How to read the diagram
Time runs left to right, and the arrow is the whole story. Two Bibles can sit one below the other and mean completely different things depending on which arrow joins them.
The diagram shows where the English Bibles actually come from — which were translated directly from the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, which inherited an older English text and were re-checked against the originals, and which were only edited or reworded without anybody going back to the ancient languages at all.
It is not a chart of every English Bible ever printed. It covers the ones that come up in conversation, the ones read at Mass or in church across the English-speaking world, the ones that matter for tracing the divine name, and the ones consulted directly in building it. It stops there deliberately; the point is to be readable.
Deliberately left off: Bibles that are study editions rather than translations (Scofield, Thompson Chain-Reference); the Jewish English Bibles (JPS 1917, NJPS 1985), which would change what the chart is about; and a long tail of minor or software-driven versions — God’s Word, the New Century Version, the Easy-to-Read Version, the Modern English Version, the Berean Standard Bible, The Passion Translation. Several of those sell well. None of them changes the shape of the tree.
Two kinds of region
Time runs left to right. The ancient sources are on the left edge, today’s Bibles on the right, and the chart is built to be panned rather than taken in at once.
The fans off the three brown junctions are everything translated afresh out of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. The long horizontal runs — Vulgate to Douay to the New American Bible, Tyndale to King James to the ASV to the RSV — are the inherited-English tradition and everything revised out of it.
What each arrow means
| Arrow | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Thick | Translated from the original-language texts. Somebody sat down with Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek and produced English. No English predecessor on the desk. | New World Translation, NIV, Jerusalem Bible |
| Solid | Revised against the originals. The previous English text was the starting draft; the committee checked it line by line against the Hebrew and Greek and changed what needed changing. | KJV → RV 1881 → ASV → RSV |
| Dotted | Adapted or edited only. No re-translation. Renderings changed for doctrinal or editorial reasons, archaisms dropped, books reordered. | RSV → RSV-CE → RSV-2CE |
| Circle head | Paraphrased. An existing English text freely reworded for readability, not translated. | ASV → The Living Bible |
| Grey, no head | Textual base, not descent. Which printed Greek text the committee worked from. Drawn without an arrowhead because nothing was inherited. | Westcott and Hort — RV 1881 |
| Gold dotted | Wording borrowed. Not descent at all — one translation’s English phrasing was taken up by another, across the Catholic/Protestant divide. | Rheims → KJV; KJV → Challoner |
The arrows pass down the English, not the meaning
Each revising committee sat with the previous stage’s English in front of them and a brief to check it against the Hebrew and Greek, changing what needed changing and leaving the rest standing. That is why whole verses of Tyndale survive word for word into the King James, and whole verses of the King James survive into the RSV three and a half centuries later.
It is not a chain of translations-of-translations. With three deliberate exceptions on this chart — the Wycliffite Bibles, the Douay-Rheims, and Knox in 1945, all translated out of the Latin Vulgate — no stage ever translated from the stage above it. Nobody rendered the KJV’s English into new English. Inherited English, re-checked each time against the original languages. That is what revision means in this tradition, and it is how a Bible can be both a link in a chain and a translation from the originals.
The marks
📖 marks the text that is proclaimed, not the Bible it came from. Where the two differ the marker goes on the text actually read from the ambo — which is why it sits on the CTS New Catholic Bible and not on the Jerusalem Bible it is made from.
🔍 marks a Bible that documents its own sources. Not study notes and not commentary — a footnote wherever the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek sources disagree, naming the manuscript or version each reading comes from, so the reader can weigh the evidence instead of taking the translator’s word for it. Only two nodes on this chart carry it, and they are twenty-one years and a whole tradition apart.
✦ marks a Bible that prints a form of the divine name rather than a title.
⚠️ marks something routinely misunderstood — usually a famous name that belongs to an edition nobody is actually holding.
Colour, and the brown junctions
Dark boxes are the ancient texts and manuscript families everything else is made from. Green boxes were consulted directly in building this chart rather than taken on report.
The brown junctions are not books. Each is a junction meaning “somebody sat down with the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek and produced English.” Nothing feeds into them, on purpose: they label a method, not a text anything descends from. Hanging one off the Masoretic Text, as an early draft did, both said something untrue — those translators used the Greek and the scrolls too — and dragged two arrows across the full width of the diagram.
There are three of them, one per era, and that is the only reason the chart is readable at this size. A single junction served eight Bibles; it now has to serve nineteen spanning 1862 to 2019, and one hexagon on the left edge would fire arrows clean across the page. Splitting it by century keeps every thick arrow one step long and puts each Bible in roughly its own time column. The three junctions say exactly the same thing — they are one idea drawn three times, not three different methods.
Two exceptions to watch, both in the same direction
The New Living Translation hangs off the Living Bible because that is its history, but it is a real translation from Hebrew and Greek, not a reworded paraphrase — the arrow tells you where it came from rather than what it is.
The Message is the mirror image: it hangs off a brown junction because Peterson worked from Hebrew and Greek, but what he produced is a paraphrase, and it reads like one.
The chart’s arrows track ancestry; on these two, ancestry and character point opposite ways.
Three more things worth noticing
A “version” is just a translation. Authorized Version, Revised Version, Revised Standard Version — the word carries no claim about manuscript families or method. Older English Bibles say Version, twentieth-century ones increasingly say Translation. The naming is fashion, not substance.
The foundation moved once, and it moved decisively. On the King James line, everything before 1881 rests on the Byzantine text; everything from the English Revised Version down rests on the Alexandrian codices, with the New King James the one deliberate holdout. The English kept flowing down the page while the Greek underneath it was swapped out. Two independent axes — and that single swap explains most of the verse-level differences people argue about.
A revision is not a modernisation. The New King James modernised the King James’s English without moving to the critical text; the English Revised Version moved to the critical text while keeping the King James’s English. Same tree, opposite decisions.