It seems to me (a Catholic who primarily uses the Challoner revision to the Douay-Rheims and the Latin Vulgate) that the both the ESV and NKJV are projects which in their history are based on the same work (Tyndale's Bible) with the same general goals (modernized language) and which have both achieved this goal with negligible qualitative differences. By the time the ESV was published the New King James Version - which also had as its goal to modernize the language - had been published twenty years earlier.
#What is esv bible update#
The RSV, upon which the ESV is based, was primarily a project to update the Bible to the English language of the current time (mid-20th century) as an improvement over the old KJV. Relative Differences: the biggest practical difference that I can see is that the ESV is newer. The language was modernized to remove "thou" and "thee" and replace obsolete words (e.g., "jug" for "cruse"). Many alterations designed to correct or improve the text were made to satisfy the objections of conservative Protestants who had considered the RSV to be theologically liberal, for example, changing the translation of the Hebrew almah from "young woman" (used in the RSV) to "virgin" (in the ESV) in Isaiah 7:14. Work on the ESV began over the perceived looseness of style and content of recently published English Bible translations. The English Standard Version (ESV) of 2001 is a revision of the of the 1971 Revised Standard Version, which traces it's origins to William Tyndale's New Testament translation of 1525 (the first English translation of a Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, which was also a significant influence on the original KJV). Verb forms were also modernized in the NKJV (for example, "speaks" rather than "speaketh"). One of the most significant features of the NKJV was its abandonment of the historic second person pronouns “thou”, "thee", “ye”, “thy”, and “thine”. The task of updating the English of the KJV involved significant changes in word order, grammar, vocabulary, and spelling. The translators have sought to follow the principles of translation used in the original King James Version, which the NKJV revisers call "complete equivalence" in contrast to "dynamic equivalence" used by many other modern translations. 130 translators used the original King James version as well as Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew texts including the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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The New King James version is meant to be an update (circa 1975) of the vocabulary and grammar of the King James Version, while preserving the classic style and literary beauty of the original 1611 KJV version.