The "New International Version" Translation Project: Its Conception And Implementation -- By: Carolyn Johnson Youngblood
Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 21:3 (Sep 1978)
Article: The "New International Version" Translation Project: Its Conception And Implementation
Author: Carolyn Johnson Youngblood
JETS 21:3 (September 1978) p. 239
The New International Version Translation Project: Its Conception And Implementation
Is there really a need for another translation of the Bible?
In the early 1950s a group of evangelical Bible scholars concluded that such a need did in fact exist. This paper is an attempt to explain how and why they came to that conclusion, to discuss the aims and goals that were established for the new translation (the New International Version), and to describe the translation procedures—including a unique system of checks and balances—that were utilized to help attain the quality of the final product. Surveys of the planning and progress of the project, and the problems of financing it, are also included. They are essential to an understanding of the magnitude of this endeavor, which eventually involved more than a hundred scholars working in excess of 200,000 man-hours over a period of twenty-five years at a cost of more than two million dollars.
I. Background
“The Reformers of the Protestant Reformation gave great impetus to the truth that the Bible belongs to the common man.” 1 Until the late fourteenth century, however, it was inaccessible to all but scholars who were trained to read Hebrew, Greek or Latin. There were no translations in the vernacular until John Wycliffe, in the 1380s, rendered the entire Bible into simple and concise English for ordinary people. In spite of his good intentions, printing presses were not yet in existence and very few for whom his Bible was intended could afford it in manuscript form.
One hundred forty years later it was illegal to buy, sell or possess a Bible in the English language, and consequently practically no one had access to one. William Tyndale felt so strongly about this deplorable situation that on one occasion he proclaimed to a learned churchman, “If God spare my lyfe ere many years, I wyl cause a boye that dryveth ye plough, shall knowe more of the scripture than thou doest.”2 God did spare his life, and in 1520 Tyndale began his translation of the Scriptures into English. It was a dangerous and daring undertaking in those days, and eighteen years later he died as a martyr.
In contrast to the perilous situation in which Tyndale worked the sovereign of one of the most powerful nations of the seventeenth century, King James I of England, authorized in 1609 the translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek texts into English. Completed in 1611, the King James Version (KJV) has been the most beloved and widely used English Bible for some 350 years. It has been
*Carolyn...
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