![]() ![]() letting language inflate into pomposities or artifices that are no longer current with the way we express our ordinary lives.” “For those of us who take the Scriptures seriously as the word of God and the authoritative text by which we choose to live, translation is one of the primary defenses that we have against. He sees it as part of the mission of God’s people. He goes so far as to say it’s a form of sacrilege to speak of God in language that is “inflated into balloons of abstraction or diffused into the insubstantiality of lacey gossamer.”Īnd that is the reason he agreed to provide people with a paraphrase of the Bible that makes sense in contemporary language. In his book on Bible reading, Eat This Book, Eugene Peterson writes about his motivations in writing The Message. At least that’s how my friend has found it. But as a doorway into serious Bible reading, it has been a gift to the church. It’s a rendering of the text, an attempt to make the Bible accessible in the common vernacular. It’s not a reliable translation if that’s what you need. There are many criticisms of The Message, some of them justified. So I changed it again, this time to The Message. It was better, she said, but still somewhat esoteric. I went into the settings and changed it to an NIV and asked her to read a section. When I looked at her phone it was clear the app she had downloaded used the KJV as its default translation. I enquired what translation she was reading, and she looked at me as if I was stupid. “But it makes no sense,” she said, exasperated. ![]() ![]() Of course, the correct answer is to say, “Read the Bible,” which I did.Īnd she took me up on it! A few days later she told me she had taken my advice and downloaded a Bible app on her phone and had tried reading it. “Where can I read more about what Jesus said?” she asked. A death in her family had prompted her to ask questions about life beyond the grave, so we talked about faith in Jesus, and she showed a great deal of interest. Recently, I had a conversation with someone regarding salvation and the afterlife. ![]()
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