It began with one denomination's dissatisfaction. In 1955 the businessman Howard Long, together with the Reverend Peter De Jong, pressed the Christian Reformed Church to produce a Bible in contemporary English, and in 1957 the CRC endorsed a committee to study the idea. The National Association of Evangelicals had started a similar project of its own the same year. The two bodies joined forces: a joint committee sent out invitations in 1964 to a translation conference, which met in August 1965 at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois, and resolved to form "a continuing committee of fifteen" to carry the work forward. That standing committee became the Committee on Bible Translation. In 1967 the New York Bible Society — since renamed Biblica — took over as sponsor and hired the scholars who would do the translating.
Nothing here descends from an older English Bible. Where the King James Version, the Revised Version, the American Standard Version and the World English Bible form a single chain of revisions in this corpus, the New International Version was translated afresh straight from the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek: the Old Testament from the Masoretic Hebrew text, with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint and other early witnesses consulted; the New Testament from the eclectic critical Greek text represented in the United Bible Societies and Nestle-Aland editions, not the Textus Receptus that stands beneath the Geneva Bible and the King James here. The committee of fifteen grew, over roughly a decade, into a project drawing on more than a hundred scholars from several English-speaking countries and many denominations. Their stated aim was a translation that held to the accuracy of the original wording without reading like a word-for-word transcript of it — a balance usually classed as dynamic equivalence, steering between a strict literal rendering and a loose paraphrase.
The New Testament appeared first, in 1973; the complete Bible followed on 27 October 1978; a light revision came in 1984. The text changed more substantially in 2011, when a fuller revision replaced both the 1984 printing and the 2005 Today's New International Version, retiring them both in favour of the single text that has stood since. That 2011 text is the one held in this corpus — the year the catalogue card shows. Biblica, Inc. holds the copyright throughout; Zondervan publishes it in the United States and Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom.
Its place in this reader is a quiet kind of central. Set the interface to English and this is what opens — the King James Version and Revised Version pages in this corpus each say so themselves, pointing here as the edition you switch away from rather than the one you land on. Because it revised nothing, the corpus records no parent for it: open a lineage rung under a New International Version verse and it goes straight down to the original-language floor marked ≈, the same as for the Berean Standard Bible, with one difference worth knowing. That floor's Greek witness is the Textus Receptus, and the Textus Receptus is not what this translation's New Testament was actually made from — the floor stands in for "the original Greek" in general, not for this committee's own working text. One more thing sets it apart from most of its English shelf-mates: it is licensed, not public domain, the same standing as the New American Standard Bible 2020, where the Berean Standard Bible, the Geneva Bible, the King James Version, the Revised Version and the World English Bible are all free to copy outright.