The New International Version

The New International Version (NIV) is an English translation of the Christian Bible which is the most popular of the modern translations of the Bible made in the twentieth century.

Translation

The complete translation was first published in 1978 and revised in 1984. The translation work was done under the auspices of the International Bible Society and Zondervan Publishing House.

The translation took more than ten years and involved 100 scholars from the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. The range of theologians includes over 20 different Protestant denominations such as Baptists, Evangelicals, Methodists, and many more. It did not include non-Protestants.

Circulation

The translation has become the most popular modern English translation of the Bible, having sold 150 million copies worldwide. It is especially popular among American Evangelicals, though many Fundamentalists strongly oppose it and some claim it to be a heretical counterfeit. see King-James-Only Movement. It is considered by many Christians a good, modern supplement to more historic bible translations like the King James Version, or even as more accurate (since it draws from a wider range of source texts including the Dead Sea Scrolls). Some Christians favour more literal translations such as the New American Standard Bible, which makes less attempt at theological interpretation.]

Features

Evangelical Protestants received the Revised Standard Version, which first appeared in the whole Bible in 1952, with some trepidation. The RSV was criticized by conservative Christians for not using traditional Christian translations of certain texts regarding the virginity of Mary, and other Old Testament passages whose Christian interpretation referred them to Jesus. The New International Version project was begun to meet the perceived need of having an updated Bible in contemporary English but which preserved traditional Evangelical theology on these contested points. Unlike the RSV and New Revised Standard Version, the NIV is an explicitly Protestant translation; the deuterocanonical books were not included in the translation. Apart from these theological issues, the translation philosophies of the NIV were similar to the RSV, and the NIV, like the RSV, uses the critical Greek New Testament texts, rather than the Textus Receptus of the King James Bible.

Packaged versions of the NIV usually feature an introduction to the individual chapters as well as charts, maps, etc. Also, there are numerous study bibles available with extensive notes on the text and background information to make the Biblical stories more comprehensible. Among these are The NIV Study Bible and its Wesleyan revision, The Reflecting God Study Bible, as well as The Life Application Study Bible.

This article is licensed under the Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “The New International Version.”