Howard Long was an engineer from Seattle, the kind of man who noticed when something didn't work and couldn't rest until he'd fixed it. It was the 1950s, and Long loved two things fiercely: sharing the Gospel with anyone who'd listen, and the King James Bible he'd grown up reading.
One day he tried to share it with someone who didn't yet know Christ. The words fell flat. Not because the truth in them had changed, but because 17th-century English didn't speak to a 20th-century listener. Long watched something he loved fail to land, and he couldn't shake it.
In 1955, he set out to do something about it: find or help create a Bible translation that captured the Word of God faithfully, in English people actually spoke. It took ten years of pressing the case before his denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, and the National Association of Evangelicals finally caught the same vision. What started as one man's frustration became the effort that would produce the New International Version.
In 1965, a cross-denominational gathering of evangelical scholars met near Chicago and agreed Long was right. Rather than revise an old translation, they'd start over from the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic manuscripts.
That gathering became the Committee on Bible Translation, an independent, self-governing body that still exists today. No publisher, not even Biblica, gets a say in how they translate God's Word. Changes require 70 percent agreement among scholars from dozens of denominations, a built-in safeguard against any single theological bias shaping the text.
Biblica (then known as the New York Bible Society) came alongside the project in 1968 as its financial backer, eventually mortgaging our own office building to help see it through. By 1975, funding had run out, but the work was too important to abandon. Zondervan Publishers stepped in to help finish what had been started. In 1978, after more than a decade of translation, review, and testing with real pastors, students, and everyday readers, the complete NIV was published.
The first printing sold out before it was even done being printed.
Half a century later, it's still the most-used Bible translation in churches across the United States. The Committee on Bible Translation still meets every year, because Scripture is too important to ever call the work finished. New discoveries made by biblical scholars, new insights into ancient languages, and changes in the English language mean that the work is an ongoing labor of love.
