Improvements in the NIV Bible between 1984 and 2011 – Part 1

It’s important for people to be able to read and hear the Bible in their own language.

How the Bible came to us is described in the blog, Can we trust our Bibles. The steps in the process are:

• God-breathed: The original text was “God-breathed” via the prophets and apostles
• Preservation: Faithful copies of the original text have been preserved
• Scholarship: Textural scholars have reconstructed the original text
• Translation: The reconstructed text has been translated into various languages

The two most recent translations of the NIV Bible were done in 1984 and 2011. The process of translation involves transferring the message from a source language to a receptor language. In the case of the NIV2011 the source languages are Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament) and the receptor language is everyday English. New translations are needed from time to time because all languages are constantly changing.

This evaluation of the NIV 2011 Bible looks at:

• Part 1 A statement by the committee that did the translation
• Part 2 A statement by an independent Bible scholar
• Part 3 A statement by a group that is critical of the NIV 2011

Assessment of statement by the committee that did the translation

A summary of the changes made in the 2011 update of the NIV Bible are available from the committee that did the translation.

The update reflects advances in biblical scholarship and changes in the usage of the English language between 1984 and 2011. Some examples of these are given below (italics added to highlight the changes). About 95% of the text is unchanged between 1984 and 2011.

Changes in English usage

Advances in scholarship

Improved clarity

Improved accuracy in gender language

About 25% of the changes related to gender. The Collins Bank of English was used to determine current usage of gender language. Some of the guidelines used were:

• ‟Ancestors” usually replaced ‟forefathers”.
• When it was clear that a passage addressed both men and women, ‟brothers and sisters” usually replaced “brothers” (Greek “adelphoi”). In this sense, the NIV 2011 is more gender accurate than the NIV 1984.
• When the Greek word “anēr” (‟man” or ‟person”) refers to both men and women, this is made explicit.
  •  A variety of words were used to replace words that referred to both men and women. For example: ‟people”, ‟humans”, ‟human beings”, ‟humanity”, ‟human race”,  ‟mankind”, and ‟man” (which has been retained for some memorial phrases, such as ‟The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”, Mark 2:27). Here is an example of some of these changes.

Examples of texts that now have ‟mankind” where they didn’t before include:

• ‟Let us make mankind in our image” (Genesis 1:26a);
• ‟Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12); and
• ‟For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5).

Some other examples are given below (italics added).

Other improvements

Some other improvements include:

• ‟Saints” often becomes ‟God’s people,” ‟the Lord’s people,” ‟the Lord’s holy people” and the like.
• In the Gospels and Acts, when associated with the coming deliverer of the Jews, ‟Christ” has often been changed to ‟Messiah.”
• In the New Testament, ‟spirit” has been capitalised whenever a reference to the Holy Spirit made good sense in a given context.
  • Most occurrences of ‟sinful nature” have become ‟flesh”. Especially in Paul’s letters, “sarx” can mean either part or all of the human body or the human being under the power of sin. In an effort to capture this latter sense of the word, the NIV 1984 often rendered sarx as ‟sinful nature.” But this expression can mislead readers into thinking the human person is made up of various compartments, one of which is sarx, whereas the biblical writers’ point is that humans can choose to yield themselves to a variety of influences or powers, one of which is the sin-producing sarx. The updated NIV uses ‟flesh” as the translation in many places where it is important for readers to decide for themselves from the context whether one or both of these uses of sarx is present.

Some well-known texts that have been updated are given below.

Conclusions

It is clear that most of the changes mentioned above are improvements to the accuracy and understandability of the NIV Bible.  As I am not qualified to comment on some aspects of the linguistic changes, these have been omitted above.

With regard to the word “mankind”, I prefer to use the word “humanity”. Other changes that may take a while to get used to are “the flesh” (from “the sinful nature”), “impure spirits” (from “evil spirits”) and “forbearance” (from “patience”). I need to investigate these further.

As the changes to 1 Corinthians 11:10 and 1 Timothy 3:11 move the verses closer to the Greek text, they are an improvement.

The change to Romans 16:1-2 was based on current scholarship, although I suspect that whether Phoebe was a deacon in the local church will be debated by some. On the other hand they would probably accept a woman as the coordinator of a children’s ministry at church, which could be deemed to be the role of a deacon (Acts 6:1-6; 1 Tim. 3:8-13).

The change to 1 Timothy 2:12 has some ambiguity, but this may be appropriate as there is uncertainty in the meaning of the rare Greek word “authentein”.

On the whole, this assessment of the statement by the committee that did the translation indicates that the NIV 2011 is an improvement on the NIV 1984.

Written January 2013

See the next article in this series:
– Improvements in the NIV Bible between 1984 and 2011 – Part 2