gdeering

It might not be news to some, but there is going to be a period of soul searching for the next NIV. Just noticed this at one of my other favorite haunts, The Huffington Post: NIV Revision

The top-selling Bible in North America will undergo its first revision in 25 years, modernizing the language in some sections and promising to reopen a contentious debate about changing gender terms in the sacred text. The New International Version, the Bible of choice for conservative evangelicals, will be revised to reflect changes in English usage and advances in Biblical scholarship, it was announced Tuesday. The revision is scheduled to be completed late next year and published in 2011.

I'd like to hear what people think should be up for consideration? Obviously besides just chucking the whole thing out.

Personally I'd love to see better translation of Hebrew in the OT, add "young girl" and remove "virgin" anyone?


Gregg

Sea

Semi-serious suggestion: start using "ya'll" as a second person plural pronoun.

This would increase the accuracy of the translation.

spin

Get rid of the doctrinal mistranslation of Gen 1:1. It should be:

In the beginning of god's creating the heavens and the earth...

(or: In the beginning when god created the heavens and the earth...)

The beginning is god saying "let there be light".

But then YEC buyers might have a heart attack... but then YECs don't read NIV. It's KJV or nothing, isn't it?


spin

dog-on

And with that, spin has completely laid waste to a huge part of Mormon theology.:notworthy:

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

Then the NIV would begin to catch up with the King James Bible in pronoun accuracy.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

Newfie

According to Reuters, the NIV is overseen by the Committee on Bible
Translation (CBT) which is made up of a group of international biblical scholars. The promise seems to be that English speakers from around the world would be better served by this new translation, not just North Americans. I can't help but feel that plenty of people will resist this change, and I wonder if some folks will want to preserve the old NIV. Could they do this under copyright law?

Doug Shaver

As I understand the law, copyright on the current version will be unaffected by the publication of any revisions.

motorhead

For starters, accepting the Documentary Hypothesis.

xaxxat

That would be sweet - especially if each source was color coded...

DCHindley

Gregg,

While I generally like the way their translation philosophy had balanced dynamic equivalence (translation tries to clearly convey the thoughts and ideas of the source text) with healthy respect for formal equivalence (translation tries to remain as close to the original text as possible, without adding the translators' ideas and thoughts into the translation), the choice of textual variants and especially footnotes are blatantly slanted towards the US conservative-evangelical POV.

Because I read the books of the bible to understand what they actually say, and not what I would like them to say or to use in worship, I personally like a literal (formal equivalence) translation, but the NASB (the most literal) and especially the KJV(AV) have archaic language that can get in the way of interpretation. The RSV & NRSV are supposed to be formal equivalence translations, but I can find numerous places where the meaning conveyed is clearly dynamic, and does not effectively convey the full meaning of the Greek.

But if you accept their translation style, which in itself is pretty good, the biggest thing I would like to see changed is the footnotes. They should reference a range of opinions about the historical situations and textual variants rather than just the ones approved by Calvinists.

DCH