A Word About
the New International Reader’s Version

Have You Ever Heard of the New International Version?

We call it the NIV. A lot of people read the NIV. In fact, more people read the NIV than any other English Bible. They like it because it’s easy to read.

And now we are happy to give you another Bible that’s easy to read and understand. It’s the New International Reader’s Version. We call it the NIrV.

Who Will Enjoy Reading the New International Reader’s Version?

We made sure that people who are just starting to read could understand and enjoy the NIrV. Children will be able to read it and understand it. So will older people who are learning how to read or those who are reading the Bible for the first time. So will people who have a hard time understanding what they read. And so will people who use English as their second language. We hope this Bible will be just right for you.

How Is the NIrV Different from the NIV?

The NIrV is based on the NIV. The NIV Committee on Bible Translation (CBT) didn’t produce the NIrV. But several members of CBT worked hard to make the NIrV possible. We used the words of the NIV when we could. When the NIV words were long, we used words that were shorter. We wanted to use words that are easy to understand. We also made the sentences much shorter.

Why did we do all of those things? Because we wanted to make the NIrV really easy to read and understand.

What Other Helps Does the NIrV Have?

We decided to give you a lot of other help too. For example, sometimes a verse is quoted from another place in the Bible. When it is, we put the Bible book’s name, chapter and verse right after the verse that quotes another place.

We separated each chapter into shorter sections. We gave a title to almost every chapter. Sometimes we even gave a title to a section. We did it to help you understand what the chapter or section is all about.

Sometimes the writers of the Bible used more than one name for the same person or place. For example, in the New Testament the Sea of Galilee is also called the Sea of Gennesaret and the Sea of Tiberias. But in the NIrV we decided to call it the Sea of Galilee everywhere it appears in the New Testament. We did it because that is its most familiar name.

We also wanted to help our readers learn the names of people and places even in verses where those names don’t actually appear. For example, when we knew that “the River” meant “the Euphrates River,” we used those words even in verses where only the words “the River” are found. When we knew that the name of “Pharaoh” in a certain verse was “Hophra,” we wrote his name in that verse. We did all of those things because we wanted to make the NIrV as clear as possible.

Does the NIrV Say What the First Writers of the Bible Said?

We wanted the NIrV to say just what the first writers of the Bible said. So we kept checking the Greek New Testament as we did our work. That’s because the New Testament’s first writers used Greek.

We used the best and oldest copies of the Greek New Testament. Earlier English Bibles couldn’t use those copies because they had not yet been found. The oldest Greek New Testaments are best because they are closer in time to the ones the first Bible writers wrote. That’s why we kept checking the older copies instead of newer ones.

Later copies of the Greek New Testament added several verses that the earlier ones don’t have. Sometimes it’s several verses in a row. When that’s the case, we included them in the NIrV. But we set those verses off with a long line. That tells you that the first writers didn’t write them. The verses were added later on. You will find the long lines at Mark 16:9–20 and John 7:53—8:11. Sometimes it’s a single verse. An example is Mark 9:44. That verse is not in the oldest Greek New Testaments. So we put the number 43/44 right before Mark 9:43. Then you can look on the list below for Mark 9:44 and locate the verse that was added.

Verses That Were Not Found in Earliest Greek New Testaments

What Is Our Prayer for You?

The Lord has blessed the New International Version in a wonderful way. He has used it to help millions of Bible readers. Many people have put their faith in Jesus after reading it. Many others have become stronger believers because they have read it.

We hope and pray that the New International Reader’s Version will help you in the same way. If that happens, we will give God all of the glory.

A Word about This Edition

This edition of the New International Reader’s Version has been revised so that the gender language more closely matches that of the New International Version. When we prepared this new edition, we had help from people who were not part of the first team. We want to thank them for their help. They are Ben Aker from the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary, Paul House from the Southern Baptist Seminary, and Scott Munger from International Bible Society.

The Old
Testament