TNIV Quest, Pars Secunda

No, I don’t mean that there’s a TNIV edition of Christianity Today‘s Quest Study Bible. Well, at least I hope not.

 

I’m talking about my quest to find a decent, low-priced edition of the TNIV around here, now that my local Borders has wholly forsaken the Bible market. I called a number of Christian bookstores, but those who happened have English Bibles had only KJV and NIV. Thus I set out for Wal-Mart, hoping that they would have a book section.

 

Well, they did have books, and even Bibles! In English! Unfortunately, they had no copies of the TNIV. King James, New King James, NIV, and even Holman Christian Standard, yes―but no TNIVs. However, the trip was not wholly wasted in that I came across a new(er) Zondervan Study Bible of which I was unaware: the Archaeological Study Bible (NIV), published under the auspices of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and which apparently was the best-selling Bible of 2006. It seems to be the Evangelical response to The Learning Bible (CEV, now also NIV), published by the American Bible Society in 2001. I spent some time examining the book introductions, notes, inset thematic boxes, and appendices, and my impression is that while this Bible improves in some ways on its slightly older counterpart, it also has a number obvious disadvantages by comparison, and even contains some outright mistakes. This is all very unfortunate indeed.

 

Moreover, I must make note of the following: this edition makes use of red letters for the words of Christ, which practice is, of course, against my religion. To quote my hero Father Ephrem Lash, “I must protest most vigorously against the wholly unorthodox inverted Arianism of the typography whereby the words of Christ are printed in salmon pink, while his heavenly Father has to be content with mere black along with Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate.” Further, the color actually used in the NIV Archaeological Study Bible is neither red nor salmon pink, but rather a very loud orange. I’m still not over the shock of the color clash, since the text is printed in what one Amazon reviewer called a “fake papyrus background.”

 

Back to my search for a copy of the TNIV, it seems I’ve exhausted my local options. There is another Borders, and another Wal-Mart, about an hour away from here, but I’m unsure I want to go all the way out there only to come away with empty hands. We shall see!