The New American Standard Bible began as a deliberate continuation rather than a wholly new project. The Lockman Foundation, a nonprofit based in La Habra, California, launched the work in 1959 to carry the American Standard Version of 1901 forward — keeping its reputation for literal, word-for-word fidelity to the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek while modernizing its dated English. The Foundation assembled a committee of scholars drawn from Christian colleges, seminaries and mostly conservative evangelical denominations, and the translation appeared in stages: the Gospel of John in 1960, the other Gospels in 1962, the complete New Testament in 1963, Psalms separately in 1968, and the whole Bible in 1971. That first complete edition worked from the third edition of Rudolf Kittel's Biblia Hebraica for the Old Testament, with the Dead Sea Scrolls consulted, and from the 23rd edition of Nestle and Aland's Novum Testamentum Graece for the New.
Revision continued for decades after that first printing. Minor wording changes followed in 1972, 1973 and 1975, then a more substantial revision in 1977 and a further limited one in 1992. In 1995 the Foundation issued the Updated Edition — NASB95, the text most people mean when they simply say “the NASB” — consulting the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and the 26th edition of Nestle-Aland. The current text is the 2020 update, portions of which had already begun appearing online in 2018: it moved the Old Testament textual base to the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and, for the books it covers, the newer Biblia Hebraica Quinta, consulting the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Targums and other ancient versions where they bear on a reading, while the New Testament now follows the 28th edition of Nestle-Aland supplemented by the Editio Critica Maior's fuller apparatus of Greek manuscript evidence. The translators' stated method held across every revision: render the original as literally as English allows, and where a strictly literal rendering would mislead or read unnaturally, choose the clearer idiom and footnote the more literal wording instead — a discipline regularly cited as making this one of the most literal of the widely used twentieth- and twenty-first-century English translations.
Despite its name and its declared debt to the American Standard Version, the New American Standard Bible is a fresh translation from the original languages rather than a line-by-line revision of it, and the corpus records no parent for it accordingly: open a lineage rung beneath an NASB verse and it goes straight to the original-language floor marked ≈, exactly as it does for the New International Version. The two share more than that shape — both are licensed rather than public domain, standing apart from the free-to-copy English editions on the same shelf, though an English interface opens on the New International Version by default, with the New American Standard Bible reached from its own card in the translation grid.