Why I Don’t Often Read the New International Version (NIV)

The NIV isn’t the worst translation you could read. It has accessible, modern language. It tries to eliminate at least some gendered language in places where gendered language has changed with the culture, makes no sense or becomes a stumbling block while reading. Myself, I almost always use the NRSV day-to-day, so I have my own biases. I like that the NIV is accessible. I frequently require greater accessibility while reading the Bible. Of course, I happen to prefer The Message when I need that accessibility, but my reasons for that would require a totally different blog post and there are plenty of Christians who don’t like The Message, either. It’s a good thing Jesus said things like, “love your neighbor,” and, “clothe the naked,” not, “translate my words perfectly.”

If you enjoy the NIV, I’m not here to persuade you otherwise. I simply want to caution you that there was an agenda at work in its translation. Unfortunately, that agenda seemed to overrun biblical scholarship in several places. In other words, there are parts of the NIV that vary from other translations dramatically to reinforce preconceived theological ideas. Rather than trying to get to a direct translation, the NIV prefers to insert words that emphasize a theological conviction over the generally accepted scholarly consensus. So, theology came first, translation second. That’s my problem with the NIV.

Background on the NIV

In 1965 a committee formed called, “The NIV Committee on Bible Translation (CBT)” made up of people who were associated with various evangelical churches in America. Their stated purpose was to create and revise the NIV as a brand-new translation in idiomatic twentieth-century English.

The committee formed a governing constitution with some interesting points, including:

(Article III, Section 3) Only those shall be eligible for membership on the Committee who endorse the purpose for which the Committee exists, and who are willing to subscribe to the following affirmation of faith: “The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written, and is therefore inerrant in the autographs”; or to the statements on Scripture in the Westminster Confession, the Belgic Confession, the New Hampshire Confession, or the creedal basis of the National Association of Evangelicals; or to some other comparable statement.

I love any evangelical passage that start with, “the Bible alone,” and then quickly shifts to requiring belief in extra-Biblical confessions and creeds. In addition to having what I consider to be outdated and unschooled views of scripture, the Westminster Confession also demands a particular Calvinist view of predestination and calls the Pope the Antichrist. Yuck. Thankfully the constitution only insisted on holding the same view in scripture, not some of the more distasteful parts of those old confessions (don’t marry a Roman Catholic but please do support your local monarchy). What if, like me, a translator believed Jesus is the Word of God, not the Bible and certainly not the Bible alone? Off the committee. Later in the constitution, it states the translators and editors involved must also subscribe to inerrancy as above. In their Translator’s Manual they add that “the translation shall reflect clearly the unity and harmony of the Spirit-inspired writings.”

I think this leads to many practical and theological differences between the NIV and better translations. It has a clear bias, three of which I’ll explore here:

1. The translators assumed that the Bible must be inerrant, so rather than present readers with interesting contradictions that I think are important in your Bible study, they change words to harmonize difficult or conflicting passages.
2. The translators enter their translation with a bias toward a certain flavor of evangelical theology, so they changed words to support that theology rather than letting the Bible speak for itself.
3. The translators did their best to demythologize the Bible in ways that probably help apologetical efforts. I am a devout Christian who has no embarrassment around the mythology that formed and took shape in our scripture, so to me this is a bit like clipping the butterfly’s wings.

The NIV Harmonizes Difficult or Conflicting Passages

The Bible can be inspired – and I believe God’s inspiration enters both the writer and the reader in unique and mystical ways – and still contradict itself. The Bible was written by many authors over a long period of time and those authors had different goals in their writing. It’s OK that these are not historical eye-witness narratives. The differences are beautiful and tell us something about our own faith journeys when we encounter inevitable detours.

Here’s an odd analogy for you. One of my favorite pizzas used to be a goat-cheese, fig and prosciutto on Peak 7 in Breckenridge. I don’t eat grains anymore and that is one of the pizzas I miss most. That pizza shouldn’t work – sweet, salty and pungent all together. But the combination works in a way that a pizza made entirely of fig would miserably fail. That’s the Bible. The contrasts make it work in our lives, give us insight into the ways our faith has evolved and models a way forward as life and culture continues to evolve. To take those contrasts out of the Bible is sacrilege, like substituting mozzarella for my goat cheese based on the preconceived idea, “that’s how pizzas are supposed to work.” The translators assumed, “this is how the Bible is supposed to work,” and so changed the Bible where it didn’t in fact seem to work that way. I guess they knew better.

A favorite example of mine is the word, “almah,” in Isaiah 7:14. This is where Matthew gets the idea that Mary was a virgin. Now, I’m not here to debate the Virgin Mary. I will likely take it up in another blog post where probably all but one of my regular readers will be surprised how orthodox I’ve ended up on the issue. I mean, I say the Apostles Creed almost daily, so I must be OK with the Virgin Mary — whatever “virgin,” might mean in our tradition. But Matthew was working with a Greek translation of Isaiah, the Septuagint, which rendered, “almah,” as, “virgin,” instead of the more accurate, “young woman.” And Christmas was changed forever.

I think the debate around this is a fascinating one and a window inside the minds of the first century church that we wouldn’t get through a sanitized version. But the NIV committee was out to sanitize everything. Afterall, in their belief system there was no way Matthew could make a mistake. Better to change the word in Isaiah from, “young woman,” to, “virgin.” I just find that baffling behavior from a group who considers the words of the Bible to be the very words of God.

I want to be clear that I think the NIV translators were trying their best. My goal here is not to disparage them. I only want to point out their bias. If you agree with their evangelical stance, this may be a great translation for you. You do you.

In an example of scholarship and humility, later NIV versions have tried to correct their bias in some verses. A famous example involves mustard seeds. If you haven’t heard, Jesus was fully human and fully God. To be fully human, that means you must be born into the time and culture and worldview you are born into. Jesus didn’t have some sort of magical all-knowing view of botany; he had the worldview of his friends and family. So, I am unbothered if Jesus says some inaccurate things about mustard seeds.

The NIV committee was, however, bothered by this. So, where Jesus says that the mustard seed is the smallest on the earth this embarrassed them because it is in fact not. So, they changed Jesus’ words to the “smallest seed you plant in the ground.” Thankfully they changed it again in 2005 to, “the smallest of all seeds on earth.” Are there ways to explain what Jesus meant here, that it’s a parable, not a science lesson? Sure. But it doesn’t bother me if Jesus didn’t know any other smaller seeds, he was a first-century Palestinian Jew not George Washington Carver. I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff they didn’t know about back then. It’s not a sin to be unwilfully inexperienced.

The NIV Inserts Evangelical Theology

The largely conservative N.T. Wright has criticized the NIV’s treatment of Paul’s ideas by inserting an evangelical point of view on the translation rather than letting Paul speak for himself. I won’t quote him at length here because while some of his work has been literally life changing to me, I am utterly frustrated by Wright’s intractability around LGTBQ+ dignity and so I’ve generally stopped recommending him outside of some limited cases. (Stay tuned I’ll take this up ever so slightly in the coming weeks). But Wright’s gist is that the NIV conflates incorrect ideas about God’s righteousness that imparts grace with how a believer is counted righteous by faith.

For example, in Romans 3:21-26, the NIV changes, “righteousness of God,” to, “righteousness from God.” It also changes “righteousness,” to, “justice,” later. Why should you care? Doesn’t that seem small? Nope. Evangelicals assume that you must receive righteousness from God through your own faith in Christ to be saved, whereas universalists like me believe you are already saved by God’s righteousness as a free gift that you can do nothing to receive through your own merit — even your own faith. These small changes make a huge difference.

As a universalist, I also take issue with several other places in the NIV that I believe are altered to support the concepts of eternal hellfire and insist on salvation through the believer’s belief. For example, Titus 2:11 is usually translated from the Greek literally as, “the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people.” The NIV changes this to, “…offers salvation to all people,” eliminating the universalist thrust of this verse. There’s a wide gap between bringing salvation to all and offering it to all, but only the latter fits the evangelical dogma. I don’t think God’s grace is a, “you must be present to win,” contest.

Also of interest is 1 Peter 4:6 an oft-debated verse that reads in the NRSV, “For this is the reason the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead.” Saving people postmortem doesn’t fit the evangelical worldview, so the NIV reads, “For this is the reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead.” See what they did there? The gospel was preached to the dead in the original, but in the NIV, it was preached to people who then died later.

The NIV seems to be anti-Catholic as well, not surprising since many of those involved claimed to adhere to the Westminster Confession. Roman Catholic scholars have pointed out that the places where the Bible uses the word, “tradition,” in a favorable way, the NIV has changed the word to, “teachings.” Otherwise, if traditions are being criticized, they use the word, “tradition.” The same word translated two ways, betraying their bias. It might even be intellectually dishonest, but I wasn’t in the room during the debate.

The NIV Demythologizes the Bible

The Bible has a healthy dose of mythology in it. I specifically mean, “healthy dose,” because mythology is good for humankind. Myth is transformative and connects us to our core psychology, our past histories, our cosmology, our relatedness and to take the myth out of the Bible is corrosive and destructive. Literalism defaces the beauty of myth.

Genesis 1:21 refers to, “Tanninim,” which were amazing ancient sea monsters and dragons that came from myths that predated what we read in the Bible. In that old Canaanite religion, these monsters represented Chaos and God had to battle Chaos to create. I think it’s a wonderful peek into how our ideas of God evolve in our very own faith and owe some foundational elements to other faiths. But again, the NIV committee found these types of things more embarrassing than beautiful and committed acts of vandalism on our sacred texts by rendering “Tanninim,” as, “creatures of the sea,” like they’re tuna, not God’s eternal opponents of chaos and evil. So much is lost here.

Isaiah 34:14 casually drops in references to the fantastical goat-demons running through Babylonian ruins. The NIV sanitizes this mythological reference to, “wild goats.”

They Meant Well

I don’t think the NIV translators were unfaithful or heretical. I’m not here to break you from your favorite translation if you love the NIV.

I do believe I have a calling in life to point out that taking the Bible literally only leads to the pride before our fall. I can say confidently that the purpose of the Bible is not to create a completely reliable history, but to show an amazing story of a chosen people, rejected, rechosen and eventually saved by the faith of Jesus in God’s righteousness. In papering over some of the messiness in the story’s telling, we’ve lost sight of the core message. This is part of the problem with modern American evangelical theology and the NIV supports that point of view.

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I would like to add that the day this article published, Olive Tree Reader selected Proverbs 15:1 as their verse of the day. I use the Olive Tree bible reader on my iPhone daily. Olive Tree is a member of the The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, so unsurprisingly they use the NIV for their daily verses. The ECPA’s first statement of faith reads, “We believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.”

I really enjoy the layouts Olive Tree uses for their daily verses and I’ve made some Apple Watch faces out of some of them. But while I enjoy their daily verses, I almost always switch to the NRSV to read them. Today, however, I preferred the NIV over the NRSV — just God reminding me to be humble. Here they are side by side with only a single word of difference. My understanding from people smarter than me on this topic is that the Hebrew word “rak,” could mean all kinds of things: soft, gentle, immature, tender or delicate. I think the NIV’s choice of, “gentle,” better captured the context.

Proverbs 15:1