Alan Dale Gross
Active Member
Mr. Kevin McGrane is a contributor to The Bible League Trust's volume “It is Written.”
This is an excerpt from his Testimony at A Testimony | Bible League Trust
"From Darkness to Light"
"I was given a New International Version Bible as a gift that day, which I read avidly, and that same week I ventured into a Christian bookshop in Southampton. Here was a whole new world. The Lord, there and then, gave me a love of Reformed truth, and I was delighted to come away that day with Hodge on The Westminster Confession of Faith, Cunningham on The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation, Berkhof’s Systematic Theology, and a Greek New Testament (I had spent four years at a Jesuit school learning Greek). Also that week I bought Bainton’s biography of Luther, Here I Stand, and translations of Luther’s famous treatises of 1520: To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and On the Freedom of a Christian.
"When I was next visiting the parental home in London, the Romanist parish priest was predictably horrified to find me reading Luther’s treatises, yet the initial reaction of my parents to my testifying of the grace of God towards me was actually somewhat favorable: to be a Christian was surely better than to be an atheist, was it not? But once it began to dawn that this Christianity was decidedly Protestant and Calvinist, and that I wanted them to hear and believe the gospel, then a certain amount of antagonism crept in, as well as disbelief: my father quite genuinely enquired whether there were as many as twenty persons in the world who could possibly believe such things. Sadly, my father never left the Roman fold; but many years after his death my mother did so and worshipped with my family.
"Unsatisfactory"
"I very quickly realized that the NIV was a most unsatisfactory translation of the Greek New Testament text I had recently purchased (United Bible Societies Third Edition, same text as the Nestle-Aland 26th edition). I was continually finding that the NIV took unacceptable liberties in translation, and that any alleged ease of understanding came at the price of accuracy and faithfulness to God’s Word. One could hardly embrace the doctrine of justification by faith alone, as I had done, and tolerate Romans 4:3, 5, 9 and 22 in the NIV, which states that a believer’s faith is credited to him “asrighteousness.” This suggests that faith is the ground rather than the instrument of justification, though the Greek preposition is quite unable to bear such a sense. The English Standard Version would later propagate the same translation and theological error.
"I also found that the NIV frequently renders passives as actives and switches subjects and objects, e.g. 1 John 4:9, “This is how God showed his love among us.” It makes unwarranted interpolations that change the sense, e.g. John 12:44: “When a man believes in me, he does not believe in me only.” And it removes words and sometimes whole phrases, e.g. where Jesus, Philip and Peter opened their mouths to speak (Matthew 5:2 and Acts 8:35 and 10:34), the NIV merely records that they “began” to speak – yet, inconsistently, retaining the expression in Ephesians 6:19 where Paul sought prayer for when he would open his mouth to preach the gospel. None of the aforementioned examples are matters of textual variation: they are liberties in translation.
"A few weeks later I switched to the Revised Version 1885, because I saw it as the most accurate translation of the Greek text I then owned — which a year or so later I came to realize was itself seriously defective. Decades later I would spend considerable research on the Codex Sinaiticus, confirming that it is a corrupt and hopeless witness to the inspired original. It beggars belief how it could be so tendentiously described as among “the most reliable early manuscripts” (NIV). Once I came to know and understand the arguments for the divine preservation of Scripture, I was irresistibly drawn to use the Authorized Version as being the finest English translation of the soundest text, which remains my persuasion and practice (wherever I can exercise the choice) more than 40 years on."
This is an excerpt from his Testimony at A Testimony | Bible League Trust
"From Darkness to Light"
"I was given a New International Version Bible as a gift that day, which I read avidly, and that same week I ventured into a Christian bookshop in Southampton. Here was a whole new world. The Lord, there and then, gave me a love of Reformed truth, and I was delighted to come away that day with Hodge on The Westminster Confession of Faith, Cunningham on The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation, Berkhof’s Systematic Theology, and a Greek New Testament (I had spent four years at a Jesuit school learning Greek). Also that week I bought Bainton’s biography of Luther, Here I Stand, and translations of Luther’s famous treatises of 1520: To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and On the Freedom of a Christian.
"When I was next visiting the parental home in London, the Romanist parish priest was predictably horrified to find me reading Luther’s treatises, yet the initial reaction of my parents to my testifying of the grace of God towards me was actually somewhat favorable: to be a Christian was surely better than to be an atheist, was it not? But once it began to dawn that this Christianity was decidedly Protestant and Calvinist, and that I wanted them to hear and believe the gospel, then a certain amount of antagonism crept in, as well as disbelief: my father quite genuinely enquired whether there were as many as twenty persons in the world who could possibly believe such things. Sadly, my father never left the Roman fold; but many years after his death my mother did so and worshipped with my family.
"Unsatisfactory"
"I very quickly realized that the NIV was a most unsatisfactory translation of the Greek New Testament text I had recently purchased (United Bible Societies Third Edition, same text as the Nestle-Aland 26th edition). I was continually finding that the NIV took unacceptable liberties in translation, and that any alleged ease of understanding came at the price of accuracy and faithfulness to God’s Word. One could hardly embrace the doctrine of justification by faith alone, as I had done, and tolerate Romans 4:3, 5, 9 and 22 in the NIV, which states that a believer’s faith is credited to him “asrighteousness.” This suggests that faith is the ground rather than the instrument of justification, though the Greek preposition is quite unable to bear such a sense. The English Standard Version would later propagate the same translation and theological error.
"I also found that the NIV frequently renders passives as actives and switches subjects and objects, e.g. 1 John 4:9, “This is how God showed his love among us.” It makes unwarranted interpolations that change the sense, e.g. John 12:44: “When a man believes in me, he does not believe in me only.” And it removes words and sometimes whole phrases, e.g. where Jesus, Philip and Peter opened their mouths to speak (Matthew 5:2 and Acts 8:35 and 10:34), the NIV merely records that they “began” to speak – yet, inconsistently, retaining the expression in Ephesians 6:19 where Paul sought prayer for when he would open his mouth to preach the gospel. None of the aforementioned examples are matters of textual variation: they are liberties in translation.
"A few weeks later I switched to the Revised Version 1885, because I saw it as the most accurate translation of the Greek text I then owned — which a year or so later I came to realize was itself seriously defective. Decades later I would spend considerable research on the Codex Sinaiticus, confirming that it is a corrupt and hopeless witness to the inspired original. It beggars belief how it could be so tendentiously described as among “the most reliable early manuscripts” (NIV). Once I came to know and understand the arguments for the divine preservation of Scripture, I was irresistibly drawn to use the Authorized Version as being the finest English translation of the soundest text, which remains my persuasion and practice (wherever I can exercise the choice) more than 40 years on."
