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Comments on Which was the first English Bible translation to capitalize pronouns referring to deity?

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Which was the first English Bible translation to capitalize pronouns referring to deity?

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I grew up thinking that the practice of capitalizing pronouns referring to deity was pretty normal. Here's an example of it, from Matthew 4:11–12 (New American Standard), where "He" and "Him" refer to Jesus:

11 Then the devil left Him; and behold, angels came and began to serve Him. 12 Now when Jesus heard that John had been taken into custody, He withdrew into Galilee;

But recently in the preface of the ESV Bible, I found the following claim:

the practice of capitalizing deity pronouns in English Bible translations is a recent innovation, which began only in the mid-twentieth century

From what I can tell, the New American Standard was an early adopter of this approach, publishing the New Testament in 1963. But I can't tell if they were the first. Did any earlier published English Bible translations capitalize deity pronouns?

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General comments (3 comments)
General comments
Peter Cooper Jr.‭ wrote over 3 years ago · edited over 3 years ago

There are some earlier references on the Wikipedia article for Reverential capitalization, but it's not clear to me from that which was "first" or how it's distinguished from the general 17th/18th century practice of capitalizing a lot more nouns than we do today.

Nathaniel‭ wrote over 3 years ago

@Peter Interesting! Hadn't seen that article. It'd be tangentially interesting to know if any of the early "capitalize all nouns" translations also capitalized deity pronouns (and not other pronouns), but I'd say my focus here is on translations that generally follow modern capitalization conventions.

Peter Cooper Jr.‭ wrote over 3 years ago

I think your question actually has a lot to do with how "modern capitalization conventions" have changed over time in general. It might be worth asking about the history of capitalizing pronouns that refer to God on the Languages site too.