For more than two years, Peterson devoted all his efforts to The Message New Testament. As he shared his version of Galatians with them, they quit stirring their coffee and started catching Paul’s passion and excitement as he wrote to a group of Christians whom he was guiding in the ways of Jesus Christ. So he began to bring into English the rhythms and idioms of the original ancient Greek-writing straight out of the Greek text without looking at other English translations. Peterson’s parishioners simply weren’t connecting with the real meaning of the words and the relevance of the New Testament for their own lives. I hoped to bring the New Testament to life for two different types of people: those who hadn’t read the Bible because it seemed too distant and irrelevant and those who had read the Bible so much that it had become ‘old hat.'” I knew that the early readers of the New Testament were captured and engaged by these writings and I wanted my congregation to be impacted in the same way. Writing straight from the original text, I began to attempt to bring into English the rhythms and idioms of the original language. Why was The Message written? The best answer to that question comes from Eugene Peterson himself: “While I was teaching a class on Galatians, I began to realize that the adults in my class weren’t feeling the vitality and directness that I sensed as I read and studied the New Testament in its original Greek.
It can purchased through Amazon, in either a full Bible translation, or just New Testament. 115 biblical scholars from 22 faith traditions worked as translators to create a Bible both by and for the Church. It is one of the newest translations on the market, whose tag line is: ‘a fresh translation to touch the heart and mind’. Publisher: Common English Bible (October 1, 2010) Below is a list of some of the more popular Bible Translations used by various denominations: The point is to find a contemporary translation that you find ‘speaks’ to you and touches your heart and thought in a way that awakens them to the spiritual meaning within. NLT: “Then David died and was buried in the City of David.”Īs in many other specific verses, the NLT (‘functional’) more accurately conveys the meaning in English than the KJV and NIV (both ‘formal’ equivalence). NIV: “Then David rested with his fathers and was buried in the City of David.” KJV: “So David slept with his fathers, and was buried in the city of David.” English) the closest equivalent in both meaning and style of the original Hebrew and Greek (and Aramaic). The goal here is to produce in the reader’s language (i.e. Also referred to as ‘dynamic equivalence’.