant Bible translation was Wycliffe's Bible, that appeared in the late 14th century in the vernacular Middle English. Wycliffe's writings greatly influenced the philosophy and teaching of the Czech proto-Reformer Jan Hus (c. 1369–1415). [12] The Hussite Bible was translated into Hungarian by two Hussite priests, Tamás Pécsi and Bálint Újlaki, who studied in Prague and were influenced by Jan Hus. They started writing the Hussite Bible after they returned to Hungary and finalized it around 1416. [13] However, the translation was suppressed by the Catholic Inquisition. It was not until the 16th century that translated Bibles became widely available. The full New Testament was translated into Hungarian by János Sylvester in 1541. In 1590 a Calvinist minister, Gáspár Károli, produced the first printed complete Bible in Hungarian, the Vizsoly Bible.
One of the central events in the development of the Protestant Bible canon was the publication of Luther's translation of the Bible into High German (the New Testament was published in 1522; the Old Testament was published in parts and completed in 1534). [1] Following the Protestant Reformation, Protestants Confessions have usually excluded the books which other Christian traditions consider to be deuterocanonical books from the biblical canon (the canon of the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox churches differs among themselves as well), [14] most early Protestant Bibles published the Apocrypha along with the Old Testament and New Testament.
The German-language Luther Bible of 1534 did include the Apocrypha. However, unlike in previous Catholic Bibles which interspersed the deuterocanonical books throughout the Old Testament, Martin Luther placed the Apocrypha in a separate section after the Old Testament, setting a precedent for the placement of these books in Protestant Bibles. The books of the Apocrypha were not listed in the table of contents of Luther's 1532 Old Testament and, in accordance with Luther's view of the canon, they were given the title "Apocrypha: These Books Are Not Held Equal to the Scriptures, but Are Useful and Good to Read" in the 1534 edition of his Bible translation into German. [15]
In the English language, the incomplete Tyndale Bible published in 1525, 1534, and 1536, contained the entire New Testament. Of the Old Testament, although William Tyndale translated around half of its books, only the Pentateuch and the Book of Jonah were published. Viewing the canon as comprising the Old and New Testaments only, Tyndale did not translate any of the Apocrypha. [16] However, the first complete Modern English translation of the Bible, the Coverdale Bible of 1535, did include the Apocrypha. Like Luther, Miles Coverdale placed the Apocrypha in a separate section after the Old Testament. [17] Other early Protestant Bibles such as the Matthew's Bible (1537), Great Bible (1539), Geneva Bible (published by Sir Rowland Hill [18] in 1560), Bishop's Bible (1568), and the King James Version (1611) included the Old Testament, Apocrypha, and New Testament. [10] Although within the same printed bibles, it was usually to be found in a separate section under the heading of Apocrypha and sometimes carrying a statement to the effect that the such books were non-canonical but useful for reading. [19]
Protestant translations into Italian were made by Antonio Brucioli in 1530, by Massimo Teofilo in 1552 and by Giovanni Diodati in 1607. Diodati was a Calvinist theologian and he was the first translator of the Bible into Italian from Hebrew and Greek sources. Diodati's version is the reference version for Italian Protestantism. This edition was revised in 1641, 1712, 1744, 1819 and 1821. A revised edition in modern Italian, Nuova Diodati, was published in 1991.
Several translations of Luther's Bible were made into Dutch. The first complete Dutch Bible was printed in Antwerp in 1526 by Jacob van Liesvelt. [20] However, the translations of Luther's Bible had Lutheran influences in their interpretation. At the Calvinistic Synod of Dort in 1618/19, it was therefore deemed necessary to have a new translation accurately based on the original languages. The synod requested the States-General of the Netherlands to commission it. The result was the Statenvertaling or States Translation which was completed in 1635 and authorized by the States-General in 1637. From that year until 1657, a half-million copies were printed. It remained authoritative in Dutch Protestant churches well into the 20th century.
Protestant translations into Spanish began with the work of Casiodoro de Reina, a former Catholic monk, who became a Lutheran theologian. [21] With the help of several collaborators, [22] de Reina produced the Biblia del Oso or Bear Bible, the first complete Bible printed in Spanish based on Hebrew and Greek sources. Earlier Spanish translations, such as the 13th-century Alfonsina Bible, translated from Jerome's Vulgate, had been copied by hand. The Bear Bible was first published on 28 September 1569, in Basel, Switzerland. [23] [24] The deuterocanonical books were included within the Old Testament in the 1569 edition. In 1602 Cipriano de Valera, a student of de Reina, published a revision of the Bear Bible which was printed in Amsterdam in which the deuterocanonical books were placed in a section between the Old and New Testaments called the Apocrypha. [25] This translation, subsequently revised, came to be known as the Reina-Valera Bible.
The first Protestant translations of portions of the Bible into Welsh were made in the 16th century with the Gospels and Epistles being published in 1551. In 1567, the entirety of the New Testament along with the Psalms were published in Welsh, while William Morgan translated the first version of the whole Bible into Welsh from Greek and Hebrew in 1588.
For the following three centuries, most English language Protestant Bibles, including the Authorized Version, continued with the practice of placing the Apocrypha in a separate section after the Old Testament. However, there were some exceptions. A surviving quarto edition of the Great Bible, produced some time after 1549, does not contain the Apocrypha although most copies of the Great Bible did. A 1575 quarto edition of the Bishop's Bible also does not contain them. Subsequently, some copies of the 1599 and 1640 editions of the Geneva Bible were also printed without them. [26] The Anglican King James VI and I, the sponsor of the Authorized King James Version (1611), threatened to fine and imprison anyone who omitted the Apocrypha. [4]
The Souldiers Pocket Bible, of 1643, draws verses largely from the Geneva Bible but only from either the Old or New Testaments. In 1644 the Long Parliament forbade the reading of the Apocrypha in churches and in 1666 the first editions of the King James Bible without the Apocrypha were bound. [27] Similarly, in 1782–83 when the first English Bible was printed in America, it did not contain the Apocrypha and, more generally, English Bibles came increasingly to omit the Apocrypha. [10]
In 1826, [28] the National Bible Society of Scotland petitioned the British and Foreign Bible Society not to print the Apocrypha, [29] resulting in a decision that no BFBS funds were to pay for printing any Apocryphal books anywhere. They reasoned that by not printing the secondary material of Apocrypha within the Bible, the scriptures would prove to be less costly to produce. [30] [31] The precise form of the resolution was:
That the funds of the Society be applied to the printing and circulation of the Canonical Books of Scripture, to the exclusion of those Books and parts of Books usually termed Apocryphal [32]
Similarly, in 1827, the American Bible Society determined that no bibles issued from their depository should contain the Apocrypha. [33]
Since the 19th century changes, many modern editions of the Bible and re-printings of the King James Version of the Bible that are used especially by non-Anglican Protestants omit the Apocrypha section. Additionally, modern non-Catholic re-printings of the Clementine Vulgate commonly omit the Apocrypha section. Many re-printings of older versions of the Bible now omit the apocrypha and many newer translations and revisions have never included them at all. Sometimes the term "Protestant Bible" is used as a shorthand for a bible which only contains the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments. [34]
Although bibles with an Apocrypha section remain rare in protestant churches, [35] more generally English Bibles with the Apocrypha are becoming more popular than they were and they may be printed as intertestamental books. [10] Evangelicals vary among themselves in their attitude to and interest in the Apocrypha. Some view it as a useful historical and theological background to the events of the New Testament while others either have little interest in the Apocrypha or view it with hostility. However, all agree in the view that it is non-canonical. [36]
Protestant Bibles comprise 39 books of the Old Testament (according to the Jewish Hebrew Bible canon, known especially to non-Protestants as the protocanonical books) and the 27 books of the New Testament for a total of 66 books. Some Protestant Bibles, such as the original King James Version, include 14 additional books known as the Apocrypha, though these are not considered canonical. [3] With the Old Testament, Apocrypha, and New Testament, the total number of books in the Protestant Bible becomes 80. [4] Many modern Protestant Bibles print only the Old Testament and New Testament; [30] there is a 400-year intertestamental period in the chronology of the Christian scriptures between the Old and New Testaments. This period is also known as the "400 Silent Years" because it is believed to have been a span where God made no additional canonical revelations to his people. [37]
These Old Testament, Apocrypha and New Testament books of the Bible, with their commonly accepted names among the Protestant Churches, are given below. Note that a leading numeral is normally pronounced in the United States as the ordinal number, thus "First Samuel" for "1 Samuel". [38]
The Bible in English |
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Bibleportal |
Most Bible translations into English conform to the Protestant canon and ordering while some offer multiple versions (Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox) with different canon and ordering. For example, the version of the English Standard Version (ESV) with Apocrypha has been approved as a Catholic bible. [39]
Most Reformation-era translations of the New Testament are based on the Textus Receptus while many translations of the New Testament produced since 1900 rely upon the eclectic and critical Alexandrian text-type.
Notable English translations include:
Abbreviation | Name | Date | With Apocrypha? | Translation | Textual basis principal sources indicated |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
WYC | Wycliffe's Bible | 1382 - 1395 | Yes | Formal equivalence | Jerome's Latin Vulgate |
TYN | Tyndale Bible | 1526 (NT), 1530 (Pentateuch), 1531 (Jonah) | No | Formal equivalence | Pent. & Jon : Hebrew Bible or Polyglot Bible with reference to Luther's translation [40] NT : Erasmus's Novum Instrumentum omne |
TCB | Coverdale Bible | 1535 | Yes | Formal equivalence | Tyndale Bible, Luther Bible, Zürich Bible and the Vulgate |
Matthew Bible | 1537 | Yes | Formal equivalence | Tyndale Bible, Coverdale Bible | |
GEN | Geneva Bible | 1557 (NT), 1560 (OT) | Usually | Formal equivalence | OT : Hebrew Bible NT : Textus Receptus |
KJV or AV | King James Version (aka "Authorized Version") | 1611, 1769 (Blayney revision) | Varies | Formal equivalence | OT : Bomberg's Hebrew Rabbinic Bible Apoc.: Septuagint NT : Beza's Greek New Testament |
YLT | Young's Literal Translation | 1862 | No | Extreme formal equivalence | OT : Masoretic text NT : Textus Receptus |
DBY | Darby Bible | 1867 (NT) OT+NT (1890) | No | Formal equivalence | |
RV | Revised Version (or English Revised Version) | 1881 (NT), 1885 (OT) | Version available from 1894 | Formal equivalence | |
ASV | American Standard Version | 1900 (NT), 1901 (OT) | No | Formal equivalence | NT: Westcott and Hort 1881 and Tregelles 1857, (Reproduced in a single, continuous, form in Palmer 1881). OT: Masoretic Text with some Septuagint influence. |
RSV | Revised Standard Version | 1946 (NT), 1952 (OT) | Version available from 1957 | Formal equivalence | NT: Novum Testamentum Graece . OT: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia with limited Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint influence. Apocrypha: Septuagint with Vulgate influence. |
NEB | New English Bible | 1961 (NT), 1970 (OT) | Version available from 1970 | Dynamic equivalence | NT: R.V.G. Tasker Greek New Testament. OT: Biblia Hebraica (Kittel) 3rd Edition. |
NASB | New American Standard Bible | 1963 (NT), 1971 (OT), 1995 (update) | No | Formal equivalence |
|
AMP | The Amplified Bible | 1958 (NT), 1965 (OT) | No | Dynamic equivalence | |
GNB | Good News Bible | 1966 (NT), 1976 (OT) | Version available from 1979 | Dynamic equivalence, paraphrase | NT : Medium Correspondence to Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece 27th edition |
LB | The Living Bible | 1971 | No | Paraphrase | Paraphrase of American Standard Version, 1901, with comparisons of other translations, including the King James Version, and some Greek texts. |
NIV | New International Version | 1973 (NT), 1978 (OT) | No | Optimal equivalence |
|
NKJV | New King James Version | 1979 (NT), 1982 (OT) | No | Formal equivalence | NT: Textus Receptus, derived from the Byzantine text-type. OT: Masoretic Text with Septuagint influence |
NRSV | New Revised Standard Version | 1989 | Version available from 1989 | Formal equivalence | OT: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia with Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint influence. Apocrypha: Septuagint (Rahlfs) with Vulgate influence. NT: United Bible Societies' The Greek New Testament (3rd ed. corrected). 81% correspondence to Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece 27th edition. [44] |
REB | Revised English Bible | 1989 | Version available | Dynamic equivalence | NT: Medium correspondence to Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece 27th edition, with occasional parallels to Codex Bezae. OT: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (1967/77) with Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint influence. Apocrypha: Septuagint with Vulgate influence. |
GW | God's Word Translation | 1995 | No | Optimal equivalence | NT: Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament 27th edition. OT: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. |
CEV | Contemporary English Version | 1991 (NT), 1995 (OT) | Version available from 1999 | Dynamic equivalence | |
NLT | New Living Translation | 1996 | Version available | Dynamic equivalence |
|
HCSB | Holman Christian Standard Bible | 1999 (NT), 2004 (OT) | No | Optimal equivalence | NT: Novum Testamentum Graece 27th edition. OT: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia with some Septuagint influence. |
ESV | English Standard Version | 2001 | Version available from 2009 | Formal equivalence |
|
MSG | The Message | 2002 | Version available from 2013 | Highly idiomatic paraphrase / Extreme dynamic equivalence | |
CEB | Common English Bible | 2010 (NT), 2011 (OT) | Yes | Dynamic equivalence | OT: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (4th edition), Biblia Hebraica Quinta (5th edition) Apoc.: Göttingen Septuagint (in progress), Rahlfs' Septuagint (2005) NT: Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament (27th edition). |
MEV | Modern English Version | 2011 (NT), 2014 (OT) | Formal equivalence | NT: Textus Receptus OT: Jacob ben Hayyim Masoretic Text | |
CSB | Christian Standard Bible | 2017 | Optimal equivalence | NT: Novum Testamentum Graece 28th edition. OT: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia 5th Edition with some Septuagint influence. | |
EHV | Evangelical Heritage Version | 2017 (NT), 2019 (OT) | No | Balanced between formal and dynamic | OT: Various. Includes Masoretic Text, and Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. NT: Various. Includes Textus Receptus and Novum Testamentum Graecae. |
LSV | Literal Standard Version | 2020 | No | Formal Equivalence | Major revision of Young's Literal Translation OT: Masoretic Text with strong Septuagint influence and some reference to the Dead Sea Scrolls. NT: Textus Receptus and the Majority Text. |
A 2014 study into the Bible in American Life found that of those survey respondents who read the Bible, there was an overwhelming favouring of Protestant translations. 55% reported using the King James Version, followed by 19% for the New International Version, 7% for the New Revised Standard Version (printed in both Protestant and Catholic editions), 6% for the New American Bible (a Catholic Bible translation) and 5% for the Living Bible. Other versions were used by fewer than 10%. [52] A 2015 report by the California-based Barna Group found that 39% of American readers of the Bible preferred the King James Version, followed by 13% for the New International Version, 10% for the New King James Version and 8% for the English Standard Version. No other version was favoured by more than 3% of the survey respondents. [53]
Apocrypha are biblical or related writings not forming part of the accepted canon of scripture, some of which might be of doubtful authorship or authenticity. In Christianity, the word apocryphal (ἀπόκρυφος) was first applied to writings that were to be read privately rather than in the public context of church services. Apocrypha were edifying Christian works that were not always initially included as canonical scripture.
The deuterocanonical books, meaning "Of, pertaining to, or constituting a second canon," collectively known as the Deuterocanon (DC), are certain books and passages considered to be canonical books of the Old Testament by the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Church. In contrast, modern Rabbinic Judaism and Protestants regard the DC as Apocrypha.
The King James Version (KJV), also the King James Bible (KJB) and the Authorized Version (AV), is an Early Modern English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, which was commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611, by sponsorship of King James VI and I. The 80 books of the King James Version include 39 books of the Old Testament, 14 books of Apocrypha, and the 27 books of the New Testament.
The Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Israelites. The second division of Christian Bibles is the New Testament, written in Koine Greek.
The Vulgate is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. It is largely the work of Jerome who, in 382, had been commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Vetus Latina Gospels used by the Roman Church. Later, of his own initiative, Jerome extended this work of revision and translation to include most of the books of the Bible.
The Revised Standard Version (RSV) is an English translation of the Bible published in 1952 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. This translation itself is a revision of the American Standard Version (ASV) of 1901, and was intended to be a readable and literally accurate modern English translation which aimed to "preserve all that is best in the English Bible as it has been known and used through the centuries" and "to put the message of the Bible in simple, enduring words that are worthy to stand in the great Tyndale-King James tradition."
The Douay–Rheims Bible, also known as the Douay–Rheims Version, Rheims–Douai Bible or Douai Bible, and abbreviated as D–R, DRB, and DRV, is a translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into English made by members of the English College, Douai, in the service of the Catholic Church. The New Testament portion was published in Reims, France, in 1582, in one volume with extensive commentary and notes. The Old Testament portion was published in two volumes twenty-seven years later in 1609 and 1610 by the University of Douai. The first volume, covering Genesis to Job, was published in 1609; the second, covering the Book of Psalms to 2 Maccabees plus the three apocryphal books of the Vulgate appendix following the Old Testament, was published in 1610. Marginal notes took up the bulk of the volumes and offered insights on issues of translation, and on the Hebrew and Greek source texts of the Vulgate.
1 Esdras, also Esdras A, Greek Esdras, Greek Ezra, or 3 Esdras, is the ancient Greek Septuagint version of the biblical Book of Ezra in use within the early church, and among many modern Christians with varying degrees of canonicity. 1 Esdras is substantially similar to the standard Hebrew version of Ezra–Nehemiah, with the passages specific to the career of Nehemiah removed or re-attributed to Ezra, and some additional material.
2 Esdras, also called 4 Esdras, Latin Esdras, or Latin Ezra, is an apocalyptic book in some English versions of the Bible. Tradition ascribes it to Ezra, a scribe and priest of the fifth century BC, whom the book identifies with the sixth-century figure Shealtiel.
The name "Esdras" is found in the title of four texts attributed to, or associated with, the prophet Ezra. The naming convention of the four books of Esdras differs between church traditions, and has changed over time.
These are the books of the Vulgate along with the names and numbers given them in the Douay–Rheims and King James versions of the Bible. They are all translations, and the Vulgate exists in many forms. There are 76 books in the Clementine edition of the Latin Vulgate, 46 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament, and 3 in the Apocrypha.
The biblical apocrypha denotes the collection of apocryphal ancient books thought to have been written some time between 200 BC and 100 AD.
The Tyndale Bible (TYN) generally refers to the body of biblical translations by William Tyndale into Early Modern English, made c. 1522–1535. Tyndale's biblical text is credited with being the first Anglophone Biblical translation to work directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, although it relied heavily upon the Latin Vulgate and Luther's German New Testament. Furthermore, it was the first English biblical translation that was mass-produced as a result of new advances in the art of printing.
The Old Testament is the first section of the two-part Christian biblical canon; the second section is the New Testament. The Old Testament includes the books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) or protocanon, and in various Christian denominations also includes deuterocanonical books. Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Protestants use different canons, which differ with respect to the texts that are included in the Old Testament.
The term Catholic Bible can be understood in two ways. More generally, it can refer to a Christian Bible that includes the whole 73-book canon recognized by the Catholic Church, including some of the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament which are in the Greek Septuagint collection, but which are not present in the Hebrew Masoretic Text collection. More specifically, the term can refer to a version or translation of the Bible which is published with the Catholic Church's approval, in accordance with Catholic canon law.
The Canon of Trent is the list of books officially considered canonical at the Roman Catholic Council of Trent. A decree, the De Canonicis Scripturis, from the Council's fourth session, issued an anathema on dissenters of the books affirmed in Trent. The Council confirmed an identical list already locally approved in 1442 by the Council of Florence, which had existed in the earliest canonical lists from the synods of Carthage and Rome in the fourth century.
Luther's canon is the biblical canon attributed to Martin Luther, which has influenced Protestants since the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. While the Lutheran Confessions specifically did not define a biblical canon, it is widely regarded as the canon of the Lutheran Church. It differs from the 1546 Roman Catholic canon of the Council of Trent in that it rejects the deuterocanonical books and questions the seven New Testament books, called "Luther's Antilegomena", four of which are still ordered last in German-language Luther Bibles to this day.
Although the biblical themes have been an essential formative substance of the Portuguese culture, composition in that language of a complete translation of the Bible is quite late when compared with other European languages. The beginnings of the written transmission of the sacred text in Portuguese, parallel to its traditional liturgical use in Latin, are related to the progressive social acceptance of the vernacular as a language of culture in the low-medieval period. And even though the official language of the Portuguese monarchy dates back to the end of the thirteenth century, during the reign of D. Dinis, the writer Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos (1851–1925), for example, was able to state categorically that, in the medieval period, "Portuguese literature, in matters of biblical translations, is a poverty Desperate" – a judgment that remains valid, experts say.
A biblical canon is a set of texts which a particular Jewish or Christian religious community regards as part of the Bible.
The initiator of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof, translated the entire Hebrew Bible into Esperanto. His translation has been much admired by Esperantists and is widely held up as a model or exemplar for other Esperanto authors and translators. Other translators have also edited and published Esperanto versions of the New Testament and Apocrypha.
The version of 1611, following its mandate to revise and standardize the English Bible tradition, included the fourteen (or fifteen) books of the Apocrypha in a section between the Old and New Testaments (see the chart on page vi). Because of the Thirty-Nine Articles, there was no reason for King James' translators to include any comments as to the status of these books, as had the earlier English translators and editors.
Up until the 1880s every Protestant Bible (not just Catholic Bibles) had 80 books, not 66. The inter-testamental books written hundreds of years before Christ, called the "Aprocrypha," were part of virtually every printing of the Tyndale-Matthews Bible, the Great Bible, the Bishops Bible, the Protestant Geneva Bible, and the King James Bible until their removal in the 1880s. The original 1611 King James contained the Apocrypha, and King James threatened anyone who dared to print the Bible without the Apocrypha with heavy fines and a year in jail.
Why 3 and 4 Esdras (called 1 and 2 Esdras in the NRSV Apocrypha) are pushed to the front of the list is not clear, but the motive may have been to distinguish the Anglican Apocrypha from the Roman Catholic canon affirmed at the fourth session of the Council of trent in 1546, which included all of the books in the Anglican Apocrypha list except 3 and 4 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh. These three texts were designated at Trent as Apocrypha and later included in an appendix to the Clementine Vulgate, first published in 1592 (and the standard Vulgate text until Vatican II).
English Bibles were patterned after those of the Continental Reformers by having the Apocrypha set off from the rest of the OT. Coverdale (1535) called them "Apocrypha". All English Bibles prior to 1629 contained the Apocrypha. Matthew's Bible (1537), the Great Bible (1539), the Geneva Bible (1560), the Bishop's Bible (1568), and the King James Bible (1611) contained the Apocrypha. Soon after the publication of the KJV, however, the English Bibles began to drop the Apocrypha and eventually they disappeared entirely. The first English Bible to be printed in America (1782–83) lacked the Apocrypha. In 1826 the British and Foreign Bible Society decided to no longer print them. Today the trend is in the opposite direction, and English Bibles with the Apocrypha are becoming more popular again.
Paper and printing were expensive and early publishers were able to hold down costs by eliminating the Apocrypha once it was deemed secondary material.
For the Old Testament: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) and Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ) for the books available. Also the LXX, DSS, the Targums, and other ancient versions when pertinent.
For the New Testament: NA28 supplemented by the new textual criticism system that uses all the available Gr mss. known as the ECM2.
The Old Testament translators used the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible as represented in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (1977), with its extensive system of textual notes ... The translators also further compared the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint and other Greek manuscripts, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Syriac Peshitta, the Latin Vulgate, and any other versions or manuscripts that shed light on the meaning of difficult passages.
The New Testament translators used the two standard editions of the Greek New Testament: the Greek New Testament, published by the United Bible Societies (UBS, fourth revised edition, 1993), and Novum Testamentum Graece, edited by Nestle and Aland (NA, twenty-seventh edition, 1993) ... However, in cases where strong textual or other scholarly evidence supported the decision, the translators sometimes chose to differ from the UBS and NA Greek texts and followed variant readings found in other ancient witnesses. Significant textual variants of this sort are always noted in the textual notes of the New Living Translation.
The ESV is based on the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible as found in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (5th ed., 1997) ... The currently renewed respect among Old Testament scholars for the Masoretic text is reflected in the ESV's attempt, wherever possible, to translate difficult Hebrew passages as they stand in the Masoretic text rather than resorting to emendations or to finding an alternative reading in the ancient versions. In exceptional, difficult cases, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Syriac Peshitta, the Latin Vulgate, and other sources were consulted to shed possible light on the text, or, if necessary, to support a divergence from the Masoretic text.
[The ESV is based] on the Greek text in the 2014 editions of the Greek New Testament (5th corrected ed.), published by the United Bible Societies (UBS), and Novum Testamentum Graece (28th ed., 2012), edited by Nestle and Aland ... in a few difficult cases in the New Testament, the ESV has followed a Greek text different from the text given preference in the UBS/Nestle-Aland 28th edition.