The bishops of England and Wales are expected to approve a new translation of the Bible for reading at Mass later this year. In an article written before the bishops’ latest plans were made public, an Anglican biblical scholar examines the various alternatives available

Catholics in the United Kingdom have long been accustomed to The Jerusalem Bible as the preferred translation in the readings at Mass. A new lectionary is being considered using the English Standard Version: Catholic Edition, a light revision of the Revised Standard Version. As an Anglican, I can have no opinion about this move, but as a biblical specialist I can offer some thoughts about the Bible in the liturgy, and English versions in general. There are three binary choices that need to be made in selecting a modern English Bible for liturgical reading.

The first choice is between Bibles in the line of tradition going back to the King James Version (and behind that to William Tyndale), and versions made “from scratch” with ­deliberate inattention to the KJV tradition – rendered as though the Bible had never been translated before.

The King James Bible lies at the root of the Revised Standard Version and thence also of the New Revised Standard Version, revisions that add clarity to the KJV text but operate on the same principles. The English Standard Version also stands in this tradition. It is in essence a revision of the RSV, just as the NRSV is, but it adopts sometimes more conservative readings where the text is in dispute, and ­follows the wording of the biblical text more closely. It is in origin an evangelical version, made by biblically conservative Christians and published in 2001, but there is a Catholic edition from 2018, which appeared the ­following year in North America as The Augustine Bible. It is quite close to the RSV, which is now becoming difficult to obtain, since the NRSV has taken over from it as the standard “study Bible” for non-evangelical Christians. (Evangelicals actually for the most part tend to prefer the New International Version, and will probably not widely adopt the ESV, which they will tend to find rather archaic.)