The Holy Scriptures 

Today Red Clay uses the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (published in the 1980s). This translation is under copyright, and the full text has not been released for use on the Web. The immediately-previous version of this family of translations is available on-line. This is the Revised Standard Version (Old Testament published in 1952, New Testament published in 1946). Specify and Read a Chapter of the Revised Standard Version Search for Words, Phrase, or Passage, and Read the Full Passage: Several publishers allow their recent versions to be searched and limited portions posted or downloaded from the Web. The following search form comes from a site that will search the full text of many versions of the Bible in many languages and will display short sections of text from them. When searching you may have to try several similar words, since the form searches for the words in the New International Version, where the words used may not be the same as the words you remember from the Bible that you normally use. You may specify words: camel, needle, a phrase (you must include the quotation marks): "enter the kingdom", or a passage (verse, written as shown): Mark 10:25. Once you get the results page you may switch to search other versions of the Bible -- either in English (such as the New King James Version) or in another languages (such as Espagñol or Deutsch). Lookup a word or passage in the Bible Include this form on your page

Historic Bibles Below are are links to several translations of the Bible that have been widely used and that may be viewed in full online at no charge. They were placed on the Web by the University of Michigan's Humanities Text Initiative 405 AD (anno Domini = in the year of our Lord) or 405 CE (Christian era) -- The Vulgate (Popular) Bible was written in Latin by St. Jerome. He combined earlier Hebrew, Greek, and Latin versions of the Scriptures. For centuries this was the only version authorized by the Roman Catholic Church, but the only way to distribute the book was through hand-copying, which introduced errors that were often carried over into successive copies. mid-1400s AD -- Gutenberg developed equipment that facilitated the publication of multi-page books, allowing information to be duplicated without error and distributed to many more people than was previously possible. One of the books he printed was the Bible. The scriptures could now be read by many more scholars (who had studied Latin) and the guidance of scripture compared with the pronouncements and actions of church officials. 1517 AD -- Martin Luther sparked the Protestant Revolution with his views that the scriptures were the only reliable revelation of God's will and that the pope and church councils might be fallible. He translated the New Testament from the Latin of the Vulgate Bible into German and published it in 1522. He then translated the Old Testament and published this in 1534. The Martin Luther Bible (auf Deutsch = in German) 1535 AD -- William Tyndale -- an Englishman living in Germany in the early 1500s -- translated much of Martin Luther's Bible from German into English (also consulting the Vulgate version). Miles Coverdale compiled Tyndale's work to make the first complete Bible in English and printed it in Germany. 1582 AD -- English Catholics living as refugees in France prepared the first English translation of the Vulgate Bible. The Douay-Rheims Bible (New Testament only) 1604 AD -- King James I of England appointed a commmittee of scholars to revise earlier English (Protestant) versions. Published in 1611, this was the dominant English version of the Bible for over 200 years. The King James Bible 1946, 1952 AD -- The National Council of Churches in the U.S.A. was concerned because scholars had found a number of errors in the translations from Greek and Latin on which earlier English translations were based, and yet no generally acceptable version had been produced based on the more accurate translations. They sponsored a committee of scholars that published a new version of the New Testament in 1946 and a new version of the Old Testament in 1952. The Revised Standard Version