Conservative Christians’ Outcry Forces Cancellation of New Bible

Pressure from conservative evangelical Christians has forced publishers to cancel plans for an updated “gender-accurate” edition of the most popular Bible translation in the United States, which critics said was pandering to feminists.

The International Bible Society announced this week that it would “serve the church ahead of market concerns” by scrapping a proposed New International Version that would substitute gender-neutral words, such as people, for gender-specific words, such as mankind.

“We had a balance to strike between serving the evangelical church in the world and the evangelical church in the United States, and often those two halves see things from different cultural standpoints,” said Steven Johnson, spokesman for the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based Bible society, which holds the copyright to the New International Version.

The decision was immediately hailed by critics of the project.

“I believe the IBS has taken precisely the right steps in this situation,” said R. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. “I am concerned about any attempt to use a translation of Scripture, or to revise a translation of Scripture in order to meet the demands of political correctness and gender inclusivity that we hear called for so much in modern culture.”

Johnson agreed that the root issue with the new version has more to do with politics than with linguistic accuracy.

The debate over the New International Version mirrors conflicts that have accompanied virtually every new translation of the Bible and that still roil the Roman Catholic Church as U.S. bishops seek to win Vatican approval for gender-neutral biblical texts to be read at Mass.

The dispute arose in late March, when an article in World magazine, an evangelical news weekly, contended that the society’s Committee on Bible Translation had recommended a “unisex” version that would become the only New International Version available in the United States.

*

In a series of statements intended to clarify the issue, the IBS and Zondervan Publishing House, publisher of the Bible, sought to assure the evangelical community that the current version would remain available.

In a mid-May statement, the International Bible Society and Zondervan said they “never have considered, nor will ever consider, any change in the NIV text that would use feminine pronouns to describe the deity or deny the masculinity of Jesus.

“Nor would we approve any changes that would diminish or eliminate the divinely ordained uniqueness of men and women. No changes will be approved that are contrary to the original biblical text in any way.”

Such statements, however, did not mollify critics.

“I believe that the word ‘gender’ in the North American context, unlike the United Kingdom, is a highly politically charged word,” Johnson said. “It’s a powder keg of terminology.”

The British version of the New International Version already contains many of the “gender-accurate” passages that would have been incorporated into the edition planned for the United States.

Johnson said that when translators deal with gender--grammatical masculine, feminine or neuter categories of words--linguistic precision is the goal, not a bow to feminist pressures.

Some U.S. evangelicals have confused linguistic accuracy with feminist revisionism, he added.

“They view it as pandering to the feminist agenda and they don’t view it as the linguistics issue that it really is,” he said, precisely the charge leveled by Mohler.

“The main issue was the fact that we would see translators use modern standards of political correctness emerging out of the feminist agenda to come out with a version of Scripture, a translation, to be more acceptable to the modern mind,” Mohler said.

Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States with 15.7 million members, are the top purchasers of the New International Version. The version is the translation of choice for the Baptist Sunday School Board in its commentaries and study manuals.

Overall Bible sales in the United States are estimated at $500 million annually. The New International Version holds a 45% market share and is especially favored by evangelicals, who use it nearly as often as the traditional King James Version. The Rev. James Walters, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Mobile, Ala., said good modern translations help make the Bible more accessible to the public.

“It sounds to me like they are just trying to upgrade the language to be compatible with the times and make it a bit more accurate,” Walters said.

The debate about translations is misplaced, said Jimmy Duke, professor of New Testament Greek at New Orleans Theological Seminary.

“This is not a gender matter, it’s a language matter,” Duke said. “In moving from one language to another, there’s always some interpretation you have to do.”