TNIV in Matthew 19:29

Matthew 19:29 And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife [a] or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.
Matthew 19:29 [a] Some manuscripts do not have or wife.

First of all, congratulations to the CBT for moving 'or wife' back into the text from the NIV margin. This is the first of the supposed 7% of changes that were textually based that I've investigated, and it finds the support of the overwhelming majority of manuscripts. Given that it is the harder reading and much more likely to have been purposely omitted, it should have never been in doubt. Certainly there is no doubt that Jesus said 'wife', as Luke 18:29 records.

But bringing back the marginalized wife brings in problems of its own. That is, it demonstrates that the gender sensitivity of the CBT is wholly one-sided. As I have demonstrated in an earlier post, the CBT is eager to read feminine inclusivity into masculine reference, but not masculine inclusivity into feminine reference--thus damning their agenda as feminist despite their vehement protests to the contrary.

Surprisingly, 'wife' was the only referent open to gender inclusion in this passage, as Jesus himself had already specified the inclusion of feminine parents and siblings. But does the CBT really believe that it is OK for a man to leave his spouse for the sake of God's kingdom, but not for a woman to leave hers? If so, Kathryn Kuhlman, who got her hundredfold--and more--in this life, looks to have missed out on inheriting life eternal; while her erstwhile husband, who supposedly left his first wife for the same reason Kathryn later left him, skates in by the skin of his teeth.

Personally, I don't see much difference in who leaves when a marriage is broken up for the sake of the Gospel. But maybe Jesus did. Yet with the one sided approach of the TNIV to gender-sensitive translation, it's impossible to detect gender emphasis in the original text. Let's try a little back-translation (a standard technique in checking the quality of a new Bible translation), and see how close we come to the original NIV.

ONIV text:
And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.

Backtranslated text, removing gender-sensitive language:
And every man who has left houses or brothers or father or sons or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.


Actual ONIV (discrepancies italicized)
And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.

Well, what do you know. The NIV was already fully gender-neutral--nothing was fixed. Furthermore, even the KJV was already correct here too; there are no generic masculines to fix:

And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.

May I suggest something for the next revision of the NIV, to replace that antiegalitarian word 'wife': a word that the CBT themselves use a lot, but has never made its way into any of their translations: spouse.

That should make things equal.

UPDATE 2012: The more things change, the more this thing remains the same. TNIV=NNIV.