Answering the Two Common Objections to The Message Bible

Because I work in and around the world of Christian publishing, I often find myself having to enduring some rather bizarre comments about Bible versions. I do my best to correct these, but often I’m not considered as authoritative as some random person they watched on a video, or on a Christian television show.

This week in going through my hoardings, I discovered a single sheet which was no doubt part of larger package used in the early days to introduce The Message Bible. I don’t see an exact date, but this was distributed by the publisher, NavPress.

The first objection commonly raised is that The Message isn’t a true translation. In terms of the translations with which people are most familiar, there is some truth in this. (See below.) But it’s true of all translations to some degree. In the KJV rendering of Romans 6:1-2a we read, “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid…” The term “God forbid;” is a popular colloquialism of the time, much akin to “God save the King!” But God’s name, or the name of any deity for that matter, doesn’t appear in the original languages, nor in any other English translation. It’s not the type of thing Paul would say, as a Jew or or as a Christ-follower. The KJV lapses into paraphrase at this point, and several others.

One linguistics source I checked several years ago expressed some difficulty with the word paraphrase. They basically said, “If you’re taking something in one word-set, and re-stating it for other readers in a different word-set, you are in fact translating.” In the Evangelical world, paraphrase has become a pejorative term, leaving the translation ripe for criticism by those lacking a fuller understanding of how the world of Bible translation operates.

Which brings us back to The Message:

Obviously, a person looking for purity in translation would be best to stick with NASB, but those who get irate when they feel a Bible lacks integrity by the addition of things which strictly speaking are not in the original languages would have greater issues with The Amplified Bible or The Voice.

The second common issue frequently raised is that The Message is the product of a single individual. I don’t remember hearing this so much when J. B. Phillips introduced his New Testament in Modern English or when more recently, N. T. Wright introduced his Kingdom New Testament. Both are respected, though people are free to disagree with Wright’s interpretations that are published elsewhere. Ken Taylor’s original The Living Bible was a one-man production, but Taylor freely acknowledged this and the publishing company he created met this objection head-on with the creation The New Living Translation (NLT) which involved 128+ scholars, but still gets confused with its predecessor by some people.

I will admit The Passion Translation by Brian Simmons is enduring much criticism and has been updated at least twice that I am aware of in a very short period of time. And there are a host of independent translations published each and every year which never make it to the Christian bookstore market, some of which are written by people whose scholarship leans more theologically liberal.

Here’s what I learned — which I didn’t consider before — reading the information sheet:

Academics and scholars use the term peer review to describe the process by which their work is submitted for critique by others, and Eugene Peterson apparently followed this process…

…I think the people trashing The Message Bible are just looking for a fight. They’re the same people who become argumentative on so many fronts, a list of which isn’t needed in these times.

But Peterson himself was apparently surprised the first time he heard of a church using The Message as its core text for scripture readings. He didn’t envision the widespread popularity.

So my advice would be, purchase one, use it, enjoy it, but keep a more formal-correspondence or dynamic-equivalence translation close at hand.

Want to Own the Most ‘Literal’ Bible?

The answer to the above question is, ‘No, you don’t.’ You simply would get nothing out of each sentence. It’s like those words on the puzzle pages of newspapers where you’re given a quotation and asked to put the words in order. Mean you if what I know.

I was thinking about this yesterday reading an article about Bible translations. By that I mean currently existing translations. I tend to nod off during some discussions on translation history, because I’m not really a history guy, and because I consider it sufficient to know that Eve was tempted by a Septuagint in the garden.

So every once in awhile I check out Kouyanet, the blog of Eddie and Sue Arthur, who work for Wycliffe and admittedly don’t write very much about English Bibles. Still, even if you don’t understand everything, if you have an interest in something it’s good to immerse yourself in what other people are talking about, even if you feel like a car wash attendant in a room of automotive engineers.

Anyway, they recently linked to this article, Lost in Translation by David Shaw at the website of The Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches in the UK, and while I personally found the whole article informative, I thought I’d give you a short word-bite from near the end:

…Some argue that because God inspired the words of the original texts that we should try to translate on a word-for-word basis as much as possible. While there is some truth in this, it’s also a rather naïve view of translation. After all, what’s the best translation of “Au revoir”? Well, “Goodbye”. We’ve translated two words with one word, but that’s a good thing because we have clearly conveyed the meaning. To take a biblical example, borrowed from Rod Decker’s excellent brief review of the ESV (see the further reading section below) here’s a word for word ‘translation’ of 2 Corinthians 6:12:

“Not you are being restricted in us you are being restricted but in the intestines of you.”

Of course, that won’t do. And it proves that any translation will have to rearrange and change words in order to convey the meaning. The KJV reflects a more standard English word order but still doesn’t make much sense:

“Ye are not straitened in us, but ye are straitened in your own bowels.”

The ESV moves further away from the Greek word order and imagery:

“You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted in your own affections.”

That makes more sense but the nature of the ‘restriction’ isn’t clear. Enter the NIV, which says:

“We are not withholding our affection from you, but you are withholding yours from us.”

Has this made more significant changes to words of the original? Certainly. But doesn’t this also convey the meaning more clearly and effectively than the other options? Just from this example we can see that every translation has difficult decisions to make, but the great advantages of the NIV – its accessibility and clarity – still stand.

That’s just a sample passage to whet your appetite to finding more reading on the topic of translation.  I hope it resonates somewhere in the intestines of you.

Intelligent comments welcomed, but if you’re an NIV-hater or KJV-onlyist, please resist the temptation.

• Eddie and Sue Arthur previously at Thinking Out Loud: The Politics of Bible Translation March 11, 2012
• and another of my favorite columns by them we linked to in 2008, the whimsical We’re Running Out of Translation Names. (That was our title, they called it English Bible Version Generator.)  July 31, 2008
• or the equally cynical Definitive Guide to Bible Translation Terms. May 31, 2011
• or simply type “Bible Translation” in quotes in this blog’s search bar in the right margin; you’ll find it’s a recurring topic here.