New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition(NRSVue)

The New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition (NRSVue) is the 2021 revision of the NRSV, published by the National Council of Churches. The NRSV itself appeared in 1989, as a revision of the 1952 Revised Standard Version — in the lineage that runs back through the 1901 American Standard Version to the King James Version. Its committee was chaired by the textual critic Bruce Metzger of Princeton and included Protestant, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish scholars, one of the most broadly ecumenical teams ever assembled for an English Bible.

The Updated Edition, overseen by the Society of Biblical Literature, folded in three decades of manuscript discoveries and scholarship, refined the inclusive-language renderings, and adjusted several thousand verses. The NCC treats it as the current NRSV, and Bible Gateway and most publishers now serve the updated text under the plain name “NRSV.” The verses and data on this site are the NRSVue. Adoption in worship has been gradual, though — many mainline lectionaries still use the 1989 text — so a church that says it uses “the NRSV” may mean either edition.

Its guiding rule, inherited from the RSV, is “as literal as possible, as free as necessary” — a formal-equivalence approach that stays close to the structure of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, though less rigidly word-for-word than the NASB or ESV. It translates from the standard Critical Text, and where the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Septuagint preserve an older or clearer reading than the traditional Masoretic Hebrew, it often follows them and notes the change in the margin.

The NRSV was the first major English translation to make gender-inclusive language for humanity a standing policy: where the original clearly addresses or describes both men and women, it renders the text “brothers and sisters,” “friends,” or “people” rather than “brothers” or “men.” Traditional masculine language for God is kept, and pronouns for God are not capitalized — a deliberate choice, since the original languages draw no such distinction. For a generation it has been the assumed common text of Protestant seminaries and academic biblical scholarship, and the base for study Bibles like the New Oxford Annotated Bible; it is the approved lectionary translation across most of mainline Protestantism, and is also published in a Catholic edition with the deuterocanonical books.

The NRSVue verses shown here are the 2021 text. Like the 1989 NRSV before it, it reads Genesis 1:1 as a dependent clause — “When God began to create the heavens and the earth…” — where the 1952 RSV, the ESV, and most others keep the standalone “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The Hebrew grammar genuinely allows both; the dependent-clause reading was the NRSV line's break from the RSV, not a change the Updated Edition made.

The NRSV is the most recent line of revision from the King James: KJV (1611) → English Revised Version / ASV (1885–1901) → RSV (1952) → NRSV (1989) → NRSVue (2021). The ESV is a separate 2001 revision of the same RSV, made for a more evangelical readership.