The New International Version (NIV) is an English translation of the Bible known to be the most popular and the best selling in the United States and around the world, and the only one to displace the King James Version in about half a millennium. The NAE’s own poll showed that 39 percent of our members choose this version over any other.

It was at the NAE’s initiative that an exploratory committee was formed in 1957, and joined by the Christian Reformed Church in 1961, to research the possibility of preparing a new translation of the Bible. First published in 1978, the NIV was an entirely original translation produced by a committee of 15 scholars from diverse evangelical backgrounds to safeguard the translation from sectarian bias and crafted in the spirit of functional equivalence to provide a text that is easily readable and understandable to the modern reader.

The NIV translators continue to meet yearly to monitor changes in the English language and biblical studies. The 2011 update to the NIV is the latest result of this process.

The “New International Version” and “NIV” trademarks are registered by Biblica (formerly the International Bible Society) that licenses commercial rights to the text to Zondervan (U.S.) and Hodder & Stoughton (U.K.).

This article originally appeared in the NAE Insight.