Excerpt from "Answers ToYour Bible Version Questions"
© 2002 by David W. Daniels

Question: Can I read the NIV and still be saved?

Why do KJV only Christians believe that those who read the NIV are stupid, that somehow they don't know that the Lord Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the second person of the Godhead, part of the Trinity, that no man can be saved outside belief in the atoning work of Jesus Christ and his shed blood for the remission of our sins? Word twisters and people without common sense who don't read things in their proper context tend to have an "us against everyone else" attitude. I don't see where the NIV, NASB, NKJV pervert the doctrines of church Jesus began. Your arguments only serve to divide Christians by placing doubt where none should be. I came to Christ through a Chick Tract when I was 12, and believe it is an essential ministry. Everything about your organization and what you are doing for the Kingdom of God is admirable, but this continue bashing of those who are not KJV believers only tend to ruin what you are doing in the first place. I challenge you to show me that I am lost and am going to hell because I read the NIV, you won't have a leg to stand on.

Answer: I know no person who gauges Christianity (salvation, I mean) by which Bible he reads.

I too, as you, have a Chick Tract to thank for my salvation, as I do Almighty God. But when I got saved, I was immediately turned to the NASV. I didn't lose my salvation. Then I read the ASV 1901. I didn't lose my salvation. Then I read the RSV, the NKJV, then the NIV, then the NKJV again for another decade. I have been saved over 21 years, and I guarantee you, I never lost my salvation for reading another Bible, even when I spent time reading the Roman Catholic New American Bible, and the Jesuit-written Douay-Rheims, the latter because it was SO SIMILAR to the United Bible Society's 3rd edition Greek Text.

Salvation is based on the shed blood of our precious Lord and Saviour, God the Son and Son of God, Jesus Christ, and faith in His atoning death. It is NEVER based upon a preference of book reading!

If anyone has said that, then almost all of us at Chick Publications would be going to hell, for having read the "other" Bibles.

That said, I cannot then say that "all Bibles are OK." Have you read the Jehovah's Witnesses' Bible? One day I read to my church a number of verses. I asked them if they sounded right. None agreed. They agreed to a one that something was wrong. Then I showed them the camouflaged Bible I read from was a JW's New World Translation. Everyone was relieved. Then I told them: "Every verse you heard is essentially the same in the NIV." Mouths were stopped. People gasped. It was a great effect! I had made a point.

But I'm not some dyed-in-the-wool, born in the Appalachians (not to offend anyone from there), raised in a FundaMENTAList church and never grown beyond my instilled doctrines Christian, either.

I got my Bachelors of Arts at what is now called Hope University, Fullerton, California, in Linguistics and Bible. I got my Masters of Divinity degree at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California, in General Theology, majoring in Linguistics. I took the three year Summer Institute of Linguistics courses with Wycliffe Bible Translators. I was top Greek student in Bible college and walked into Advanced Greek in seminary, thrilling my ASV/NIV/NASV using denomination. After that, I spent years as a curious post-graduate, buying books about the co-called Majority Text (Hodges/Farstad), the newer Nestles/UBS Greek texts, buying copies of ancient versions, etc. No one who has known me the last two decades can deny that. I am far from an ignoramous on these issues, to be blunt.

When one (count them: ONE) of my friends brought up the issue of the King James (he's a full-grown father, grandfather, college-educated, etc.), I really disagreed, but he prayed for me anyway! He would bring up a small thought, a seminal idea, and I would (as is my nature) go crazy looking up references, versions, Greek, Hebrew, linguistics and history. (Funny I'm so big on history now: I got a C in History years ago. I guess I wanted to find out the truth, and I just got better at it.) Gradually he started making points with me.

I spent years researching the Roman Catholic religion, simultaneously to the Bible history and version issue. A few years ago, the research began to dovetail: Roman Catholic names were found involved with what happened to change the Protestant Bible into a Jesuit Roman Catholic Bible.