Canter Bridge

Marketed in many shapes and colors, the TNIV is a twenty-first century update of the New International Version, which in the space of just three decades has become the English language Bible of choice if sales records are the criterion that matters.

The notion that the NIV is an ‘evangelical translation’ in a way that puts theology ahead of the very precise science of Bible translation was always rubbish. The fact is, the NIV was the product of a hard-to-beat translation team and multi-layered process that produced a Bible that speaks like many Americans do and throws up minimal barriers to non-American English speakers at the same time.

It’s an open question whether we needed a TNIV, but the driving force was doubtless the language of gender and the sense that the NIV spoke a somewhat masculine idiom when English had moved on to more gender-inclusive forms. This question provoked no small debate among evangelical Bible readers and their go-to scholars, on which I recommend D.A. Carson’s The Inclusive-Language Debate: a plea for realism.

TNIV continues to refer to the deity in masculine terms—as the underlying biblical languages arguably do—but is much more daring when it comes to human referents. The famous first line of Psalm 1—’Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked …’—loses its precise and important singularity in a bid to include both genders. The TNIV reads: ‘Blessed are those who do not walk in step with the wicked …’

Such a translation is indicative of the policy effected by the scholars involved with the TNIV project. That it is no systematic elimination of human gender can be glimpsed—inter alia—in Proverbs 4.1: ‘Listen, my sons, to a father’s instruction!’

Witness again 1 Corinthians 12.1. Where the NIV read ‘Now about spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be ignorant’, the TNIV suggests: ‘Now about the gifts of the Spirit, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed’.

With TNIV‘s publication, churchmen (and some churchwomen) rushed to protect their readers from such compromise with the changing spirit of the age. Others chose to debate the matter at a more philosophical level, reasoning that the fact that we readers of English have plenty of Bibles from which to choose is on balance probably a good thing.