Its All In The Name!

Zondervan, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, is the top dog in the Bible marketing business. Here is an excerpt from an article on the Good News Bible from the Bible Research website:

Naming the Version

The official name of the version is Today's English Version, but nearly all editions have been published with alternate names having the phrase Good News in them. The New Testament originally appeared as Good News for Modern Man, the whole Bible was the Good News Bible, some early editions were called Good News for a New Age. In March of 2001 another such name was announced for the version. At that time the Zondervan corporation entered into a legal agreement with the American Bible Society under which Zondervan became the exclusive commercial publisher of the version in North America, and as part of this agreement the name of the version was changed from The Good News Bible to The Good News Translation, for marketing reasons. A publication of the United Bible Societies reported that the name was changed after a "request for the change came from Zondervan," and explained:
The request followed research of the US Bible market conducted last year by Zondervan. The findings showed that while the GNB ranked fourth highest in terms of awareness (42 per cent), it ranked only twelfth in terms of sales (3.1 per cent). Researchers concluded that one reason why high brand awareness translated into a low market share was the mistaken belief that GNB is a paraphrase -- a conclusion supported by the ABS's own research. Zondervan and the ABS have agreed that changing the name to the Good News Translation "will help build confidence in the translation because it addresses the misperception head-on." (7)

 

Many evangelicals have found the Good New Bible to be unacceptable and wonder what Robert Bratcher could have possibly been thinking when he translated it. Perhaps the following info from the Bible Research website will make that clear:

The New Testament of the Good News Bible was translated by Dr. Robert G. Bratcher in consultation with a committee appointed by the American Bible Society. Bratcher had been on the staff of the American Bible Society since 1957, and he did his translation according to principles of translation set forth by Eugene Nida, who since 1946 had been the Executive Secretary of the ABS Translations Department. Nida called his theory of translation Dynamic Equivalence.

At a Dallas conference on the theme "Biblical Authority for the Church Today" sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention in March 1981 he openly lambasted conservative evangelicals, calling them ignorant and dishonest, and scoffed at their contention that the words of the Bible were inspired and authoritative:

"Only willful ignorance or intellectual dishonesty can account for the claim that the Bible is inerrant and infallible. To qualify this absurd claim by adding 'with respect to the autographs' is a bit of sophistry, a specious attempt to justify a patent error ... No thruth-loving, God-respecting, Christ-honoring believer should be guilty of such heresy. To invest the Bible with the qualities of inerrancy and infallibility is to idolatrize it, to transform it into a false God ... No one seriously claims that all the words of the Bible are the very words of God. If someone does so it is only because that person is not willing thoroughly to explore its implications ... Even words spoken by Jesus in Aramaic in the thirties of the first century and preserved in writing in Greek 35 to 50 years later do not necessarily wield compelling or authentic authority over us today. The locus of scriptural authority is not the words themselves. It is Jesus Christ as THE Word of God who is the authority for us to be and to do.”