About: The Message

In 1992, after 29 years of service at Christ our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland. Eugene Peterson began his paraphrase of The Message^®. Today more than 10,000,000 people are readers of this inspiring version of the Bible.

1. Who is Eugene H. Peterson?

Eugene was born in East Stanwood, Washington, on November 6, 1932. He soon moved to Kalispell, Montana, where he grew up. He is married to Janice Stubbs, and they have three adult children: Karen, Eric, and Leif. Eugene has written and contributed to more than 30 books. Many have called him a pastor's pastor.

After graduate study at Johns Hopkins, Eugene returned to New York Theological Seminary where he taught biblical languages and English Bible. Concurrently, he was associate pastor at the Presbyterian Church in White Plains, New York. This turned out to be a critical transition time for him because he had previously planned to be in academic work. At White Plains he discovered his pastoral vocation.

In 1962 Eugene came to Bel Air, Maryland, as the organizing pastor of a new church, which became Christ Our King Presbyterian Church. In 1991 after 29 years at Christ Our King, he felt God was calling him to devote more time to writing and teaching. He spent one year at Pittsburgh Seminary as writer-in-residence. Much of his work on The Message^® took place during that year as well as the following summer and fall. In January of 1993 he became professor of spiritual theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Colombia. Currently Eugene is a full-time writer and poet. He is Professor Emeritus of Spiritual Theology at Regent College. He continues to work on translating the entire Bible. He lives with his wife in Montana.

Although Eugene is best known in theological and pastoral circles, several of his books, such as A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, have extended his influence to a much broader audience. He has been a regular contributor to magazines read by pastors and scholars as well as popular religious publications. He is often in demand as a guest lecturer and speaker, but he is not an ivory-tower academic, nor does he write merely from the mind. Eugene Peterson's heart is with people.

Because of the extensive amount of time spent with people?in hospitals, over kitchen tables, in parking lots, and from the pulpit?Eugene knows how people think and talk, how they express feelings, how they communicate urgency, frustration, joy, and hope. This understanding of people, coupled with his lifetime of familiarity with Hebrew and Greek, is part of what motivated Eugene Peterson to write The Message^®.

2. What are Eugene Peterson's qualifications?

Eugene Peterson has a passion for the gospel, a lifetime of familiarity with the Greek Scriptures, and scholarly credentials that include a Master's degree in Semitic Languages from Johns Hopkins University. He served as a pastor for 35 years, and approaches the biblical text with the kind of pastoral sensitivity the New Testament writers had for the people to whom they were writing. Peterson is a highly respected writer, with more than 30 books in print. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Spiritual Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia.

When Peterson began work on The Message^® project, he had only the Greek text of the New Testament before him?no commentaries, no English translations. Biblical scholars recognize his intimate knowledge and understanding of the Greek and Hebrew languages. These scholars have observed an authenticity and freshness of insight in The Message^® that comes only when a translator is not biased by the influence of English translations. In addition to being ordained in the Presbyterian Church, in 1958, Eugene holds the following academic degrees:

• B.A. in philosophy from Seattle Pacific University
• S.T.B. from New York Theological Seminary
• M.A. in Semitic Languages from Johns Hopkins University
• D.H.L. (honoris causa) from Seattle Pacific University

3. How and why did work on The Message^® begin?

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. Writing straight from the original text, I began to attempt to bring into English the rhythms and idioms of the original language. 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. 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.’”

HELPING PARISHIONERS CONNECT WITH THE REAL MEANING

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. 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. 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.

NAVPRESS EDITOR NOTICED PETERSON'S GALATIANS

Later on, Peterson included some of his work on Galatians in the book Traveling Light. An editor at NavPress^® read Traveling Light and was so gripped by what he read that he photocopied the book, cut out the Galatians, passages and pasted them together in order. The flow of thought, the emotional wallop of words, and the forcefulness of Paul's letter to the Galatians motivated the editor to write to Peterson in April of 1990 to ask if he would consider translating the entire New Testament.

The idea came at an opportune time. Peterson was contemplating leaving the pastorate at Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland. He felt God was calling him to spend the latter years of his life ministering to a different congregation: readers, who over the years had appreciated his numerous books and dozens of articles. At the same time Peterson decided to make writing his primary vocation and agreed to reword the entire New Testament, Pittsburgh Seminary offered him the post of writer-in-residence.

OVER TWO YEARS SPENT ON JUST THE NEW TESTAMENT

For more than two years, 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 was those who hadn't read the Bible because it seemed too distant, irrelevant, and antiquated. The second group was 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.

INFORMAL AND FORCEFUL

The New Testament read by the early Christians was not a formal, canonized document; it was simply a collection of writings. Paul wrote a letter to Christians in a town he'd worked in. Luke gave a friend a first-person account of his involvement with Jesus. All of the New Testament was written for people in language that was both informal and forceful.

>Those early readers were captured and engaged by these writings. No commentaries were required to make the authors' meanings clear. The people understood what was written. All the people who read the letters of the New Testament were dramatically transformed by what they read?not just the educated elite, but the commoners as well. They were engrossed and challenged and acted what they heard in such a way that the course of history was changed forever. That power, forcefulness, and directness of language is what Eugene Peterson has attempted to recapture in The Message^®.

PETERSON TURNS TO THE OLD TESTAMENT

Proficient in Hebrew as well as Greek, Peterson had translated portions of the Psalms for years as a means of teaching people how to pray. And so The Message^® Psalms was a natural follow-up to the New Testament. Peterson has immersed himself in Psalms for more than 30 years, including two years when he worked on a Psalms commentary. In Peterson's view the psalms sound too smooth and polished in English translation. Although they are grammatically accurate, they often don't communicate the real rhythms or ‘voice’ of the original text as prayers. So he sought to bring out the rough and earthy voice he saw in the psalmist's prayers into ‘American.’

4. Why do we need another version?

Language changes. New words are formed. Old words take on new meaning. There is a need in every generation to keep the language of the gospel message current, fresh, and understandable?the way it was for its very first readers. That is what The Message^® seeks to accomplish for contemporary readers.

The Message^® is a version for our time?designed to be read by contemporary people in the same way as the original koiné Greek and Hebrew manuscripts were savored by people thousand's of years ago. Language is always changing. That's why NavPress^® felt the time was right for a new version. When we hear something over and over again in the same way, we can become so familiar with it that the text loses its impact. The Message^® strives to help readers hear the living Word of God?the Bible?in a way that engages and intrigues us right where we are.

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.

The goal of The Message^® is to engage people in the reading process and help them understand what they read. This is not a study Bible, but rather ‘a reading Bible.’ The verse numbers, which are not in the original documents, have been left out to facilitate easy and enjoyable reading. The original books of the Bible were not written in formal language. The Message^® tries to recapture the Word in the words we use today.

5. Is The Message^® a translation or a paraphrase?

Since Eugene Peterson worked with the text strictly from Greek and Hebrew to English, he did what a translator does by choosing contemporary English words that best express the meaning of the original language. As all translators do, he used interpretative skill in choosing those English words. However, he ‘paraphrased’ the original by selecting language that communicates the style and flavor of the original in Bible times?rather than trying to achieve word-for-word correspondence. The Message^®, then, is a paraphrase from the original languages. Translation is generally thought of as bringing the meaning from one language to another, whereas a paraphrase is usually a rewording of a document within the same language. Yet in one sense all translation involves paraphrasing. There is no clearly distinct line that can be drawn between the two. Sometimes, it takes five English words to bring across the meaning of a single Greek word; other times only one English word is required to communicate five Greek words.

When Eugene began his work on The Message^®, he looked at how scholars had translated Homer from Greek to English. Some had tried to match word for word; others attempted to recreate the poetry of Homer in English. The Message^® leans toward the latter. Eugene's intent was to recapture the tone, to bring out the subtleties and nuances of the Hebrew and Greek languages while keeping a sense of firsthand experience for contemporary readers. He often asked himself, “If Paul were the pastor of my church, how would he say this?” or “If Jesus were here teaching, what would it sound like?”

So is it a translation or a paraphrase? It is probably most accurately called a “translation of tone” or a “paraphrase from the original languages.” It is a bridging of the gap between the original languages and English, and between centuries of time and language change, to bring to us the New Testament as it originally sounded.

Taken from Navpress History and FAQs