Neither New, Nor Standard:
An Examination of
Bible Naming Practices
Brett Mahlen
As we stand back and observe the Bible publishing industry, we cannot help but be perplexed by the names publishing companies give bibles. I shall limit myself only to the most popular Bibles in this observation. The explosion of modern Bible versions began with the “New” American “Standard” Bible (NASB) in 1971 and later the “New” International Version (NIV) in 1978, and it seems that after this, Bible publishers followed the trend of using the word “Standard” on their Bibles, and most Bibles cannot help but use the terms “new” or “standard” for their versions. The most popular Bibles are the English Standard Bible (ESV), the New American Standard Bible (NASB), the New Living Translation (NLT), the New King James Version (NKJV), the Legacy Standard Bible (LSB), Christian Standard Bible (CSB), New Revised Standard Version, updated edition (NRSVue) and the only one that seems to buck the trend, the Common English Bible (CEB).
My thesis is that the Bible market is filled with poorly named, even absurd, names for Bible versions, which are participation trophies.
“New” is a relative term. A new song is only new for a few weeks or months. A new car is not new for long; however, if it gets old and you sell it because it is old for you, and it becomes new for someone else, though it is old. The NIV was first published in 1978, but I don’t think anyone who bought a house in 1978 still calls his house new. The NIV had updates in 1984 and 2011, making the 1978 old, though retaining the name “new.” If you bought a house in 1984 or 2011, it is hardly new in 2025.
Using “Standard” in Bible titles began in 1901 with the American Standard Version and then the Revised Standard Version of 1952.
The NASB uses both New and Standard in its title, and it was new in 1971, and possibly 1972, but it is definitely not new in 2025; there have been updates along the way, like in 1995. The NASB also calls itself a “standard,” which is strange because a standard is a tool for measuring. The NASB, as it has aged, has never been the standard by which other versions were measured.
The word “New,” as an adjective leaves us scratching our heads. The NIV is a “new version,” says the title, and it once was, but it no longer is a new version. NASB makes us wonder what “new” is qualifying; is this a “new Bible,” or a “new Standard;” likely it is not for a “new America,” since NASBs are not handed out to recent citizens of the American Republic. Likely, NASB was a “new Bible” with two other qualifiers (American and Standard) crowding up the middle of the name.
The NIV and NASB, when put together, seem to be opposite sides of a coin, since one is “International” and one is “American.” Taken together, the NASB must be domestic, for North Americans, since central and south Americans speak Spanish and Portuguese, and the NIV must be for nations abroad, that is to say, outside of North America, yet the NIV seems to be marketed most to Americans, oddly enough. Maybe the NASB should be the NNASB, the New North American Standard Bible. If so, then America gets a Standard Bible, while the other nations get a Version of the Bible, which apparently is not standard, just a version of the standard. This would make sense, since the United States uses a different standard of measurement than the other nations, which use the metric system.
The United States often sees itself as the standard; note how the United States invented a sport, American Football, which is played by teams within the United States, and then whatever team wins the Super Bowl proclaims itself “world champions” in a sport that nobody plays outside the United States; talk about seeing yourselves as the standard!
The contemporary liberal overuse of the word “standard” is strange indeed. One cannot announce that he is the standard at the outset in any other place, besides Bible marketing; being thought of as the standard comes by testing over time. A boxer who announces before his first professional fight that he is the standard by which future fighters will be measured will rightly be laughed at, because he has proven nothing and he has announced everything; Mike Tyson and Floyd Mayweather could be considered standards in boxing, they are measuring rods, by which other boxers are compared. If such a boxer can show that he has staying power and ability to go undefeated for most of his career, then he might be a standard someday.
While we laugh when a bombastic athlete declares himself the standard at the beginning of his career, we do not laugh when an untested Bible that has recently been published declares itself the standard. Though we probably should laugh at this. If it would be the standard, time would tell, but not yet, and certainly not at publishing time.
The Bibles that call themselves “standard” periodically have updates, which shows that there is another standard to which they are still attaining. A standard does not often, if ever change, and if it does, it is not a standard; then something else becomes the standard.
As we look at how many Bible versions have the term standard in their titles, we wonder if anyone knows what a standard is anymore. If there is a standard, there is one, not five or 10. The word “standard” is a participation trophy, like the ones conservatives complain about children getting in sports, even though they have not won anything. You get a participation trophy for playing, not for winning. You get a real trophy when you win. The modern Bible market seems like the famous Oprah car giveaway to her audience: “You get a car, and you get a car, everybody gets a car.” The Bible publishers all say “our bible is the standard,” and the Bible purchasers say to each Bible version, “You are the standard, and you are the standard, every Bible is the standard!” If every Bible is a standard, then no Bible is the standard; just like, if everyone is brilliant, then nobody is brilliant; if everyone is special, then nobody is special; if everyone is a genius, then nobody is a genius.
The ESV has some things to commend (and I should confess that at one time or another, I have read and benefitted from the ESV and nearly all the Bibles that are on the market). However, the ESV is an evangelicalized RSV, but to call it evangelicalized implies that the RSV was not evangelical, which it was not. The ESV comes from a liberal Bible, that was made evangelical because it is easier “to make of a bad Bible, a mediocre one” than to make a completely new one. When one sees the ESV, one wonders if it might be the Evangelicalized Socinian Version, but instead it proclaims itself the English Standard Version. Open your ESV and you’ll see that the copyright was the National Council of Churches, a living embodiment of Socinianism, if there is one today. Thankfully, Crossway owns the copyright now, and they publish a lot of great books, though their bible version leaves a lot to be desired. Is it called the ESV because the ESV is standard English? It certainly isn’t standard English, as far as I have experienced. I have never met anyone who speaks like the ESV, and I thank the Triune God for that! The ESV is awkward, wooden, and clunky, though not nearly so much as the NASB. The ESV does not use standard English and it is certainly not the English Standard. If the English standard is mediocrity, then maybe it is the standard, but there are so many standards these days, who can really say! If Forest Gump had gone into the Bible publishing business instead of the shrimp business, he could have said “Standard is as standard does.” Whatever the case, time will tell if the ESV will become a standard, but 24 years is certainly too short for something to become a standard.
And now we have the LSB, which has taken audacious announcements to a new level, announcing that it is not only a standard, but a legacy as well. This “legacy” is announced at the outset. Imagine a man saying to his wife on their wedding day, “We have a legacy.” This would be absurd; they may hope to leave a legacy for their children or they may hope to have a legacy of love but they are not a legacy, and announcing that they have a legacy is foolish; if anything, listen to the grandfather pray at the wedding and you’ll know who has a time-tested legacy of prayer, handed down to the generations. Some might say “A legacy is an inheritance, and the LSB is an inheritance to hand down to the next generation.” This may have been the intent, but the trouble is, the LSB follows the cringy new trend of calling God’s name Yahweh, which is not standard, and we pray that the name Yahweh does not become a legacy or a standard. Yahweh is Gesenius’ name for God, and it has become popular to follow Gesenius, but it certainly was not a Protestant name for God. The “so called” LSB uses Yahweh as God’s name 5,903 times. Once upon a time, fringe cults like the House of Yahweh in Abilene, Texas and other judaizers thought they were on the cutting edge, saying Yahweh, and it was very rare to hear anyone orthodox say Yahweh, though Yahweh was used by scholars decades ago. Now, out of nowhere it seems, pastors have begun saying Yahweh, and if they are really pretentious, they say YAGH-way, with extra guttural emphasis on the H in Yah. It is all quite odd, really! Being a trend, it is not a legacy; legacies and trends are antithetical.
So, what are we to do? First of all, we must stop giving money to any professed standards, professed legacies, and anything that is professedly new, but is actually old. The Bible market has made the words new, standard, and legacy nearly meaningless.
It seems that Native American Indians had more wisdom than the Bible marketers; Native Americans waited to name their children because they wanted to see what attributes their children would take on before they named them. For Indians, words and names rightly had meaning, so, some tribes would have a naming ceremony for a child later in life, after he earned his name. The Bible market is saturated by Bibles which have not yet earned their names “legacy” and “standard” and many “new” bibles are not so new anymore. It would have been better to have called Bibles by their publisher names, calling them names like the Lockman Bible instead of the NIV, the Zondervan Bible instead of the NASB, and the Crossway Bible instead of the ESV, until these Bibles could have earned their names.
In this article, we have not spoken about concerns we have with Bibles based upon inferior manuscripts, like Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and the papyri. We have not spoken of concerns we have about Bibles which use ancient versions to correct the original Hebrew, like the so-called Septuagint, the Vulgate, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. We have those concerns, but those are for another day.
We commend the Authorized Version in English, along with the Authorized versions of other nations. We also commend the Geneva Bible as a glorious-received text Bible, with priceless notes. We also commend the New King James Version, in the places where it follows the received text; we do not commend it when it veers from the received texts of the Old and New Testaments, those texts which should be our standards. We also lament the NKJV’s loss of distinction between 2nd person singular (thou, thee, thy, thine) and second person plural pronouns (you, ye, your), which are essential, and which are still standard since both Greek and Hebrew make such distinctions.
Lastly, we note that most of the names of the modern versions are more accurately attributed to the authorized version, often called the King James Version. The King James version is the English Standard Version; though it is not new, we note that it is also the American Standard, as well as the most International Version that exists, since it has been the standard among English speaking Christians, internationally. The King James is the Common English Bible, since it was proposed at the Hampton Court Conference to replace both the Bishop’s Bible (preferred by the church of England) and the Geneva Bible (preferred by Puritans). The King James is the Legacy Standard Version, since it is the true standard, and it is a lasting legacy of over 400 years.
Whenever we run across the unearned diminutives of the modern Bibles, we should insert “so-called” before these three modern Bible buzzwords. That Bible is the English “so-called” Standard Version, the “so-called” Legacy Standard Bible and the “so-called” New “so called” International Version. We respectfully call for a moratorium on these words until they are earned, and maybe use of these words should be discontinued permanently.
Brett Mahlen (B.A. Colorado State University; M.Div. Westminster Theological Seminary; S.T.M. Trinity Anglican Seminary; D.Min. Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary) is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
