The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language by Eugene H. Peterson (Navpress, 2002)
It's my habit to read through the Bible at a rate of approximately once per year. My last cycle, however, took twice that long, thanks to the version I chose to read. I like to switch up versions, both for the variety and for the slightly different perspectives each brings. This time I chose the very popular The Message, which, as its Wikipedia article notes, "is a highly idiomatic translation, using contemporary slang from the US rather than a more neutral International English, and it falls on the extreme dynamic end of the dynamic and formal equivalence spectrum." In other words, more a paraphrase than a translation.
I'm glad I read it, and I'm sure The Message has been helpful to many, but for me the effort was like slogging through mud. This is the Bible with all the poetry, beauty, and life sucked out of it—not to mention that "contemporary slang" sounds dated the moment it hits print. In the Wikipedia article you can see how Peterson's interpretation of a couple of popular passages stands up against both the King James and the New International translations.
Did I say The Message is a paraphrase rather than a translation? More than that, it's a sermon from beginning to end. Not that I should have been surprised, since Eugene Peterson was a pastor, and the book arose from a lifetime of crafting Bibilical texts into sermons.
Let's just say that I'm glad I have a pastor who occasionally speaks over my head and expects me to rise to the challenge. Peterson's efforts feel condescending and often made me wince.
Dorothy L. Sayers wrote,
The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man. ... We may call that doctrine exhilarating or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all.
The greatest crime of The Message is that it makes the whole Biblical epic sound dull—and like a made-up sermon illustration rather than the messy record of real, historical people that it is.
My apologies to those who find The Message inspiring and exciting. From all I've heard of Eugene Peterson, he was an amazing person, pastor, and scholar. I'm sure his books, including The Message, have been helpful to many. Tastes differ, and I'm thankful we have such a variety of resources available to us.
But for my next cycle, I'm going with the good ol' Revised Standard Version (RSV). Not the new one (NRSV), which also makes me wince, but the version of the book presented to me by "the Church School of the First Reformed Church of Scotia, New York, June 4, 1961." Well, technically, not that book, since most of my reading is done through YouVersion's Bible App. But that version. It's clean, it's poetic, and it should be a good palate cleanser. We'll see if I still feel that way after a year.
I find it interesting that he used to call it a paraphrase, but then, at least from my view, once it was more accepted, then he started calling it a translation.
