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For more than two years, Eugene Peterson devoted all his efforts to The Message New Testament. His primary goal was to capture the tone of the text and the original conversational feel of the Greek, in contemporary English. He hoped to bring the New Testament to life for two different types of people. The first group were those who hadn't read the Bible because it seemed too distant, irrelevant, and antiquated. The second group were those who had read the Bible all their lives but now found it "old hat," so familiar that they were no longer startled by the truth of its message.

Some people like to read the Bible in Elizabethan English. Others want to read a version that gives a close word-for-word correspondence between the original languages and English. Eugene Peterson recognized that the original sentence structure is very different from that of contemporary English. He decided to strive for the spirit of the original manuscripts to express the rhythm of the voices, the flavor of the idiomatic expressions, the subtle connotations of meaning that are often lost in English translations.

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I take issue with you. Peterson has no true understanding of Hebrew and has no Ruach to guide him in his translation. I teach biblical Hebrew and have analyzed the message and it is in serious error with no basis in the biblical text. Period.

Here we go again, I thought. We'll be trying to decipher what spirit and flesh really mean in this context, etc., etc. So I picked up The Message, a relatively new translation of the Bible I had received, and I read the same verses from Paul: "Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God and what he is doing. And God isn't pleased at being ignored ... "

Wham! It was so clear, as if Paul himself had rung the doorbell, come in, pinned me against the wall and said, "Time to get your act together, my brother in Christ." And he wasn't smiling. Our group listened to both versions of Romans at our meeting a few days later, and there was unanimous agreement that The Message carried Paul's message in a sensible, powerful, personal new way.

The Message is relatively unknown to Catholics because it is a Protestant Bible. It was translated by a Protestant scholar, omits several books that are in Catholic versions, was published by a Protestant outlet, NavPress, and until now, was not reviewed or promoted in Catholic media. The translations for The Message were published in parts over a nine-year period between 1993 and 2002, when the full work was released.

Griffin said he used the Catholic-approved New Latin Vulgate as the basis for his translations. The Latin was no problem for him, he said, but finding English expressions that were both faithful to the Latin meaning and suitable for a contemporary audience was a challenge.

"I discovered The Message by accident some years ago," explained Pierce. "I ran across an art book that contained several incredible images from the New Testament in The Message translation. I was blown away. I began to use it in my writings and encouraged my authors to do the same."

The Message translation is certainly not a literal one. It has been called an idiomatic translation, a paraphrasal translation, a rendering of the Bible using conversational language and figures of speech. Some critics have labeled it a "watered-down," distorted message, even a "comic book" Bible.

As I became more familiar with the book, I began to see that this is not a new "English" translation of the Bible; we have had more than two dozen of these published in the 20th and 21st centuries. The Message is very clearly a modern "American" translation.

The man who did the original translation, Eugene H. Peterson, does not dispute such criticism. His intent, he told NCR, was to write using the contemporary, even colloquial idioms of Americans today. He admits he thereby loses some of the historical and cultural flavor of the original writings. For that reason, he said, "I do not recommend that passages from The Message be read at church services, and I feel uneasy whenever I hear it's being used that way."

His translation is not a study Bible, he noted, but rather a "reading Bible," aimed at helping Christians see an old message in a new way or sparking interest in seekers who found traditional Bibles boring.

Peterson, 81, is a retired Presbyterian minister, teacher, university professor, author of some 30 books, and translator living in a cabin in Montana. While pastoring a congregation in Bel Air, Md., in the 1980s, he became frustrated at the inability of the standard translation of the Epistle to the Galatians to arouse his people's concern about problems in society like race relations and the sagging economy. "I got mad," he said. So he got out the original Greek and did his own, more contemporary translation.

Following the introduction, this is how Paul begins in the Peterson rendition: "I can't believe your fickleness -- how easily you have turned traitor to him who called you by the grace of Christ, by embracing a variant message! It is not a minor variation, you know; it is completely other, an alien message, a no-message, a lie about God."

When the editors began talking about the Old Testament, Peterson said he thought, "Maybe this is my life's work." And that's how it's turned out. It took him, he said, almost 20 years to achieve the translation of the entire Bible, though there were intervals when he was invested in theological writing and pastoring. He said he consulted some 80 biblical scholars who pored over his work and made suggestions.

To give a bit of context, following is a short video of Eugene Peterson wherein he discusses his philosophy of Bible translation for The Message. This video is from the 2007 Symposium by the Sea at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, CA. You can watch the full interview @UC TV, but for the sake of brevity, I have included only the part of the interview related to his translation.

This post will lay out some areas of concern that all pastors, teachers, and followers of Jesus should take very seriously. In future posts I will offer both guidelines on how to select a reliable Bible text and offer some of my own guidelines for what makes a good translation.

Virtually anyone can read this Bible with understanding . The reason that new translations are made every couple of generations or so is to keep the language of the Bible current with the common speech we use, the very language in which it was first written.

While doing detailed work in the Greek New Testament and in several English translations, I have repeatedly found this to be true. For the past several months, I have been working with a team of scholars on a Bible app (Wave Parallel Bible) that links the words in the original Greek and Hebrew to their equivalent words and phrases in nine major Bible translations, including The Message. I often am unable to link certain portions of The Message to anything in the Greek text, which means that meaning was added. At other times, ideas found in the Greek text cannot be linked to anything in The Message, which means that meaning has been lost. I have had no problems linking any other translation to the Greek text, including dynamic" translations such as the NIV and NLT.

I want to stress that the author of The Message, Eugene Peterson, is highly respected. I hear only good things about him from those who know him. He produced The Message out of a desire to help the Bible come alive for readers. So this post is not meant to attack him, but rather to express my concern that The Message should not be used as if it were a translation. Most Christians will have some difficulty recognizing when meaning is being added or subtracted, and so I hesitate to recommend it. The Message may be helpful as a supplement for careful readers of Scripture who compare it to standard translations and are aware of how often it adds meaning and loses meaning.

The following article compares verses in The Message Bible by Eugene H. Peterson to the New American Standard Bible, the King James Version, and the English Standard Version. The purpose of this comparison is to highlight just how different The Message is from these translations with the hope of demonstrating that it not a trustworthy version. I understand that The Message was not translated with the same goals in mind. Therefore, I am not surprised by the differences; but I am concerned about them. For more information about my concerns please see my post A Creative But Inaccurate Message and my article Analysis Of The Message Bible: Justification and Sanctification.

Verse 29 is creative, but far from a standard translation. The idea of someone luring someone into a bad situation is gone and instead we have a strange reference to calloused climbers and stabbed grandmothers.

According to the 6th edition, an entry on the reference list is not required for Bible verses quoted or paraphrased. Instead, place an in-text citation after the quotation or paraphrase, indicating on the first reference the version or translation used.

The Message Bible translation by Eugene H. Peterson is a paraphrase of the scriptures using modern English, the author claims he is trying to make the Bible understandable to the average person. There are many issues I have with the Message translation, but for the sake of space I am only listing three of them.

Your article caught my eye because The Message has never sat well with me, precisely because, as you point out, it is a paraphrase and not a formal translation. This should be emphasized whenever a preacher or teacher quotes from it, I believe. I saw new believers using The Message as their actual Bible during a study, and felt like The Message was robbing them of some choice meat when they read passages from it that were flowery but so watered-down.

Thank you for your comments on The Message, although not very well versed in the bible something in my gut told me that it was wrong. Especially when our own pastor prayed the Lords prayer in Peterson speak. I was appalled and immediately went home and read A LOT . It was then I got on the internet and read A LOT more and studied LOTS. I reached the conclusion that it was very bad and going to deceive a lot more people. Thank you so much. I am not alone. ff782bc1db