The Revised Version is recalled in the history of English language biblical versions because of the intense public debates over its potential to supplant the Authorized Version of 1611. These highly politicized contests over text and translation have continued through to the present day and have sidetracked attention from the deeper issues of identity and status associated with scholarship and national standing.Footnote ² Sixty-six biblical scholars from the United Kingdom were involved;Footnote ³ Philip Schaff led a committed and ambitious group of 35 American Protestant and Unitarian scholars in efforts to be credited as equal participants with the English Revisers in the massive project of the revision of the long-standing and much-loved English translation. The formation of the American Revised Version Committee within a year of the commencement of the work of revision by the two English Revision Companies ushered in an immense behind-the-scenes struggle over the requisite standing for decisions over the wording of the revised translation. Linguistics and text became the arena on which contests for recognition, national pride and scholarly achievement were fought. The choice of weapons of influence ranged from promotion of academic ability to rhetorical appeals about English-speaking family ties and manly honour to threats of commercial subversion. This paper explores the significance of American efforts to be involved credibly and influentially in the work that culminated in the Revised Version of 1881/1885 in England and (as a testament to the standing of American biblical scholarship and the failure of international cooperation) the distinct American Standard Version of 1901.

In the year that Philip Schaff assumed his position as Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary in New York, a Revision of the Authorized Version of the Holy Scriptures was announced in England. The Committee charged under the resolution of the Convocation of Canterbury on 6 May 1870 announced the division of the work of Revision into two companies (for Old Testament and New Testament), the members of the British Companies and the terms under which the revising would occur.Footnote ⁴ Echoes of the announcement resounded in the United States.Footnote ⁵ Particular warmth attached to convocation's announcement of names of scholars from the British Nonconformist churches who would serve on the companies. It was, repeated Philadelphia's National Baptist, noteworthy for the ‘speed and … spirit of equity which are wonderfully at variance with the customary proceedings of that body’.Footnote ⁶ Hopes were indeed high.

It had become commonplace among Anglicans and Nonconformists in England and Protestant denominations in the United States to acknowledge mistakes in the foundation texts for and translation by the King James Version and to tie them to the growing scepticism about and scientific challenges to Christianity.Footnote ⁷ ‘If my Bible cannot stand the daylight I do not want it any longer’, declaimed the Reverend Minot J. Savage. ‘And if we will not let it be seen as it is, others will begin to entertain the same feelings.’Footnote ⁸ Revision was held to be an apologetic and missionary necessity. No amount of nostalgia for the King James Version or the longevity of its use,Footnote ⁹ or that it had even more formal authorization in the United States than in England,Footnote ¹⁰ was deemed sufficient to thwart a revision.Footnote ¹¹

Many individual new translations had been published in both countries. Baptists in the United States had already baulked at the American Bible Society's commitment to publish only the King James Version and had formed two successive societies to execute a revision. The result gained approval as far afield as the ‘South Australian Bible Translation Revision Society’, formed in 1867,Footnote ¹² indicating that the cry for a revision for ‘English-speaking people’ was more than empty rhetoric.Footnote ¹³ Most recently in England, Henry Alford, the Dean of Canterbury, had published a revision of the King James Version New Testament.Footnote ¹⁴ He refuted any suggestion that an individual's revision could replace the Authorized Version, holding that ‘no new rendering is safe until it has gone through many brains, and been thoroughly sifted by differing perceptions and tastes’. This last observation was telling, for just as he recognized that the very act of individual revision, of which his was one among many, ‘kept open the great question of an authoritative Revision’,Footnote ¹⁵ so also no authoritative Revision could be attempted without a broad range of contributions. How broad was to become the critical issue, even as, for some, it was, in hope and execution, its greatest glory. Equally, as it turned out, the thwarting of American ambitions for the work was to prove the greatest barrier to future international cooperation on Bible revision.

In his public writings about the Revised Version, Schaff's enthusiasm for the undertaking and for the results was manifest. Before the final revision was published – the New Testament in 1881, the Old Testament in 1885 – the German Reformed scholar consistently spoke of the ‘Anglo-American Bible Revision’. It was a phrase avoided in England, and certainly not used in official documents on that side of the Atlantic.Footnote ¹⁶ He emphasized the work of Americans as a mirror of the British work – in the range of denominations represented in the work of revision, in the division into two companies (one for each Testament), and especially in the terms of reference adopted as principles guiding the work. These accented the selection of the ablest biblical scholars the country could offer and a commitment to the greatest accuracy in translation measured largely by lexical and grammatical equivalence. All in all, in Schaff's eulogy, this was a ‘joint work of both committees … among the two most civilized nations of the earth’.Footnote ¹⁷ His hyperbole scaled more general political and economic aspirations as well: ‘England and America have honoured themselves by thus honouring the Bible, and proved its inseparable connection with true freedom and progress.’Footnote ¹⁸

Schaff was far from alone in this glowing avowal of cooperation, and its significance for the unity between England and America. The Episcopalian Bishop of Delaware, Alfred Lee, wrote, ‘Measures were … taken to obtain the cooperation of American scholars, in the hope of making the new version, like the old one, a bond of union between two great nations speaking the same language.’Footnote ¹⁹ Isaac Hall wrote of the two Committees as ‘virtually one organization’.Footnote ²⁰ The driving hopes for the Americans are revealed in such statements. The ecumenical vitality of Schaff, that extolled the unity that could be achieved by diverse confessions working on a common project, was certainly present.Footnote ²¹

But this avowal of unity, implying a convivial ease of collegiality, actually screens the politically tense dimensions of the international project. There was the perceived need for recognition of intellectual and literary achievement, of a distinct yet related identity, of a religious vitality not without a scholarly foundation. Schaff himself used the language of ‘mother-daughter’ to describe the relationship of England and America.Footnote ²² He was not the first to use the discourse of family ties in the pursuance of specific objectives even though such asymmetrical language was sometimes contested.Footnote ²³ Nevertheless, such constant deferrals to and comparisons with England reinforced the imbalance and it gained effusive display in the outpourings of almost adulatory welcome to Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster Abbey and key player in the moves for revision, when he visited the eastern seaboard in 1878.Footnote ²⁴ No such public extension for Philip Schaff's repeated visits to England mirrored the English churchman's welcome.Footnote ²⁵ At one level this related to the nervousness amongst the Americans about the standing of their own biblical scholarship. The National Baptist reassured its American readers that ‘The names of the English Churchmen who have this undertaking in charge, will inspire general confidence.’Footnote ²⁶ Conversely, concern was expressed in England and reported in the United States that ‘Biblical scholars are few and far between in America and … the three or four whose services might be acceptable would by no means contribute to render the new version popular among their countrymen.’Footnote ²⁷ Such a qualified view was not without American self-appraisal; even Episcopalian dignitaries avowed similar humble self-assessments.Footnote ²⁸ However, it was clear also that American biblical authorities outside of the Episcopal Church were concerned both to test their own ability by reference to English scholarship and to make their own contribution. The American Committee on Revision later argued for equal authority over the resultant revised translation on the basis of ‘the character and merits of our cooperation … in the joint work’ but even here this was laid as an appeal to English adjudicators.Footnote ²⁹

Furthermore, the work of revision became a magnet of hopes for restoration of relations between Britain and America, grounded not merely in a common language but in the literary apex of the cultural and religious heritage of that language – the Authorized Version. It was less than one hundred years since the War of Independence. The coals of past tensions had recently been re-fired over the role of the British in the secreting of the ship Alabama to the Confederate side in the Civil War just concluded.Footnote ³⁰ Schaff made great truck of this element of shared language and shared artefact, significant because English was not his native tongue. He recognized that it was clearly the unifying element in what later commentators have called ‘Americanization’. So this unity, gathered around language and literary treasure, had more than ties with England in view; it was (to be) a means of unifying a nation, disparate in its migrant groups and in its politics. Language, religion and nationhood were entwined through this project of translation for the shaping of identity. Edwin Gentzler's perceptive delineation of the importance of translation for the shaping of American identity is especially pertinent here, yet he omits any notice of the work of revision of the Authorized Version. This work encapsulated in a large-scale group process the very forces he has identified as operative in the role of translation in the shaping of America.Footnote ³¹

The English revisers themselves were almost as effusive about the relationship as their American counterparts. In his carefully crafted preface to the Revised Version of the New Testament, the chair of the New Testament Company, Bishop Charles John Ellicott, wrote, ‘We gratefully acknowledge their [i.e. the Americans’] care, vigilance and accuracy; and we humbly pray that their labours and our own, thus happily united, may be permitted to bear a blessing to both countries, and to all English-speaking people throughout the world.’Footnote ³² Here again was the grand vision of ecumenical if not imperialist ambition.

Ellicott's portrayal of the relationship was at some remove from the historical reality though it has either been merely reiterated as the reality or ignored altogether. David Norton, for example, makes no mention of the work and contribution of the Americans in his study of the Bible as literature,Footnote ³³ in fact, dismissing ‘political and sectarian motives’ from consideration in assessing the Revised Version.Footnote ³⁴ The two assertions are far from unrelated. Melanie Hall and Erik Goldstein, even though accenting the developments of cultural exchange between the two countries, make no mention of the Revised Version at all, despite giving considerable attention to Dean Stanley's American visit.Footnote ³⁵ The lode-stone of biblical revision does not figure in studies of the development of the concept of ‘Greater Britain’Footnote ³⁶ or expositions of the relations between the Established Church and the Episcopal Church of the United States of America.Footnote ³⁷ Certainly, there is no recognition of the serious dent in the Episcopal Church's aspirations of engineering a national ideal that the Revised Version delivered to the Episcopal Church. At the time, its barely concealed antagonism to the project inspired a polemical characterization of the church as that ‘snug little American Zion’,Footnote ³⁸ a confirmatory tag-line for Kevin Ward's interpretation of the ‘Olympian detachment’ of the nineteenth-century Episcopal Church.Footnote ³⁹

The revision of the Authorized Version was a major public contest from the time of its announcement until a decade or more after its two-part publication. Contemporary scholarship has delivered little more than repetitious reiterations of its failure to capture popular acceptance, largely because of the success in its avowed aim of literalism. The Revised Version was a lightning rod of national and international identities and ambitions. Most particularly, the rising American confidence in its literary (which demanded, in the nineteenth century, biblical) scholarship came up against the vigour of an English assumption of a linguistic hegemony to match its political power. This has remained a forgotten chapter of the history of the Bible in English.Footnote ⁴⁰

There is more to the story of the relationship than utopian harmony and equality. The failure of English commentators to make any reference to an ‘Anglo-American’ edition, Ellicott's meticulous explanation that the Americans responded to the first and second draft revisions of the English RV Companies by sending back their criticisms and suggestions, and Schaff's determined efforts to place on the record the ‘Documentary History of the American Committee of Revision’ even if it could only gain a private printing,Footnote ⁴¹ point to the struggles involved.

Schaff encapsulated the conflict over the nature of the relationship in these terms: were the Americans to be ‘advisers or fellow-revisers’?Footnote ⁴² His efforts from the beginning clearly marked out a determined hope and argument that the Americans would take their place with the English Companies as ‘fellow-revisers’; the resistance to those efforts by the English indicates that, on this score, anything but unanimity and equality was operative.

The question of the involvement of the Americans was obliquely anticipated in a resolution of a Joint Committee of the Convocation of Canterbury, but the wording was decidedly ambiguous:

Arthur Stanley had moved rapidly to interpret the resolution as meaning that the operations of revision should be done by Establishment and Nonconformist members in England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, working together.Footnote ⁴⁴ The application was early tested by the furore that broke out over the inclusion of an English Unitarian, G. Vance Smith, in the New Testament Company of Revisers. An accelerant was poured on the fire by the invitation extended to him to attend the Holy Communion that launched the work of the Company. Once the early crisis was resolved in favour of the inclusion of Smith in the decision-making processes of the New Testament Company,Footnote ⁴⁵ the question of the involvement of other nations seemed to follow naturally on its heels.Footnote ⁴⁶ An indication of the importance of this move was that it became a matter of debate in the House of Commons. Charles Buxton moved for a Royal Commission to revise the Authorized Version. He believed that such a Commission should be executed by the combined action of ‘Her Majesty’ and ‘the President of the United States’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Various speakers opposed both the revision and the call for American involvement. When the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, finally joined the fray, his measured sidelining of the Government warrant for the revision made no mention of the Americans.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, his diary entry revealed that there was more than a defence of the King James Version in his sights;Footnote ⁴⁹ it was the ‘American collaboration’ that he specifically opposed in Buxton's motion.Footnote ⁵⁰ Gladstone had shown a similar ambivalence towards admitting American leadership in democratic reform in the debates over the Reform Bill recently passed in 1867.Footnote ⁵¹ There was no question that English leadership was to be asserted and retained.

This may have tailored, at least partially, the manner of Stanley's shepherding of American involvement. The resolution was completely capable of interpretation on an individualistic basis,Footnote ⁵² wherein single American eminent scholars would be invited to cooperate, presumably on whatever ad hoc basis the English Committee decided. However, Philip Schaff took the invitation to provide names as an intention to form a group of scholars to cooperate,Footnote ⁵³ in his mind on the entire project. Stanley acceded that it was a matter of American organization for which they alone, and not the English, were responsible. He carefully corrected Schaff's draft letter of invitation to various scholars making just this point:

Schaff's draft had read:

Stanley's corrections were telling, reflecting his own concern at making American involvement acceptable in England:

The distinction between ‘assist in the proposed revision’ and ‘Co-operation in the work of revision’ was subtle, but would prove telling. It was clearer in Stanley's rejection of Schaff's use of ‘fraternal equality’ in his draft suggestions to Bishop Ellicott of the initiation of the American Revision Committee:Footnote ⁵⁵ ‘though doubtless most reasonable as regards the spirit in which it is made, [it] might mislead unless more carefully explained’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Accordingly, from the English point of view, the Americans, however they might wish to organize themselves and on what principles they may wish to proceed, were viewed as little different in kind, though different in degree, from the eminent advisers on nautical matters sought out by the English Company for one-off assistance on how best to interpret terms for the shipwreck in Acts 27.Footnote ⁵⁷ They were, from Stanley's careful manoeuvring, not in the same position nor with the same authority as the English Revisers, though this remained to be clearly demarcated.

The issue was compounded by the separation of lines of approach to the Americans. Bishop Wilberforce of Winchester was to approach the Episcopalians; Dean Stanley was to contact the non-Episcopalians. This may have been Stanley's strategy to avoid sore memories. He had refused to allow Westminster Abbey to be used for a gathering of bishops that has become known as the first Pan-Anglican Conference.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Bishop of Vermont, John Hopkins, accused Stanley of being ‘an absolute autocrat’ and breaching his vow of obedience to episcopal authority.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, the situation was not helped by a difference in the timing in notification of the two American groups. Stanley had swung into action quickly, contacting Philip Schaff as the conduit to American scholarship.Footnote ⁶⁰ Schaff had already become good friends with J.B. Lightfoot and B.F. Westcott. They had organized and overseen his contributions to Dr Smith's Dictionary of Christian Antiquities.Footnote ⁶¹ Schaff had even stayed with Westcott, at the master's house at the Harrow School.Footnote ⁶² He was known to others of the English revisers as well and his scholarship and amity were generally trusted.Footnote ⁶³ He was, in many ways, leading the display of American scholarship in England – Protestant with catholic sensibilities, familiar with though critical of German scholarship, detailed in his investigations. He was suitably parallel to the revitalized Cambridge scholarship epitomized in the work of Lightfoot, Westcott and F.J.A. Hort – the Cambridge triumvirate. Stanley chose his American conduit well.

Bishop Wilberforce by contrast made what some saw as a (or another?) fatal mistake in holding off any communication until the Episcopalians met as a group at their Convention,Footnote ⁶⁴ which meant going through the Presiding Bishop. His formal correspondence came more than twelve months after Schaff had swung into action.Footnote ⁶⁵ Whether simple procrastination, over-scrupulous concern that hierarchical protocols be observed or a surreptitious effort to derail the project in America (or as a whole) is difficult to discern.Footnote ⁶⁶

The Episcopalians growled that the group of decidedly Protestant denominations – as distinct from ‘Churchmen’ as one Episcopalian bristledFootnote ⁶⁷ – were already gathering as an organized unit for the revision; ‘the marked exclusiveness of the movement’ was the judgment of a resolution of the Diocese of Illinois.Footnote ⁶⁸ However much they stood under the banner of Protestant the bishops were in no mood to have their Episcopal status undervalued. The resolution passed by the Second Congress of the Protestant Episcopal Church, despite the protests of the Bishop of Louisiana, was tart in its wording: ‘this House, having had no part in originating or organising the said work of revision, is not at present in a condition to deliver any judgment respecting it’.Footnote ⁶⁹

It did not help that there had been vehement English reactions to the place accorded to the Unitarian, G. Vance Smith.Footnote ⁷⁰ The appearance of the Unitarians, Ezra Abbot and Joseph Thayer, on the American committee seemed to compound the mischief. The Bishop of West New York, A. Cleveland Coxe, made up in flourishing rhetoric what he lacked in biblical acumen: ‘Who does not foresee what must follow? Here a text will be stigmatized as influenced by the Baptist Revisers; another will be credited to the Methodists; and another to those Socinian and semi-Arian helpers who are called in.’Footnote ⁷¹

However, the upshot of these bruised feelings was that the American Committee initially found itself without Episcopal representation and this became another sore in England. As the Chair of the British Committee, Bishop Ellicott wrote to Schaff,

It seemed to Ezra Abbot, Professor at the Harvard Divinity School, that ‘a man's official position in the Church’ had taken precedence over scholarship, quite counter to any of the formal resolutions and regulations related to the projected Revision and a key motivation for American involvement in the project; but he restrained his public tongue, if not his private pen.Footnote ⁷³ In the end, repeated pleas and increasingly high-ranking private representation forced the hand of the Bishop of Delaware, Arthur Lee, and he joined the American Committee. He was promptly given the task of opening deliberations with prayer at his first attendance, a responsibility noted in the minutes,Footnote ⁷⁴ and passed in correspondence across the Atlantic,Footnote ⁷⁵ doubtless to satisfy the ‘needed confidence’ that Bishop Ellicott had requested. Stanley's wit was wryly reported, ‘One bishop is quite enough’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Bishop Lee was clear, however, that all the fuss and pressure manifestly indicated a group, not separate individuals, a group carefully constructed to imitate in some measure the English Committee for Revision. As noted above, the English had earlier avowed that how the Americans chose to organize themselves was their affair,Footnote ⁷⁷ and yet they soon began to be spoken of even by the English as a ‘company’.Footnote ⁷⁸ This communicated a decidedly unambiguous message to Schaff. He intended all along that the project be understood as an international project for English speakers by the two leading English-speaking nations.Footnote ⁷⁹ The difficulty was that the authority for the two Companies of the English Committee was direct – the Convocation of Canterbury – and this was rehearsed often enough to make the point. But the same Convocation had not been as clear about specifically American appointment or involvement.

Much of the subsequent decade revolves around the effort to find a basis of authority that would carry similar if not equivalent weight for the Americans. Schaff and his Committee tried a range of possibilities. Schaff organized structures and procedures of operation to mirror the English Committee subdivided into two companies, one for the Old Testament, one for the New. He tirelessly promoted the work of revision by public lectures and media essays. He worked with Andrew Taylor to cultivate the monetary support of American subscribers, there being no arrangement with publishing houses to secure the finances. He accented the relative size of the American population and their interest in the Bible. He made constant reference if not deference to English advice. All these elements were tested as possible sources of authority for the work. The very introduction of such a range of conceivable anchors into the developing tensions in the American relationship with the English indicates the American sense of uncertainty about their own foundational authority for the enterprise.Footnote ⁸⁰

The fragility of the American position became devastatingly clear when the University Presses, who had since 1873 underwritten the costs of the project (to the tune of £20,000)Footnote ⁸¹ in the United Kingdom, stepped in to prevent the English Companies sending any more of their drafts to the Americans for review.Footnote ⁸² That the Companies meekly relayed this information to the Americans illustrates that their own authority was also being squeezed by the power of the purse – they had, as the return for the Presses’ financial support, transferred copyright in the revision to the presses.Footnote ⁸³ With the work of revision firmly into a review of the first draft, the University Presses had become concerned about the protection of their interests. Congressional legislation for copyright protection outlawing ‘bootlegging’ in the United States did not come in until 1891.Footnote ⁸⁴

The festering sore of the level and status of the collaboration, which had begun in the lack of terminological clarity and was compounded by the different claims upon roles and functions, remained unresolved through to the end. Schaff's initial invitation to American scholars to an exploratory meeting in his Bible House study in late 1871 signalled his understanding or at least his intent. It was ‘for the purpose of forming an organization to coöperate with the British Committee in the revision of the Authorised English Version of the Scriptures’.Footnote ⁸⁵ The membership contained scholars from the sweep of Protestant denominations as in England, and added Reformed and Lutheran representatives as well.Footnote ⁸⁶ Bishop Lee and the Revd Dr Washburn of Calvary Church, New York, made up the Episcopalian contingent.

The formalizing of the membership of the American Committee had barely been completed when serious dis-ease filtered through the ranks of the American scholars about the standing of their recommendations. Bishop Ellicott's letter of May 1873 announcing the intention of the English New Testament Company to begin work on the second revision of the Gospels in October of that same year made no reference to American suggestions nor, apparently, allowed sufficient time for the fledgling group to devise them. George Day, the American Committee's minute secretary, cryptically recorded ‘some interchange of views’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Schaff's forthcoming summer visit to England was, accordingly, given a specific brief to determine:

This ‘weight’ meant nothing less than a recognition that the biblical scholarship of the Americans had the same worth and ability as their English colleagues. The proof was to be found not in the discussions over various technicalities of text and translation but in the equal voting rights deciding the final wording.

Schaff brought back to the United States resolutions from each British Company. These introduced the mantra of English response that eventually began to irritate rather than placate, namely, they ‘will give them the greatest possible weight’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Matters came to a head with Schaff's next visit to England in 1875, fired as it was by the American Committee's resolve that they should be treated not as advisers but as fellow-revisers and fellow-authors. He mustered a range of arguments, of justice, honour and expediency designed ultimately to claim the moral authority of the American position, but with a tone designed to tweak English sensitivity:Footnote ⁹⁰

1. 1. The American companies mirrored the English organization; they contained leading biblical scholars from across the churches; they represented 40 million people; they were conscientious in their work and expected no payment; they had meticulously authored their own work as a mature contribution to the process. ‘It would be unreasonable’, he said, ‘to continue such an expensive machinery simply for giving advice.’

2. 2. The honour of America was at stake, a ‘spirit of self-respect and manly independence’ that had been inherited from their British ancestors. This honour nevertheless carried economic consequences, with the prediction that continued liberality of support from American subscribers was dependent on recognition of the equality of labour from the American committee.Footnote ⁹¹

3. 3. Recognition of the American title in the work was critical to the acquisition of copyright to protect the resulting publication in America, crucial to avoidance of literary piracy.

Schaff went on to lay out some practical alternate measures that might be followed – joint conferences, select representatives of one nation sitting on the companies of the other – all designed to demonstrate the common authorship. Some on the English Companies had heard these arguments before. Schaff had already repeatedly raised the question of the quality and nature of the relationship between the Revision Companies of the two countries. But for this meeting, some English members had schooled him in the shaping of arguments. In the aftermath of a measure of success,Footnote ⁹² when a revised printing of the abstract of Schaff's arguments and suggestions was being prepared for the English University Presses, Fenton Hort provided further refinements to the text, admitting ‘I should not in any case have thought it right to criticise it as a document in which I had myself a responsibility’.Footnote ⁹³

There was, however, one strategic mistake in Schaff's presentation. He raised for the first time in this larger theatre, the possibility of two editions, what later would be spoken of as two recensions, one for England and one for the United States. A particular consciousness of differences in the target audiences had been evolving touching on the acceptance of archaisms, the use of aoristic compared to perfect forms of verb construction, and this in spite of the avowed intent for greater literal accuracy in the Revision. This consciousness was compromising the repeated accents on a common tongue and a single Bible for English-speaking peoples.

But now the suggestion for two distinct editions became combined with a commercial difficulty, the details of which cannot be surveyed here. Suffice to say that in the long run, the decision was taken out of the hands of the Revision Companies by the University Presses who sensed that their hold on the commercial return for the new Revision, in both countries, might be devastated. Given that the University Presses were subventing most of the expenses of the British Companies (unlike the Americans who relied on private subscriptions from over 1200 people),Footnote ⁹⁴ they began to call in the return on their investment. The English Companies found some of their organizational independence curtailed. The Presses also had an eye to the American market and extracted from the American Revision Companies a commitment to support the editions published by the University Presses.

In the end, the Americans adhered to their commitment to produce, as much as possible, a common Revision. Too much time and effort had been expended on the project and they settled for a narrower official recognition than that for which they argued. There was also the trust of many generous private contributors to be honoured. Certainly American public recognition abounded. Notice of the major unresolved differences in the rendering of the Revision between the American and British Companies was recorded in an Appendix.Footnote ⁹⁵ This at least inferred the role the Americans had played in the final form of the revised text,Footnote ⁹⁶ even if it also confirmed the fear-inducing polemics at the beginning of the project that the two nations would produce different translations and thereby fuel uncertainty among ordinary Christian folk.Footnote ⁹⁷ But the members worked assiduously to promote the official edition of the University Presses in the United States in the face of the predicted piracy and the irony of repeated substitutions of their own Appendix renderings into the main text, with the English wording transferred to the tail-end of the volume. The regularity with which this happened seems to indicate a matter of national pride as much as skill in translation.

The English Baptist, Joseph Angus, once confided to Schaff his own admiration of Schaff's work ethic.Footnote ⁹⁸ This could have been extended in some measure to other members of the American companies who would even take a summer retreat together to catch up with the Revision drafts sent to them by the British Companies.Footnote ⁹⁹ All the while there was a fastidious concern to accommodate the desires of the English Companies in their decisions about revisings and organization, in their helpfulness, in the courtesy of their correspondence and in a constant return to the discursive anchor of harmony, unity and cooperative achievement.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Attention to detail was paramountFootnote ¹⁰¹ as was the accent on the credentials of those sitting on the American companies. One comment of an American reviser is revealing of motivation in all this. In 1874, Professor Joseph Packard of Virginia had been in England and he was invited to sit for half an hour with the British Old Testament Company at Westminster. He wrote to Schaff,

Here we see a nation grasping the opportunity to display its growing confidence in its own biblical scholarship by involvement in the largest biblical project of the century. The belief that they were not to be patronized as advisers but were fellow-revisers was as much about national identity, the standing of American academia and the growing confidence before Old World scholars, as it was about authorial rights.

After publication, the English Companies disbanded,Footnote ¹⁰³ leaving a preface to the Revised Version New Testament that could not, through the pen of Bishop Ellicott, find its way to acknowledging the Americans as fellow-revisers. An Appendix of alternate readings was tacked on to the translation, introduced with a heading that intimated patronizing largesse rather than recognition of equally valid renderings: ‘List of readings and renderings preferred by the American Committee, recorded at their desire.’ This was not the explanation Schaff had drafted.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The American Companies, however, voted to continue their work, breaking their English connection and turning to German scholarship for more advanced examination of the Hebrew text.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The ‘Anglophile tendency’ that Gary Pranger sees in Philip Schaff was now considerably dampened.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Once all obligations to the University Presses were fulfilled, the Companies produced the distinctive American Standard Version in 1901 – an event Schaff did not live to see.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Certain trans-Atlantic friendships, cooperation and respect survived the ruptured collaboration of the project, with Schaff introducing the new Westcott and Hort Greek text to the American public. As the Unitarian, Ezra Abbot, confided to Philip Schaff,

For the Cambridge triumvirate at least, nothing was to be lost to England's reputation by the acknowledgment of America's. But the intense political struggles locked into the international efforts for the revision of the Authorized Version, left a distinct shadow over Anglo-American relations for a considerable time to come, dark enough to ensure that future enterprises (such as the Revised Standard Version and the New English Bible) were distinctly national rather than international efforts.