The NIV’s translation decision reflects a broader cultural shift away from sympathy and toward empathy. At one level, this is a very small change, the substitution of one prefix for another. “Sympathy” (and its Latin equivalent, “compassion”) literally means “suffering with” (sym + pathos in Greek, com + passio in Latin; throughout this book, I will use sympathy and compassion interchangeably). “Empathy,” on the other hand, means “suffering in.”
