new bible translation

But yesterday's NIV was just fine. Why do we need Today's NIV?

It actually reminds me a lot of the debate over the KJV Bible. I think a lot of this is simply objection over the language flow rather than objection over the doctrines, though that makes a good smokescreen. Just ask the KJV-only crowd.

I'm not a Greek scholar, so this has to be viewed as the offhand perspective of a scantly informed layman:

The English language has changed in the past thirty years; a fair amount of that has been driven by the desire to eliminate sexist language (political correctness), but the change has happened nonetheless. It used to be that the word his was an accepted gender-neutral possessive pronoun for people; i.e., "Everyone should study his Bible" was not viewed as sexist since his was understood to include men and women.

That is no longer the case, because we have been conditioned as a society to look at his as masculine only, and to say his or her or their when we want to be gender-inclusive.

In this light, a Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic text that uses the masculine form of a noun or pronoun (or the equivalent in the appropriate lexicon) as the generic form as well would not be accurately translated with a masculine English word.

Let's say the Greek word for men is used in a gospel to describe the number of people listening to Jesus preach. It's reasonable to assume there were women present as well; by that reasoning, it's a better translation into contemporary English to say 5,000 people than 5,000 men.

This is a fairly consistent trend at least. Like the New International Version, the Revised Standard Version was updated a few years ago, to reflect the evolution of the English language.

Many evangelical groups mislike the translation because of its "liberal" bent. The translation reflects an academic or scholarly bent rather than a faith one, with the result that many O.T. passages that in the original languages reasonably could be interpreted as prophecy do not pass that muster in translation. Isaiah's famous prophecy, "The virgin shall bear a son" is rendered "The young maiden shall bear a son," for instance.

Again, I'm not a Bible scholar and the only Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic I know are fairly basic words familiar to many English speakers, so I'm probably not doing the arguments credit.

Perhaps when I take over the world, I can make koine Greek, Aramaic and classic Hebrew required languages alongside English, so we can eliminate the need for translation anyway. (I have to admit, gaining even a modicum of insight into the translation process has made me understand a lot better why devout Muslims don't consider a translation of the Quran to be adequate for study or understanding.)

Honestly, any time you're dealing with a translated work, if you don't know the original language, it's best to have multiple translations in order to get the best sense of the original. That's why I have copies of the NIV, RSV, KJV and some Catholic Bible I don't remember the name of (which is so badly done that I chiefly value it for the Apocrypha)*. I used to have a copy of the NKJV but haven't seen it for ages, although Natasha has an NRSV and we also have a Haitian Creole Bible and a French Bible. Not that I read much French anymore.

*We're talking about a really bad translation here. Rather than converting cubits to standard, for instance, the "translators" substitutef the standard measurement for the ancient one, with the result that Goliath is about seven feet tall....