American Standard Version

History

The ASV is rooted in the work that was done with the Revised Version (RV), a late 19th-century British revision of the King James Version of the Bible. In 1870, an invitation was extended to American religious leaders for scholars to work on the Revised Version project. A year later, 30 scholars were chosen by Philip Schaff. These scholars began work in 1872.

Any suggestion the American team had would be accepted by the British team only if 2/3 of the British team agreed. This principle was backed up by an agreement that if their suggestions were put into the appendix of the RV, the American team would not publish their version for 14 years. The appendix had about 300 suggestions in it.

In 1881, the RV New Testament was released. Four years later, the Old Testament appeared. Around this time, the British team disbanded. Also around this time, pirated editions of the RV appeared with the suggestions of the American team in the main text. In 1898, publishers for Oxford and Cambridge Universities published their own editions of the RV with the American suggestions included. However, these suggestions were reduced in number.

In 1901, the 14 year agreement between the American and British teams expired. The American Standard Version was published the same year. It was copyrighted in North America to ensure the purity of the ASV text, although the copyright has since expired. The copyright was a reaction to tampering with the text of the Revised Version by some U.S. publishers, as noted above, allegedly in the interest of the American reading public, which was legally possible as there was never a U.S. copyright filed for the RV. By the time of the ASV’s copyright expiry, interest in this translation had largely waned in the light of newer and more recent ones, and textual corruption hence never became the issue with the ASV that it had with the RV.

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