Originally posted by ScottEmerson:
Yep - you guessed it. the TNIV New Testament. It was $4.99 at the local bookstore, so I HAD to pick it up. I want to read it for myself before making a judgement on it. It is pretty cool to read, "Brothers and sisters," considering I'm a moderate kinda guy. I'll let you know if I find anything sketchy.
Well, this is my second reply attempt. After writing for 15 minutes, some kind of glitch in the board software erased my post before I could submit it!
I'm starting over...
I got my copy a few weeks ahead of the official release date, through Amazon. No problems so far. In fact, I had had only two significant problems with the NIV: the extreme paraphrase/mistranslation in the margin of the first part of 1 Cor. 11, and the mistranslation of
porneia in Matt. 5:32 and 19:9 (such a mistranslation would ordinarily be but an annoyance, but there it leads to an entirely different conclusion than the Lord's point relating to the Hebrew betrothal custom). The TNIV fixes the first problem, making it a more usable translation.
I read a review of the TNIV by Blomberg (of Denver Seminary) that provides much interesting information. First, the TNIV, as many know, is essentially an American edition of the NIVI. The NIVI was created under pressure from the British publisher, which was losing market share to the NRSV, to which the public was responding very favorably because of its gender accuracy.
The new rendering of "the Christ" as "the Messiah" will not only sound better to Jews being evangelized, but helps in a small way to avoid the liberal idea of "the Christ Principle." I'll miss the vocative "O" but changing "saints" to other terms like "believers" will mislead only a few doing word studies (who for that purpose should be using the NASB anyway) instead of misleading a far greater number of readers holding more of the Catholic concept when they see the word "saints." Except for the matter of gender accuracy, Blomberg notes that changes in wording from the NIV to the TNIV go in a more literal direction three times as often as the other way.
Most of the changes in the TNIV had nothing to do with gender, and most were improvements in translation, according to Blomberg. I read his examples, and agree in several cases and abstain from voting on the rest at this point.
I think the main reasons this version were so opposed is because evangelicals had a sense of ownership of the NIV and felt threatened by
any significant changes to it--they felt it should remain static, even as language changed, and fundamentalists freaked over what they thought was a feminist incursion rather than recognizing that the generic masculine is an archaic, soon to be obsolete, linguistic artifact, that offends many people and misleads a great many more. If Wycliffe Bible Translators came to a culture in the jungle that did not have a masculine generic, they couldn't impose it, but would have to accommodate the language into which they were translating. It's already been done with our elimination of two separate forms, one for singular (thou) and the other for plural (ye) in the second person. The Greek and Hebrew make a distinction, but we don't translate them because we no longer do: we just render both as "you." Kids no longer use a generic masculine, and neither do their teachers or professors. Ordinary people don't talk that way any more, although older persons may write that way formally. It's not poor grammar any more to follow "anybody" or "someone" with "their." English has construed some singulars as plurals for centuries and vice versa; it's nothing new. And the singular "they" goes back at least as far as Shakespeare. The generic masculine in pronouns is almost dead, but "man" and "mankind" for "humanity" and the awkward-sounding "humankind" have a longer shelf life. And admittedly, "fireperson" and "policeperson" sound as ridiculous as "chairperson," but there's nothing wrong with "firefighter," "police officer," and "chair" (which goes back centuries). Anyway, we know from context how frequently "brothers" was generic in the Bible, and therefore it
is more accurate in those instances to translate the word as "brothers and sisters," especially since women today (and girls especially) will not take the passage in question as applying to them at all otherwise.
