[chrislee973]

Ah, that's a good idea. I was considering just fully replacing the KJV with the NIV, but for people who want the KJV, having a mapping between the two versions would work. Do the verses between the two versions map each other exactly? Like they cover the same exact thing, just written in a different style?

[chrismorgan]

To do this properly, you have to map versifications, because some systems use different conventions. As the most significant and pervasive example, some systems treat the title of psalms as verse one (French generally does this), while others treat it as separate (verse zero, effectively; English generally does this), so if you just reuse numbers across such transitions you’ll get consistent off-by-one errors. There are quite a few other similar off-by-one errors, and occasionally more, throughout.

https://wiki.crosswire.org/Alternate_Versification is a decent starting point for looking into the topic, with SWORD’s canon_.h files fairly tolerable for showing the number of verses in each chapter. Unfortunately, SWORD has never gone as far as doing proper mapping* between versifications for some reason—they have some basic mapping somewhere or other, but I can’t remember offhand where or what it is, as I only briefly looked into it five years or so ago.

The most significant differences occur when you switch languages (there are quite a few differences if you switch from English to French or to many Indic languages), but there may be some differences between translations within a language too, e.g. SWORD’s NRSV versification has an extra verse in 3 John and Revelation 12 compared to its KJV versification.

[lrvick]

Just remember the NIV translation of The Bible is property of Harper Collins, who is also amusingly the publisher of many tabloids and The Satanic Bible.

I used to distribute a BibleGateway-ripped copy of NIV as a plugin for the open source GnomeSword project and managed to upset both Harper Collins and the open source scholar community. It was absurd and I refused to stop. I dared them to sue me for sharing the Bible as open source... the headlines would write themselves.

FWIIW they never took the bait, but expect empty threat Cease and Desist letters from the Harper Collins legal team.

[pbhjpbhj]

I thought NIV was Zondervan, bought (as you intimate) by News International (Rupert Murdoch). What I hadn't realised is Harper Collins owns Zondervan and Murdoch controls that.

[JasonFruit]

Since a few verses are in the KJV but not the NIV, some would never appear in searches.

[Yeroc]

Yes, for the majority of the English translations verses map to each other exactly with a few minor exceptions. NIV would map virtually exactly.