The Revised NIV and "sinful nature"

Lots of the blogs (e.g. Better Bibles Blog) are reporting the news of the new version of the NIV (New International Version) to be released in 2011 (announcement here at NIV Bible 2011, including webcast). As far as I can see there is no sign yet of what it will be called, but new Bible translations are always great for demonstrating the folly of calling things "new" since "new" soon becomes not so new, and eventually it becomes old. "New Revised Standard" is one of the best pile-ups of adjectives yet. "Today" has already gone in the previous revision, the TNIV. Perhaps the NIV can be the Revised New International Version? Or NIV 2.0? "NIV Bible 2011" is going to date even more quickly, one would have thought.

As far as the content is concerned, I will be disappointed if they regress to some of the non-gender-inclusive language of the NIV. But there is one thing I will be looking for more than anything else, to see if they finally drop "sinful nature" as a translation of sarx in Paul, which was retained in the TNIV. It makes it unusable as a translation for teaching Paul.

Update (21:14): In comments, Matthew Montonini notes this interesting article (PDF) on the topic by Douglas Moo, who is on the CBT, the board that oversees the NIV translation.

666 verses in Mark's Gospel in the NIV, or are there?

Over on PaleoBabble, Michael Heiser has a fantastic example of Another Great Moment in Pulpit Paleobabble, so good it is worth repeating here so that you can see it for yourself:



The pastor is a certain Steven Anderson from Faithful Word Baptist Church, already notorious for comments on Him that Pisseth Against the Wall. Now he is attempting to prove that there are 666 verses in the New International Version of Mark's Gospel with a view to demonstrating that everyone should be using the King James Version (I understand that this phenomenon is called "KJV only" and it is surprisingly widespread, especially here in the US).

Michael makes some excellent points on PaleoBabble, all of which will be transparent good sense to any one with an education, but I'd like to add a quick point of my own which undermines the bizarre case on its own terms, and it goes as follows: There are not 666 verses in the NIV of Mark's Gospel. Like most modern translations, the NIV does not print Mark 7.16, 9.44, 9.46, 11.26 and 15.28. So there are not 666 verses in the NIV of Mark 1.1-16.8. There are 661. The preacher in question has made the mistake of counting simply by going to the last verse of each chapter and adding up those numbers. Of course he might say that these missing verses are printed as footnotes in the NIV, but then the whole point of his sermon is that the NIV ignores Mark 16.9-20 by treating them as footnotes, so that is hardly going to wash. Hoist by his own petard, I am afraid.