NIV, NASB, etc.
by Keith Loggins

I want to do a systematic study on this subject and I want to lay out my information so that it cannot be refuted.

Lets compare the NIV to the KJV so that we can see the many differences that occur within the texts. I submit that the translation of the NIV is not a translation at all, but an interpretation.

Let me explain what I mean. There are two major types of translation criteria that scholars use when going from one language to another. One is called "dynamic equivalence" and the other is called "complete equivalence". The KJV and the NASB use complete equivalence and the NIV and RSV use dynamic equivalence. So what do I mean here?

CE (complete equivalence) is when you take a passage or verse and do a word for word translation. Of course, you say. How else would you do a translation? DE (dynamic equivalence) is a thought for thought translation. That is, you read a verse and put down what you think it means as a "complete thought."

Think about this. For example. a scholar somewhere takes the Word of God and reads John 2:4.
Word for word from the Greek - Ti emoi kai soi, gynai?

"What to you and to me, Woman?"

Doesn't make sense, does it?

Now if he does a CE, he gets this. - (KJV), "Woman, what have I to do with thee?"

or - (NKJV), "Woman, what does your concern have to do with me?"

If he does a DE, he gets this. (NIV), "Dear woman, why do you involve me?"

Do you notice the difference? There is a semantic shift from the question "what" to the question "why". So in this NIV translation, there is a distortion!

This passage is an idiomatic Greek phrase for which we have no English equivalent. Still, the vast majority of scholars agree "what" is semantically closer than "why". It sounds like in the NIV that Jesus is asking a question about motivation or intent from His mother, when that is just not true. The NIV is not accurate here at all.  There is a question of accuracy when you use a paraphrase, which the NIV ultimately is!

When you read a DE, you are getting a paraphrase. In other words, you are getting what someone else thinks this passage means, not what it actually says. Many scholars say that, that is better because the meaning is actually lost when you do a word for word and many times there is not a word equivalent in the target language from the source language. This is true to a degree. You will notice that not even the KJV is a straight word for word translation because the Greek language is not structured like English. Words have to be placed in the correct order, in order for the reader to understand what is being said. That is why we have scholars. They are suppose to translate it for us, not interpret it for us.

Word order is of great importance in all languages. For example, if I wrote you a letter and said "John Dear". Then in the next letter I wrote "Dear John". The meanings are totally the opposite. The same in Greek.

When there is a word that translates completely, the CE scholar will use it. When there is not, he will use the best word or the best series of words to convey the meaning over. This is hard work. My hats off to scholars who do it the hard way, like Art Farstead and Zane Hodges; and the other scholars like Jerome and of course, those in 1611.

The DE way of translation, in my opinion, is the lazy way. You read a verse, "Oh, It means this" and you write down what you think it means. Are you getting the original meaning, or what someone else thinks the original meaning is?

There is another problem that I must point out about the scholars that worked on the NIV etc. Because it is a thought for thought translation, we must find out what the scholars who did the work believe; and, unfortunately, what their lifestyles are about. That is a lot of work just to be able to read the Word of God. A must read is the section on "Westcott and Hort". It is not flattering to the "gentlemen" who brought us the minority text.

I want to go to the most glaring difference between the NIV and KJV. It occurs in Mark chapter 16. Pull out these two versions and look at verses 9 through 20.

In your NIV, they are italicized. In the KJV, they are not. The NIV is saying that this huge passage is not in the original (Alexandrian) texts. They are right. It is not in the Alexandrian texts. What is in this passage that the NIV, for all extensive purposes, leaves out?

I will tell you.

JESUS DOES NOT APPEAR AFTER HIS RESURRECTION!

You have to ask yourself, "Is it a gospel at all without the resurrection?"

I would jettison the NIV for this reason alone, but I don't have to because there are many, many more reasons.

I want to stop there to give you some background on the NIV so you can understand the scope of the NIV project. One hundred scholars from many denominations got together in 1967 to produce a fresh and accurate bible that would be easy to read for the masses. They spent in excess of 200,000 man hours over a period of 25 years and $2 to $2.5 million to get the NIV to the publishers. The NIV remains at the top in terms of popularity to English speaking people.

Many of you might think that these people are scholars and that they know more than you, so are immanently more qualified to bring a new Bible to the forefront. But they are only human and they can make mistakes, many mistakes. Let me quote Jack Lewis who was on one of the committees putting the NIV together;

"Once the committee got at its task, one discovered that his preparation was far too scanty. If one had written a Ph.D. dissertation on each verse that was to be considered, he might have been qualified to deal with the questions that could be raised. The individual traits of each committee member quickly surfaced. One had a special talent for recalling where a particular form had occurred before. Another could offer his training in Akkadian and Ugaritic; another in Latin and Greek. The Old Testament specialists were sometimes not aware that a passage was also used in the New Testament."

So let us be aware that these people could make mistakes and in fact, did make mistakes. There is no way for me to lay all of them out to you but I will show you enough to make you concerned. There is a pattern with the Old and New Testament translators that I personally do not like. After you read my examples, even if you consider them minor, must take them as a whole. How good are these scholars and why are they doing what they are doing?

Get out your translations;

GENESIS 21:16
The NIV says that Hagar "sat there nearby and began to sob."
The NKJV says that Hagar "lifted her voice and wept."
The masoretic text agrees with the NKJV. It is well known that in the Eastern culture, even 4,000 years ago, when people were upset, they let you know it, loudly! Why did the NIV westernize Hagar?

GENESIS 38:21
This is the story of Judah and Tamar. Judah's friend asks the question "Where is the shrine prostitute who was beside the road at Enaim?" The response, " There hasn't been any shrine prostitute here, they said."
Two points. The word "shrine" is not in the text and there is no mention in the whole story of a shrine being there at all! Once again, the NIV is too pedantic. Also the NKJV uses the word "harlot", a word still used in out society and a think more accurate than the slightly sanitized word "prostitute".

1 SAMUEL 15:32
In this rendition, we have the king of the Amalekites, Agag, being brought to Samuel to be executed. The NIV says " Agag came to him confidently, thinking, ' Surely the bitterness of death is past.'"
Wrong, wrong, wrong!
The NKJV gets it right when it says " Agag came to him cautiously."
I want you to read the rationalization of Calvin Linton who with twisted logic, defends the "confidently" word play.
" The Hebrew ma'adan can mean something approximating "daintily." But the context indicates the simulated nonchalance of one who is in fear of his life and is as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. The fears of Agag were well-founded, for, walk he never so delicately, Samuel will forthwith kill him. The quaint word must however, give way to the modern and accurate one and the NIV accordingly renders the passage thus: ' Agag came to him confidently.'"

Did you follow his logic? He agrees that the text says "daintily" and also agrees that it should be translated "confidently". Is this the kind of logic that you are willing to put up with to read the NIV? If you read this NIV passage, would you glean that "confidently" means, nervous, or simulated nonchalance? Of course not!

1 SAMUEL 25:25
I am going to quote Zane Hodges directly on this one.

In the biting sarcasm of Abigail, whom Nabal's crass behavior had embarrassed deeply, her husband's name is explained this way in the NIV:

He is just like his name- his name is Fool, and folly goes with him.

D.F. Payne wonders what an "untutored reader" might make of this. More comprehensible, though still not perfectly lucid, are KJV and NKJV:

Nabal is his name, and folly is with him.

To be sure, it is not easy to handle a text where there is a wordplay on the significance of a name. But the retention of the name itself is likely to be less confusing than the abrupt NIV translation of Nabal by its English equivalent: "Fool."
The reader is likely to ask himself why Nabal's name is suddenly given as a "Fool"! The NIV further complicates matters by creating a quasi-personification in the words, "folly goes with him." There is no word for "goes" in the Hebrew text and its addition in English in a statement like this one only compounds the obscurity. Why is it that "folly" goes with "Fool"? This lacks the signs of thoughtful translation.

I could go on with the Old Testament but instead will point to an excellent resource called "The NIV Reconsidered" by Earl Radmacher and Zane Hodges if you wish to go further.

MARK 6:37
Here is an example of dynamic equivalence going too far. The NIV says "That would take eight months of a man's wages! Are we to go and spend that much on bread and give it to them to eat"?
Now read the NKJV. " Shall we go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread and give them something to eat"?
This is the type of translation that gives dynamic equivalence a bad name. The NIV is not even close to being a reading of the Greek text. Who would justify this NIV "paraphrase" as the "closest equivalent possible" in English translation?
What is wrong here? EVERYTHING. The NIV translators were apparently determined to communicate a piece of data to the English reader - namely, that the sum of money mentioned by the disciples was approximately the amount that a laborer might earn in an eight-month period of time. But this intention of the NIV is another signal of its scholastic and pedantic outlook. If I want to read a commentary, I will buy one. I want the text!!! This is the Word of God I want to read, not somebody's bad attempt of a commentary.
Where did these scholars come up with "eight months of wages"? It may be true that a field hand would have to work about eight months to earn this kind of money. But not everyone in the first century was a field hand. Artisans, craftsman, professionals, clergy; did they all make the same wage? It is extremely dubious that a monetary figure like two hundred denarii suggested eight months work to the average Israeli. Let me put it this way. The NIV has lost touch with the real world of Jesus' day. By seeking to convey information of very doubtful accuracy, the translators have fallen into the trap of rewriting the disciples response and restructuring the text without cause!

JOHN 2:4
I wanted to come back to this text to illustrate something further. The NIV has a tendency to change its English translation based on feelings, not scholarship. I will show you one of those here.

Jesus in the NKJV and the KJV refers to His mother in this text as "Woman". The NIV says that Jesus called His mother "Dear Woman". While it is sweet that the NIV scholars wanted to modify Jesus' words to make it sound less harsh, I would rather have the truth. Look at John 19:26, 4:21, and 8:10. The Greek text is identical in all four places but the NIV translators are a little sensitive when Jesus refers to His mom that way. The NIV is tinkering with the text, based on bias, not on truth!

JOHN 15:2
As another proof that the NIV tends to interpret instead of translate is in this verse when the scholars render the Greek verb airo as "cut off": "He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit He prunes so that it will be even more fruitful." The NKJV uses "takes away."
The most basic meaning of airo is "to lift up, take up, or pick up." The standard Greek lexicon [Bauer-Gingrich-Danker] gives these definitions as its first listing. The basic usage of the term fits right into the viticultural setting that Jesus and the eleven were viewing. "Every branch in Me not bearing fruit, He lifts up from the ground."
In Israel, in contrast to the United States, the stalks of grape vines for the most part are down on the ground during the non-productive season - not bearing fruit. But when the time comes for fruit, the vinedressers begin to lift them off the ground. Today, two thousand years later, you can see the vine-tenders on the West Bank of the Jordan doing it the same way they did then. They get a rock (about 8 to 10 inches high), pick up the stalk and put the rock under the top end of the stalk. Then they go to the next one and do the same thing.
Several days later they come back and move the rock back a little further toward the root and do the same thing to every stalk in their vineyard. Several days will pass before they get the stalk prepared properly for fruit bearing. In the process, the branches have been 'taken away' or 'lifted' from the ground. Why? do you ask. By doing this they control the exposure of the grapes to the sun. The further they lift the branches, the more exposure to sunlight the fruit gets.

Furthermore, if they leave the stalk on the ground, the branches will shoot tiny roots directly down from the branch into the top surface of the earth where there is little moisture. They will produce grapes all right - little, hard and sour ones. But if they lift that stalk off the ground, those branches will get their sustenance from the stalk whose roots go into the rich moisture of the earth, and then they will produce the succulent fruit for which Israel is known.

What a beautiful picture Jesus gave His disciples. We can understand why He prayed later, " I do not pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil one" [John 17:15]. Here our Lord uses a compound form of airo [epairo], and it is in the aorist tense rather than the present tense as airo is in John 15:2. Jesus does not want the Father to "lift" them completely out of the world, but to keep on "lifting" them away from the earth.

Thus, Jesus says, "I want them in the world - but not of it; in it, but not deriving their sustenance from it." The sustenance of the branches [believers] is to be from the vine [Christ], not from the evil world system. Finally, if the Apostle John had wanted to say "cuts off," he had a good word for it which he used in John 18:10, where it is recorded by John that Peter cut off the right ear of Malchus.

1 CORINTHIANS 4:9
Once again, the NIV commentators do it. As David Scholar stated, "this text has been over translated in the NIV.." I call it paraphrasing.
"For it seems to me that God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession, like men condemned to die in the arena. We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to men."

This is NOT a good translation.
To begin with, the ideas conveyed by "at the end of the procession" and by "in the arena" are totally absent from the Greek text. The translators have probably based these expansions on the word "spectacle," which is the Greek term theatron , from which we get the English word "theater." From this slender base, the NIV has extrapolated Paul's imagery.
In fact, a note in the NIV Study Bible links "spectacle" to "theater" and comments that "Paul refers to the gladiatorial contests in the arena or perhaps to the triumphal procession of a victorious Roman general." "Perhaps" is the crucial admission here. "Perhaps" Paul employs a gladiatorial image, or "perhaps" the image of a triumphal procession- or "perhaps" he employs neither. Then why does the NIV put it in the text as if it was a fact? The translators should not try to do the work of a commentator, nor should they use tenuous and debatable imagery as an accurate rendering of the text.
Scholer was right. As a result of this overtranslation here, the NIV reader cannot know where the translation ends and where commentary begins. The use of italics would have helped, but it does not justify the additional words.

CONCLUSION

In none of the selected samples that I have considered above do we find fundamental doctrine at issue. But, I wanted you to see a pattern that can be found in many other NIV renderings as well. You may ask if it matters that much? You may ask yourself, were these scholars competent? You may ask if it was intentional? The last two I cannot answer. The first one I can. If you are serious about the Word of God and the impact that God can have on you through His Word, you must ask yourself, which version can I trust? There are over 3000 changes or differences between the NIV and the KJV/ NKJV in the New Testament alone. And these changes are major!
Look at it this way, there are 260 chapters in the New Testament. That means that there are an average 12 major differences per chapter. Tell me that makes no difference!!
Thanks to Earl Radmacher for the great research he did on this subject.
Be sure to read the page on the Alexandrian Text.