When the full version of the New International Version of the Bible was published late in the 1970s, no one would have believed how quickly it has become the default version of masses of English-speaking Bible readers. It marked a kind of coming of age of the evangelical movement and was tribute to the maturity of the scholars that made such a project achievable. That such scholars often sported evangelical credentials and that the Bible itself was published by one of the Big Three evangelical publishers lead some to fear and criticize the version as ‘the evangelical Bible’.
It is nothing of the sort. Perhaps never in the history of Bible translation has the process enjoyed such coherence and credibility. The NIV is, if anything, a faithful rendition of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek biblical texts that lie behind it.
As a young Sunday School student, I can remember a teacher who was particularly given to pontification announcing to us that many Bibles are useful (his face said ‘tolerable’), but that ‘when it comes to memorization, we use the King James’.
Funny, I feel a little of that proprietory sentiment with regard to the NIV, now that its update – Today’s New International Version – has claimed the legacy while sacrificing so much of the language. In my more lucid moments, I wish the TNIV and all those readers for whom ‘he’ means a man and only a man all the best.
As for me, I still memorize Scripture in the late twentieth-century American idiom of my venerable and well-worn NIV.
Canter Bridge 
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