The English Bibles - From the Originals to the Various English Versions
In 1999, I published a public domain paper which represented about 4 years of casual research. It is available here with my complete bibliography in pdf format. The paper was written in order to evaluate various Bible versions and includes quite a lot of Bible history. - Enjoy!
 Features:
- The Original Writings - Tables, (2 pgs)
- The Identification of Manuscripts - (5 pgs)
- The History of Early English Translations - (3 pgs)
- The English Versions Compared - 18 Versions investigated, (7 pgs)
  DOWNLOAD "The English Bibles" (1999) - .pdf format.
Update: English Translations 12 Years Later: (Febuary 7, 2012)
Generally, to date, the only versions I'm fully confident in are the King James Version (KJV), American Standard Bible (ASV-1901), and the New American Standard Bible (NASB, NASB Update). The problems with other Bibles generally being non-literal translation, omitting TR-only passages, liberal or denominational bias, and gender-inclusive language. The ESV, HCSB, NET, NKJV, and KJ21 will be evaluated more extensively for the next version, but for now I continue a guarded confidence in those versions.
The New English Translation (NET) of Dallas Theological Seminary, which should have been incredible, turned out to be moderately gender-inclusive, which was a huge disappointment. The finished work is still worth a Bible student's attention due to the prolific translation notes of very specific techical nature.
The English Standard Version (ESV) and Holman (HCSB) Bibles - I have reviewed the ESV and HCSB Bibles only lightly, but am generally optimistic - the ESV being literal, and the Holman being "balanced" literal/equivalent, both reading pretty well so far, without specific evaluation.
Today's New International Version (TNIV), the revision to the NIV, is even worse than the original NIV, now going to a fully gender-inclusive edit of God's Word. I am not looking forward to investigating it further, but undoubtably will.
The Message (MSG) is a worse-than-paraphrase "idiomatic" translation and should not be considered.
There are also many English translations which I am either unfamilar with, or have not investigated.
During 2012, I plan to publish a revision to this document, including the later translations and fresh evaluations on all included versions.
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