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 PrintableVersion The Holy Bible: Today's International VersionRepeated hesitationsTHE HOLY BIBLE: As they say on Classic FM, ‘If you like that, you’ll like this’. In other words, TNIV is pretty well the NIV dusted off a bit. The translators reckon they have made a 70% change, clarifying and updating, and some of the changes are welcome. It is sensible, for example, to have ‘Messiah’ instead of ‘Christ’, where the title is used with plainly messianic intent. On the other hand, to evaporate ‘saints’ into ‘God’s people’ (e.g. Romans 8.27) is a serious loss. Does it help to have ‘noon’ instead of ‘the sixth hour’ in Mark 15.33 — or indeed, is this not properly footnote material? ‘Gender inclusiveness’, or as the translators prefer, ‘gender accuracy’, usually looms largest when we think of TNIV — though they say that 70% of the changes are not related to the gender question. Many (like me) will consider it plain silly that today’s ‘correctness’ requires ‘brothers and sisters’ rather than simply the ‘brothers’ of the text (e.g. Hebrews 2.17), or that ‘sons’ (Matthew 5.9) must be generalised into ‘children’, or that, in Romans 3.28, a ‘person’ is justified by faith. It is more serious, however, when ‘fathers’ — against the sense of the passage — becomes ‘parents’ in Hebrews 12.7, and ‘men’ in Acts 4.4 is represented as ‘believers’. True it is that the church of Jesus is, as the Book of Common Prayer said, ‘the blessed company of all believing people’, but ‘believers’ is not what the text says at that point, nor can we lightly acquiesce when the important individualism of ‘man of God’ (2 Timothy 3.17) disappears into ‘all God’s people’. Or when, in Revelation 3.20, to avoid the masculine but essentially singular ‘him’, we are given the grammatically dubious and actually inaccurate ‘them’. In 1 Timothy 2.5 ‘himself human’ lacks the valuable emotional quality of ‘the man Christ Jesus’. Most of one’s hesitations about TNIV, however, are simply replicated from NIV. Both trespass too readily from the task of translating into that of interpreting — as when the great truth of ‘propitiation’ becomes the imprecise ‘sacrifice of atonement’ (Romans 3.25; 1 John 2.2). Too many unnecessary concessions are made to the supposed need to be ‘modern’. Do you want to exchange ‘in the bosom of the Father’ for either (NIV) ‘at the Father’s side’, or (TNIV) ‘in the closest relationship with the Father’? The significant word ‘behold’ has been simply removed — often without discernible trace; the hugely important word ‘for’ (‘because’) is notable for its absence. The anachronistic rendering ‘Jews’ (instead of ‘Judeans’) remains in the Old Testament. When the great Revised Version New Testament appeared in 1881, Spurgeon is said to have appraised it as ‘strong in Greek, weak in English’ — in fact, exactly what we need for Bible study — a version that brings English readers as close as possible to the original God-chosen languages. By this test, NIV/ TNIV seriously fail. In the ‘covenant’ verse, Isaiah 59.21, the theologically technical word ‘seed’ comes three times in the Hebrew, but only twice in NIV and TNIV (a reductionist principle of translating which prevails throughout) and is translated differently each time! How can anyone self-limited to the NIV tell, then, that it is there to begin with? And what’s wrong with the straightforward translation ‘seed’ anyway? Those who opt for NIV should seriously consider only to use it for study purposes with RV alongside. Alec Motyer, © Evangelicals Now - February 2006 |
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