S. Michael Houdmann Supporter Got Questions Ministries

New International Reader's Version - HistoryThe New International Reader's Version (NIrV) was a new Bible version developed to enable early readers to understand God's message. Begun in 1992 and co...

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July 01 2013 • 2 responses • Vote Up • Share • Report

Jack Gutknecht ABC/DTS graduate, guitar music ministry Baptist church

This is definitely one of my favorites! I used it profusely when teaching Children's Church for 14 years.

A Word about the NIrV
God has always spoken so people would know what he meant. When God first gave the Bible to his people, He used their languages. They could understand what they read. God wants us to understand the Bible today too. So the NIrV team has worked hard to make the New International Reader's Version easy to read and understand.

The New International Reader's Version
The New International Reader's Version (NIrV) is a new Bible version based on the New International Version (NIV). The NIV is easy to understand and very clear. More people read the NIV than any other English Bible. The NIrV was made even easier to read and understand. The words of the NIV were used when possible. Sometimes shorter words were used. Explanations were used for words that might be hard to understand. The sentences were made shorter. Yay!

Some other things were done to make the NIrV a helpful Bible version for us. For example, sometimes a Bible verse quotes from another place in the Bible. When that happens, the other Bible book's name was put, chapter and verse, right there. They separated each chapter into shorter sections. They gave a title to almost every chapter. Sometimes they even gave a title to the shorter sections. That will help us understand what each chapter or section is all about.

Is the NIrV an Accurate Bible?
At the time the Bible was written, God's people used the Hebrew and Greek languages. So the first writers of the Bible used those languages. The goal was to make the NIrV say just what the first writers of the Bible said. So the translators kept checking what the Hebrew and Greek said.

They used the best and oldest copies of the Hebrew and Greek. Some of the first English Bible could not use those copies because they had not yet been found. But today we can check copies that are closer in time to the ones the first Bible writers wrote. The translators wanted to make sure they were giving us the actual Word of God.

Here is a comparison of a passage in the King James Version, the New International Version, and the New International Reader's Version:

KJV: "And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory." (1 Timothy 3:16, KJV)

NIV: "Beyond all question, the mystery from which true godliness springs is great: He appeared in the flesh, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up in glory." (1 Timothy 3:16, NIV)

NIrV: "There is no doubt that godliness is a great mystery. Jesus appeared in a body. The Holy Spirit proved that he was the Son of God. He was seen by angels. He was preached among the nations. People in the world believed in him. He was taken up to heaven in glory." (1 Timothy 3:16, NIrV)

A children's version of this text, targeted at 4 to 7-year-olds and featuring the characters of the Berenstain Bears, has been published by Zondervan and HarperCollins.

August 10 2019 • 0 responses • Vote Up • Share • Report