Published: September 23, 2026 | thefinalconvergence.com
Here is a question almost no Christian has ever thought to ask about the Bible on their nightstand: who owns it? Not the physical copy, the text itself. The words. The translation. Who holds the legal rights to it, who controls what it says, and who makes money every time it is printed, quoted, or revised?
For most of church history the question would have made no sense. But it is one of the most important questions in the modern Bible-version debate, because the answer reveals a set of interests operating on your Bible that have nothing to do with what God actually said.
“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith” (1 Timothy 6:10).
Paul’s warning is not that money is evil, but that the love of it is a root from which every kind of evil grows, and, most soberingly, that some who coveted it “have erred from the faith.” The love of money can bend even the handling of holy things. So when we discover that the modern Bible is a multi-billion-dollar industry of copyrighted, corporately owned, regularly revised products, this verse tells us exactly what to watch for. Not that everyone involved is corrupt, but that commercial incentive is a force, and it does not point toward fidelity.
The One Bible No One Owns
Start with the exception, because it throws everything else into relief. The King James Bible is in the public domain. Its copyright expired centuries ago. No one owns it. No corporation profits specifically from its printing. No publishing house controls its content, charges licensing fees to quote it, or has any financial incentive to revise it. It can be printed, quoted, distributed, preached, and shared freely by anyone in the world, in any quantity, for any purpose.
Every major modern translation is the exact opposite. Each one is copyrighted intellectual property, owned by a corporation or foundation, generating revenue through sales and licensing fees, and subject to the editorial control of whoever holds the copyright. That is not a peripheral detail. It is central, because copyright creates incentives, and those incentives operate on the text.
What Copyright Does to a Bible
When a Bible is under copyright, three things follow, and none of them has anything to do with accuracy or fidelity.
First, the copyright holder has the legal right to control what the text says, and therefore a direct institutional interest in what it says. Second, the holder generates revenue whenever the text is reproduced commercially: in books, bulletins, websites, apps, curriculum, anything exceeding the “fair use” threshold the copyright itself defines. Third, and this is the one most people never consider, the holder has an incentive to revise the text regularly, because each revision creates a new copyright, extending commercial control and generating a fresh wave of sales.
Sit with that third point. There is a built-in financial reason to keep changing the Bible. Not a theological reason. Not a manuscript-discovery reason. A commercial one. A public-domain text has no such engine driving it toward perpetual revision. A copyrighted one does.
The NIV: A Product of News Corp
The NIV is the best-selling Bible in America and has been for decades. Its underlying rights are held by Biblica (formerly the International Bible Society), but the exclusive commercial rights belong to Zondervan, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, which is itself a subsidiary of News Corp, the global media conglomerate founded and controlled by Rupert Murdoch.
HarperCollins is one of the largest publishers on earth, with revenues in the billions and a catalog spanning every genre. And here is a documented, publicly verifiable fact the manuscript states plainly: under the HarperCollins umbrella and its subsidiaries, the same corporation that holds commercial rights to the best-selling Bible in America also publishes The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey, the founding document of the Church of Satan, along with extensive pornographic content through other imprints.
This must be stated carefully, exactly as it should be. It does not mean any NIV translator is personally associated with those publications, or that the scholars who worked on the NIV have any connection to that content. But it does mean the corporation that profits from the NIV, controls its licensing, and ultimately shapes its editorial direction is a secular entity with no theological commitment whatsoever to the text it sells. From that corporation’s perspective, the NIV is a product, a successful product, whose success depends on remaining broadly acceptable to a large market. And that creates real, documentable pressure on editorial decisions. When the 2011 revision introduced gender-neutral language across hundreds of passages, supporters called it scholarly improvement; critics noted the timing coincided with peak commercial pressure for inclusive language in publishing. Without accountability to a fixed, unchanging textual tradition, there is no way to cleanly separate genuine scholarship from market-driven accommodation.
The ESV: The “Permanent” Text That Lasted Three Months
The ESV is owned by Crossway, a non-profit evangelical publisher in Wheaton, Illinois, and it is a fairer case, because Crossway is not part of a secular conglomerate and its mission is explicitly Christian. It has been embraced in Reformed and conservative circles as the “serious,” “literal” alternative to the NIV, with enormous commercial success of its own.
But the ESV supplies the single clearest illustration of the problem. In September 2016, Crossway announced that the ESV text was now permanent, committing to “never again introduce textual changes to the ESV Bible.” The permanent edition would be the final, definitive version, so that churches building their memorization programs and curriculum around it could do so knowing the text would never shift beneath them.
Three months later, Crossway reversed the decision entirely. Facing backlash over specific 2016 choices, particularly in Genesis 3:16 and 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, it announced it would return to the earlier text and recall the permanent edition. The “permanent” text was itself revised. This is a nearly perfect picture of the underlying instability: committees change their minds, respond to pressure, and reverse in December what they declared final in September. The text of Scripture, under the doctrine of preservation, is not subject to that. What God has settled in heaven cannot be unsettled by an editorial committee, however well-intentioned.
The NASB, and the Pattern
The NASB, owned by the Lockman Foundation, long respected as the “scholar’s Bible” for its literal approach, followed the same arc: in 2020 it too was revised to introduce gender-neutral language and soften renderings considered too literal for contemporary readers. Like the NIV and ESV, it follows the Nestle-Aland critical text; like them, it is subject to ongoing revision at the discretion of its owner; like them, it generates licensing revenue from commercial use. The pattern repeats because the incentive structure is the same.
And that structure is enormous. The worldwide Bible-publishing industry generates billions of dollars annually. Consider the machinery: a publisher owns a copyrighted translation, so it has a financial interest in selling it; selling it means getting it adopted by churches, seminaries, and individuals; adoption is driven by familiarity, the version the pastor preaches, the small group studies, the children’s curriculum uses; and once a translation is adopted institutionally, switching carries real cost. The publishers know this. The commercial relationship between Bible publishers and church institutions gives the publishers significant leverage over what Christians read.
The Question to Ask
None of this means every editorial decision is commercially motivated. Many are made in good faith by scholars who genuinely believe they are improving the text, the same careful disclaimer this series has kept throughout. But the commercial context is real, and it is not neutral. The love of money is a root, and it grows quietly.
So the question every Bible reader should ask is not only what does this translation say? but who controls what this translation says, and what are their interests? When you ask it, the contrast is stark. The King James Bible has no such interests attached. No corporation profits from its printing. No committee controls its content. No licensing fee is required to quote it. It cannot be revised for a new copyright, recalled after three months, or bent toward a market. In the most literal sense, it is free, and its freedom from commercial and institutional control is one of its most underappreciated qualities. A text no one owns is a text no one can quietly change to serve an interest.
Tomorrow, Part Three begins: what is actually missing. The verses that are in one Bible and gone from another, and the pattern in what disappeared.
“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith.” — 1 Timothy 6:10 KJV
📖 This post is adapted from Which Bible Can You Trust? Scripture, Manuscripts, and the Quest for the Most Trustworthy Text. If it helped you, the full book is available on Amazon — or you can support this ministry directly.
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