Today’s NIV

Yesterday after class a couple students came up and said that at their church they’d been told to get rid of their TNIVs because the translation gets rid of the male language for God. That is awkward because I’ve talked about the improvements made in the TNIV.

(By the way, I seriously doubt that they heard this from their minister. I’m guessing it was from a class.)

Let me be clear: the TNIV does NOT get rid of the male language for God.

It does, however, make some changes (just one of many areas where improvements are made over the older NIV) that reflect differences in the way Greek and English deal with gender.

For example, I have one brother and two sisters. In Spanish I could say I have three hermanos. Even though “hermano” is the word for brother, in the plural it can include brothers and sisters. But even though in Spanish I could say I have three hermanos, I wouldn’t in English say I have three brothers.

Similarly, when Paul writes to the “brothers” in a church, he isn’t just addressing the males. So in Today’s NIV it comes out as “brothers and sisters” (unless, of course, the context suggests a male audience).

Here’s what D. A. Carson, who’s known as a fairly conservative Evangelical scholar, has said about the TNIV: “The TNIV is more accurate than its remarkable predecessor, the much-loved NIV, while retaining all the readability of the latter. It is a version I can use with confidence, whether I am speaking at a university mission, or in a Bible conference anywhere in the English-speaking world. I am deeply impressed by the godliness, linguistic competence, cultural awareness, and sheer fidelity to Scripture displayed by the translators. Thirty or forty years from now, I suspect, most evangelicals will have accepted the TNIV as a ‘standard’ translation, and will wonder what all the fuss was about in their parents’ generation—in the same way that those of us with long memories marvel at all the fuss over the abandonment of ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ several decades ago.”

My preaching hero John Stott has said: “It has never been easy to distinguish between a ‘translation’ and a ‘paraphrase’. Translations tend to go for contemporary scholarship at the expense of contemporary language, whereas paraphrases tend to sacrifice accuracy for relevance. Today’s New International Version is highly successful in combining both scholarly accuracy and linguistic relevance.”

Despite what a few have said, the TNIV isn’t an attempt to create some gender neutral society. It’s an attempt by people who love scripture to translate scripture accurately in this generation. Spend a little time at their website, and you’ll get a feel for the devotion the translators had to this communicating God’s message. If you want to check out more about their decisions of how to handle language related to gender, there’s a great explanation here. As he explains, one day we’ll realize that this was a tempest in a teapot!