Wednesday 24 November 2010

New NIV (2011)

There is a new translation of the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible out and about, at least online. You can only get hold of the NIV (2011) in Cyberia, that is to say, by going to http://www.biblegateway.com/ and poking around.

One significant trouble with the Old New New International Version, the TNIV (Today's New International Version) was their attitude to gender-specific language to describe male and female. They ironed it out ('they' instead of 'he', 'humanity' instead of 'mankind', etc), sometimes with disastrous translational and theological consequences.

The Council For Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) were among the early objectors to these changes, and a lot of people followed them on it. So much so that the publishers of TNIV saw their sales figures significantly affected, and realized they had a problem. I blogged some of their response here.

That is a long introduction to explain why I'm linking the CBMW's initial response to the NIV (2011) here.

There have been significant improvements, but significant concerns remain.

As for me, I am continuing to appreciate the good though not perfect English Standard Version, not primarily because of the gender question which is at best a sidetrack, but more because it has restored conjunctions to the text. Hooray for 'and', 'but' and 'therefore', which add significantly to meaning and comprehension of all sorts of things, mainly sentences within paragraphs and paragraphs within documents.

I am reading the ESV at breakfast time to my 7 year old, 9 year old and 11 year old, and all three daughters seem able to cope and answer questions about what we're reading. In fact, eldest daughter managed to pick up from our genealogy reading in Luke 3 some important facts about history which she was able to use in an evangelistic conversation with her friends. But that is another post.

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