The Revised Version is the one revision of the King James Version that England’s church actually commissioned. The Convocation of Canterbury resolved on it in 1870 and appointed two companies, one for each Testament, drawing in more than fifty British scholars from several denominations — not only Anglicans, which was itself new and was argued about. American scholars were invited to take part by correspondence, and did. The instruction was conservative: alter the Authorised Version only where the original languages, faithfully rendered, required it. The New Testament came out in 1881, the Old Testament in 1885, and the Apocrypha, worked on last, in 1894.
The conservative instruction did not stop the New Testament company from making the most consequential decision in the book. They did not work from the Textus Receptus. Westcott and Hort sat on that company and put their own Greek text before it in proof as the work went on; what the revisers settled on was their own eclectic text rather than Westcott and Hort’s exactly, but it moved decisively toward the older uncial manuscripts. Set this edition beside the King James Version in two columns and the shift is visible at once. At 1 John 5:7 the King James column reads “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one”, and this one reads “And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is the truth”.
What the British revisers did not change is the thing the Americans most wanted changed. At Psalm 23:1 this edition still prints “The LORD is my shepherd”, exactly as the King James Version does; the American Standard Version above it prints “Jehovah is my shepherd”. The name appears here only where the King James Version had itself printed it — at Exodus 6:3 both read “by my name JEHOVAH” — and carrying it through the whole Old Testament was an American preference, consigned to the appendix under the fourteen-year agreement and released into the text only in 1901. Reading the two columns together is the shortest way to see what that agreement actually held back. A second difference shows in the shape of the sentences rather than their wording: the revisers broke with verse-per-line typography and set prose in paragraphs, and the footprint survives here in verses that begin in lower case because they continue a sentence — “and I appeared unto Abraham” at Exodus 6:3, where the King James column begins “And I appeared”.
The card for this edition leaves the year blank, and that is the honest answer rather than a gap. The Revised Version was not published once but three times, and the text here is the eighty-book one: sixty-six books plus the fourteen of the Apocrypha, 36,873 verses in all, which means it carries material that did not exist in print before 1894. The corpus record stamps it 1885, the year the Old Testament completed the Bible proper, and that is the year the lineage rung chip shows. Which printing the text descends from is not recorded — the same gap the corpus leaves open for the King James Version and for the Finnish Biblia of 1776. Note also that no interface opens on this edition; an English interface opens on the New International Version, and this is one you switch to.