Associated Press
The International Bible Society said Monday that America’s best-selling modern Bible is about to get an update using gender-neutral wording, despite past criticism of that idea from conservatives.
The revision will be called "Today’s New International Version," or TNIV. The original "New International Version," which has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide since 1978, will remain on the market.
The New Testament of the latest version goes on sale in April with the full Bible including Old Testament books expected by 2005.
Zondervan of Grand Rapids, Mich., owned by HarperCollins, holds North American rights for both versions. To date, the Bible society and Zondervan have spent $2 million to develop the new translation but they did not disclose other financial terms.
Both versions, the work of evangelical translators, are especially popular in the conservative, Protestant heart of America’s competitive Bible market.
Randy Stinson, executive director of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, a Louisville, Ky., group that works to preserve gender specific language, said Monday he had not yet seen the revisions but was concerned that word meanings may have been altered.
"This is incredibly serious to evangelicals, how the Bible is translated," Stinson said. "We believe the Bible is the word of God, so changing these things deliberately is dangerous."
But Scott Bolinder, executive vice president and publisher at Zondervan, said there are relatively few changes involving gender and those have only been made "to reflect the original meaning of the text."
"There’s no social agenda," he said.
Examples of some changes in the New International Version Bible from 1978 to 2002:
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