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A new bible translation makes a break with its predecessor. It uses plurals to avoid man and brother where the text is not gender-specific. It changes Jews to Jewish leaders in parts of John's gospel. But when the 1996 New Living Translation made these adjustments, hardly any evangelicals raised a fuss. In fact, they rushed to bookstores: the NLT now ranks fourth in Bible translation sales. The King James and New King James versions outstrip it, and the New International Version (NIV) sits atop the chart.

Today's New International Version, an independent update of the NIV (not a revision—the NIV will remain available), has not met with as much enthusiasm. "No one is authorized to treat the Bible like Silly Putty," said Southern Baptist leader William Merrell. People who objected to the British inclusive-language NIV in 1997 now declare that the changes in the TNIV "violate the Word of God."

Why so much anger against the TNIV? In part, we attribute it to the special place the NIV holds in the evangelical world. It was created, in fact, to be the premier evangelical Bible. Though many evangelicals applauded the Revised Standard Version, many others criticized it as theologically liberal. As Peter J. Thuesen wrote in his book In Discordance With the Scriptures (1999), "The NIV finally offered evangelicals an ideologically safe alternative to the RSV, despite NIV committee members' occasional denials that their translation was specifically 'evangelical' rather than simply faithful to the originals."

Actually, being faithful to the originals was crucially important to the NIV's translators precisely because of their evangelical commitment to Scripture. All involved in the project had to agree that the Bible was the Word of God and inerrant in the original manuscripts. The NIV was created not only as an evangelical response to the RSV, but also as an evangelistic superseding of the King James Version. "Unless Christian families and churches use the Scriptures in modern English form, more and more of our young people are going to be strangers to the Gospel," said Burton L. Goddard, one of the main NIV translators.

These two driving forces behind the original NIV—evangelically driven accuracy and evangelistically driven clarity—remain behind the TNIV. "There is a growing need to reach today's generation with language they can understand and relate to," says the translation's Web site. "As English language usage changes, the Scriptures must be presented with unwavering accuracy in a way that clearly and accurately communicates in today's language."

Since its publication in 1978, the NIV has largely become the new "authorized version" for conservative Protestants, many of whom joke that the acronym stands for Nearly Infallible Version. (When the NIV was released, ct recommended that "no version should be the 'standard.'" If the NIV had not become an evangelical standard, this controversy might not be nearly so fierce.)

The TNIV's opponents claim the translators have been driven by a political agenda. But the translators are neither homogeneous feminists nor ideologues.

"Most (but not all) of the committee that translated this volume are not egalitarian (i.e., they do not believe women can do everything in ministry or can occupy every office)," says Dallas Theological Seminary New Testament professor Darrell Bock.

Translators make an important distinction between "dynamic/functional equivalence" (i.e., thought-for-thought) and "formal equivalence" (word-for-word) translations. Bock argues for another distinction—between gender-sensitive translations made for ideological reasons (to counteract perceived patriarchalism in the original text) and those made solely to communicate the meaning of the original text ("translational" reasons). The TNIV's translators have been forthright in their approaches: they lean toward dynamic/functional equivalence and translational readings.

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April 1 2002, Vol. 46, No. 4