How to reference a specific named version/edition of a work like the NIV Bible?

Question

I am aware that there are well-defined referencing methods, such as the MLA format. However, without adhering to MLA format, I wrote the following sentence in an answer on ELU.SE:

Here's a poetic proverb from Solomon's compilation, older than the English language to be sure, but translated idiomatically enough to English in the NIV version of the Bible.

The phrase in question is

the NIV version of the Bible

which, once written, I wanted to revise. I vacilated between leaving it alone and writing

"the NIV Bible"

and after some deliberation, ended up choosing

"the NIV of the Bible"

because expanded, this reads:

"the New International Version of the Bible".

Well, after I was done, a moderator on clean-up duty did a wonderful job tidying up my text and fixing formats. One of the edits included my reference, which is now:

the NIV edi­tion of the Bi­ble

which I had not considered when I was writing, but seems excellent anyhow. However, fully expanded, it reads: "the New International Version Edition of the Bible", which seems repetetive. Version comes from a word meaning "spilling" or "turning over" (https://www.etymonline.com/word/version), very similar in sentiment to edition.

So my question is this: Is there existing custom or a rule in regards to acronym expansion for this style of informal citation? Or is my mod's edit just a correction of style?

I wrongly posted this question on ELU first, but now looking at it again, I do not know if it belongs here. Feel free to opine if it's in the way, but my first impression is that it corresponds to SE's style experts.

Machavity · Answer

Typically things like the NIV, King James, etc, are referred to as translations, since the original works were not in English (Hebrew and Greek were the predominant languages of the Old and New Testaments, respectively) and the multiple variants of the Christian Bible simply differ in how they translate the original material.

Harper Collins (a book publisher that publishes Bibles) puts it like this

How is the NIV translation different from other translations?

Zondervan (also a Bible publisher) says

[T]he New International Version (NIV) is the most widely read Bible translation in contemporary English

You could also get away with just saying "The NIV Bible" in many places.

fev · Answer

Gngram shows that the NIV Bible is most common, whereas it finds no instance of the NIV edi­tion of the Bi­ble, although it looks neat and correct.
Initialisms and acronyms are very commonly used as attributive noun phrases and they are placed before the noun they modify. You get:

The CNN news (Cable News Network News)
a BBC broadcast (British Broadcasting Corporation)
the AIDS syndrome (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome)

and the list is very long (between the parenthesis you can see how the acronyms already contain the word they are followed by).

How to reference a specific named version/edition of a work like the NIV Bible?

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