While I'm not a bible thumper (just ask my friends, some of them can post a comment to confirm this fact) the outrage I feel at the release of a watered down and modernized bible is enormous! This is disturbing and sad. These idiots (The International Bible Society) think you and everyone else is too dumb to understand a more literate translation of several thousand year old text. Why don't people realize that when you lower the bar, particularly for kids and young adults, they're more than happy to just make it over....however they're just as willing to embrace great challenge and the end result is life long (teach a man to fish!). What a joke that these pseudo intellectuals believe that the number of readers who would be confused by the true meaning of such words as "stoned" and "aliens" outweighs truth, original intent and a higher bar! After all wouldn't the poor sap not so bright as I think that a women "with child" means a women and a child already born to this world and not one who is pregnant? Oh, and least you think that the context of these words would make there actual meaning clear you must also assume the context is lost on these not so fortunate small yellow bus riding bible readers!
Another sad and pathetic attempt at revision is to replace some (or all, who knows) occurrences of the word "man" with something akin to "people", "human", "us", "the chosen", "them" and so on....we wouldn't anybody to think God actually made an distinction between men and women would we?
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Err... I'm sure you know, but the whole history of the modern Bible is filled with these attempts. The NIV is really not representative of the King James nor is that representative of the Greek and Aramaic text. And that's just the commonly known Bibles. There are literally dozens of unique versions, many of which include texts that don't even exist in others.
So, if you're referring to the NIV or even the King James, it's not really representative of "God's" intent as both were rewritten for the time and place, much like this one.
The Bible changes historically for a number of reasons; often these include bowing to political pressures of the times. But as often, language was changed to become more responsive to the community. In virtually all cases, there was hostile reaction from the orthodoxy, but the goal of the writers is rarely a "social agenda". The goal of most Christians is to spread their message of the Good News and convert.
Anyways, that's skirting your main point which is basically about fears of illiteracy in young adults. I think it's a good point indeed - adults need to be able to deal with complicated language and subjects. But at the same time it's also important to have a good entry-point for less mature readers. I guess I look at this the way I look at Harry Potter - it might be a good way to bridge th gap and get younger people more aware of reading (and in this case obviously, the Biblical content itself).
Many versions however were created for a better understanding of the text as this possibly is. But to change the Bible to match our own culture is dangerous indeed.
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