For several decades the New International Version has been the most widely read modern English Bible. More than 450 million copies had been distributed by its publishers’ count by the early 2010s, and it has been the default Bible of a large part of the English-speaking evangelical world: in pews, in study Bibles, in youth groups and in Bible apps.

Its story says a good deal about how modern translations are made and argued over. The NIV was born out of evangelical dissatisfaction with the RSV, built by a standing international committee, revised several times, and caught up in one of the sharpest translation controversies of recent decades. This article traces that story and describes the NIV’s approach. Because the NIV is under copyright, it describes the wording rather than quoting it, except for a few words.

Why a new translation?

By the 1950s many evangelical Protestants in America were unhappy with the available Bibles. The King James Version was loved but increasingly hard to understand, and its Greek text was out of date. The Revised Standard Version (1952) was modern and scholarly, but many conservatives distrusted it, both because of its sponsor, the National Council of Churches, and because of renderings such as “young woman” in Isaiah 7:14 (see English translations since the King James). Several denominations had begun to discuss the need for a translation made by scholars who shared evangelical convictions about the Bible.

Two bodies took the lead: the Christian Reformed Church and the National Association of Evangelicals. In August 1965 they held a conference at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois. It agreed that a new translation should be the work of a broad group of evangelical scholars, and that a continuing committee of fifteen should be set up to oversee it. In 1967 the New York Bible Society, later the International Bible Society and now Biblica, agreed to sponsor the project and pay for it. The financial commitment nearly overwhelmed the society. The Christian Reformed minister Edwin H. Palmer became the project’s executive secretary in 1968.

The Committee on Bible Translation

The committee of fifteen became the Committee on Bible Translation (CBT), which still exists and still holds the right to revise the text. Its design was deliberate:

  • International. Members have come from the United States and from other English-speaking countries, including Britain and Canada, hence “International” in the name. The aim was an English that would serve readers in all those countries, not only Americans.
  • Interdenominational. Translators came from more than a dozen denominations, among them Anglicans, Baptists, Brethren, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians and Reformed churches. No single church could shape the text to its own doctrines.
  • Evangelical. Every translator was committed to the authority and trustworthiness of Scripture, as the NIV’s preface states.

The work was layered. Teams of scholars drafted individual books. Their drafts went to intermediate editorial committees, then to a general editorial committee, and finally to the CBT itself, which made the final decisions. In all, more than a hundred scholars took part. Stylists read the drafts for English, and samples were tested on readers of different ages and backgrounds. Since then the CBT has met regularly to review the text, and changes need a two-thirds majority of the committee. A fuller description of how such committees work is in How a modern translation is made.

1973, 1978 and 1984

The New Testament appeared in 1973 and the whole Bible in 1978, published in the United States by Zondervan and in Britain by Hodder & Stoughton. A minor revision followed in 1984, and for a quarter of a century “the NIV” usually meant the 1984 text. By the mid-1980s it was outselling the King James Version in the United States, a remarkable change after more than three centuries.

The NIV’s preface names accuracy as its first concern, together with clarity and literary quality. Its translators described their approach as a balance. They did not translate word for word, but they kept close to the structure of the original wherever natural English allowed, and turned to freer renderings when a literal one would be unclear or misleading (see Word for word or meaning for meaning?). The result sits roughly in the middle of the range between the NASB and the NLT. It also gave weight to public reading, aiming at English that could be read aloud in church.

For its base texts the NIV used the standard scholarly editions of the day: the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible, with occasional use of the Dead Sea Scrolls and ancient versions, and an eclectic Greek text close to the Nestle-Aland and United Bible Societies editions (see The Greek texts behind New Testaments).

An example: the order of creation

A well-known example shows both the NIV’s method and why it has critics. In Genesis 2:19, God forms the animals and brings them to the man. The King James Version reads:

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. (Genesis 2:19, KJV)

Read straightforwardly, this verse can seem to place the making of the animals after the making of the man, while Genesis 1 places the animals first. The NIV renders the verb as a pluperfect, “had formed,” so that the verse refers back to animals already made. Defenders note that the Hebrew verb form can sometimes carry that sense, and that the NIV is giving the sense it believes the author intended. Critics, including some scholars who otherwise admire the NIV, argue that this is harmonisation: smoothing over a tension in the text that readers should be allowed to see. The same debate has arisen at other points, and it reflects a real difference about what faithfulness requires.

The NIrV

In 1996 the International Bible Society and Zondervan published the New International Reader’s Version (NIrV), a simplified edition of the NIV written at about a third-grade reading level for children and for adults learning to read or learning English. Its New Testament appeared first, in 1994. Sentences are shorter and difficult words are explained or replaced. It shows how a single translation can be adapted for different readers while keeping the same basic interpretation, an idea Open Word Bible approaches in its own way.

The gender controversy

The NIV’s largest controversy concerned language about men and women. By the 1990s many English speakers no longer used “man” or “he” for people in general, and the CBT considered how to reflect that. In Britain, Hodder & Stoughton published an NIV Inclusive Language Edition (New Testament and Psalms 1995, full Bible 1996), which used terms such as “brothers and sisters” and “people” where the original refers to both sexes.

In March 1997 the American magazine World reported, under the headline “The Stealth Bible,” that a similar change was planned for the American NIV. The reaction was strong. In May 1997 a group of evangelical leaders met at the headquarters of Focus on the Family and produced the Colorado Springs Guidelines, which argued among other things that generic “he” and the use of “man” for the human race should be kept. The International Bible Society announced that it had abandoned plans to revise the NIV in this way.

The CBT nevertheless went on to produce a new revision under a new name: Today’s New International Version (TNIV), with a New Testament in 2002 and the whole Bible in 2005. It adopted gender-inclusive language for people more widely than the NIV, along with many other changes. In June 2002 the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution urging its agencies not to use it, and LifeWay, the denomination’s publisher, declined to sell it. Supporters, including members of the CBT such as Douglas Moo, argued that the committee was simply trying to translate accurately into the English people now spoke. Opponents argued that some changes altered meaning, for example by turning singular statements into plurals and so obscuring individual responsibility. The TNIV never sold widely.

The wider arguments are set out in Gender language in Bible translation.

The NIV of 2011

In 2009 Biblica, Zondervan and the CBT announced that the TNIV and the 1984 NIV would both be replaced by a single updated NIV. The new text appeared online at the end of 2010 and in print in 2011, and the 1984 edition was withdrawn from publication.

The 2011 NIV kept much of the TNIV’s inclusive language for people, though not all of it, and the CBT published a detailed account of its decisions, based in part on a study of contemporary English usage. Some changes concerned other questions entirely. For example, the 1984 NIV had often rendered the Greek sarx, “flesh,” as “sinful nature” in Paul’s letters, an interpretive rendering long criticised; the 2011 NIV more often returned to “flesh.”

Some renderings in the 2011 text drew particular attention:

  • In Romans 16:1, Phoebe is described as a “deacon” of the church at Cenchreae. The King James Version calls her “a servant of the church,” and the Greek word can mean either.
  • In 1 Timothy 2:12, the 2011 NIV has Paul not permitting a woman “to assume authority” over a man. Some complementarian scholars objected that this phrase could be read as limiting only authority taken wrongly; the CBT defended it as a fair rendering of a disputed Greek word.

In June 2011 the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution saying it could not recommend the 2011 NIV, and the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood published a critical review. Other evangelical scholars and many churches adopted it, and Zondervan reported that sales exceeded expectations. The CBT continues to meet and review the text.

Why did it become the best seller?

Several reasons are usually given:

  • Timing. It arrived when evangelical churches were growing and many were ready to move away from the King James Version but unwilling to adopt the RSV.
  • Trust. Its translators’ evangelical commitments, and its broad sponsorship, reassured churches that might otherwise have been suspicious of a modern version.
  • Readability. Its middle-of-the-road approach made it suitable both for reading aloud and for personal study.
  • Publishing. Zondervan built a large family of editions around it, including the best-selling NIV Study Bible (1985), and licensed it widely.

In recent years other translations, including the ESV, the NLT and the CSB, have competed strongly with it, and sales rankings vary by year and by who is counting.

Criticisms from both sides

The NIV has had critics from more than one direction.

Advocates of more literal translation, such as the literary scholar Leland Ryken, argued that the NIV too often interprets for the reader, removes ambiguities, and flattens images and repeated words that the original uses deliberately. Readers of the King James Version, including those who hold that only the KJV should be used, objected to its Greek text and to its omission or bracketing of verses found in the Received Text (see The King James Version and the New King James Version).

From the other side, some critical scholars argued that the NIV’s theological commitments shaped its renderings, as in the harmonising examples above, and that a translation made only by scholars who hold a particular view of Scripture is not neutral. Advocates of gender-inclusive language thought the NIV moved too slowly; opponents thought the 2011 edition went too far.

Defenders reply that every translation interprets, that the NIV’s decisions are made openly by a large committee and published, and that its balance has served readers of many kinds for half a century. All of these views have serious advocates.

The NIV and Open Word Bible

The NIV’s history shows how much depends on the choices a translation makes between literal and natural English, and how fiercely readers can disagree about them. Its stated balance of accuracy and readability is close to what Open Word Bible calls its Balanced level, but Open Word Bible does not choose a single point on the scale. It gives each sentence at three levels, Literal, Balanced and Readable, sharing one set of meaning decisions, and it shows the reasoning record for each sentence, so that a reader can see where a choice such as “had formed” was made and why (see Showing the work). It translates from the SBL Greek New Testament and the Westminster Leningrad Codex; its drafts are AI-assisted and stay unreviewed until named human reviewers approve them; it is released under CC0; and it uses the NIV and other translations only for comparison, never as the basis for its wording.

Sources

  • Barker, Kenneth L., ed. The Making of a Contemporary Translation: New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986.
  • Barker, Kenneth L. The Accuracy of the NIV. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996.
  • Committee on Bible Translation. “Preface.” The Holy Bible, New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978, 1984 and 2011.
  • Committee on Bible Translation. “Updating the New International Version of the Bible: Notes from the Committee on Bible Translation.” 2010.
  • Carson, D. A. The Inclusive-Language Debate: A Plea for Realism. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998.
  • Poythress, Vern S., and Wayne A. Grudem. The Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy: Muting the Masculinity of God’s Words. Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2000.
  • Ryken, Leland. The Word of God in English: Criteria for Excellence in Bible Translation. Wheaton: Crossway, 2002.
  • Scorgie, Glen G., Mark L. Strauss, and Steven M. Voth, eds. The Challenge of Bible Translation: Communicating God’s Word to the World. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003.
  • Bible quotations are from the King James Version (public domain).