In the 1880s the King James Version became the basis for the English Revised Version. The American counterpart was published in 1901 as the American Standard Version. A product of both British and American scholarship, the ASV has been highly regarded for its scholarship and accuracy. By the middle of the twentieth century, The Lockman Foundation, a nonprofit Christian corporation in La Habra, California, felt an urgency to preserve these and other lasting values of the ASV by incorporating recent discoveries of Hebrew and Greek textual sources and by rendering them into more current English, calling their translation the New American Standard Bible (NASB). The NASB represents a conservative, literal approach to translation. While this translation followed the principles used in the ASV, the NASB should be viewed as a new translation rather than merely an update of the ASV.
The Lockman Foundation completed an update of the NASB in 1995. More than twenty translators (conservative Bible scholars representing a variety of denominational backgrounds) spent nearly three years completing the project. The team carefully adhered to the principles of literal translation and made no attempt to interpret Scripture through translation. The result was a word-for-word translation that is both accurate and readable.
