NIV John 3:16–21 Not red letters?
Hey,
In the NIV I'm not seeing John 3:16–21 in red letters showing them to be the words of Jesus,
They are red however in the ESV.
Any ideas?
Cheers,
Matt
Comments
-
Hi Matt
Matt Leonard said:In the NIV I'm not seeing John 3:16–21 in red letters showing them to be the words of Jesus,
They are red however in the ESV.
I am fairly sure this has been discussed before but can't find the thread.
Do you happen to know if the printed versions of each translation have red letters for that passage? (There is difference of opinion over whether that passage contains the words of Jesus or John's commentary and I wonder if this is being reflected here)
Graham
0 -
Yes, that is because the NIV translators decided that the quote ends at the end of verse 15 (you can see that the quotation marks end there), and that the words in verses 16-21 are the words of the author of the book of John. But they say in a footnote that other interpreters end the quote at the end of verse 21.
That is true of the NIV and TNIV. It was not the case in the 1984 version of the NIV. I have not been able to discover if there are other translations besides the more recent NIVs that make this interpretive decision. I tried asking ChatGPT and it lied to me. [:D] (It said NASB, ESV, NLT, and CSB all do this, which is hogwash.)
0 -
Matt Leonard said:
In the NIV I'm not seeing John 3:16–21 in red letters showing them to be the words of Jesus,
They are red however in the ESV.
Any ideas?
I set up a visual filter with "speaker:Jesus => text coloured red" and applied it in NIV with the result that it did show these verses in red (see screenshot)
This worked even with the Program setting for red colour text was set to "No".Using just the text setting for red colour text in Program setting for text display did however leave that passage v.16-21 in black,even though the other passages in the chapter were coloured in red
Apparently, the verses are tagged to respond to "speaker:Jesus", but seem not tagged to respond to the text colour setting in program settings.
Wolfgang Schneider
(BibelCenter)
0 -
Rosie Perera said:
Yes, that is because the NIV translators decided that the quote ends at the end of verse 15 (you can see that the quotation marks end there), and that the words in verses 16-21 are the words of the author of the book of John. But they say in a footnote that other interpreters end the quote at the end of verse 21.
As Rosie noted, this is an interpretive issue as to where the quote of Jesus ends as the text itself doesn't give absolutely clear guidance. Some commentaries will discuss it. However, a quick scan through the English translations in my library revealed that of all the ones that use red lettering, only the 2011 NIV does not put vv. 16-21 in red.
0 -
Wolfgang Schneider said:
Apparently, the verses are tagged to respond to "speaker:Jesus", but seem not tagged to respond to the text colour setting in program settings.
Right. The Logos supplied tagging is against the Greek and requires a reverse interlinear to map. The red text option is provided by the publisher and is translation dependent.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
0
