On Reading The Message

For many years I’ve made a practice of reading through the Bible in a year. I also like to read as many different versions as possible, for reasons I detail in the link in the previous sentence.

This past year I read through Eugene Peterson’s The Message, which I’d never read before. Since I usually prefer to read versions at the formal end of the spectrum, this choice was unusual for me; Peterson famously sought to make The Message speak in everyday, even casual language. I suppose we could argue over whether this work is a dynamic translation or a paraphrase, but it’s definitely “looser” than the versions I usually read.

A blog post is not the place for a detailed formal book review, but I noticed something in reading this translation that I hadn’t anticipated, something that I suspect would logically affect other similar versions as well.

I was struck from the outset at the general uniformity of style. In most formal Bible translations—indeed, in most literature, period—you get stylistic variations from genre to genre. Narrative is straightforward, descriptive, matter-of-fact. Poetry is much more stylized and terse, denser in meaning and implication. Legal documents are rigidly formal and plain. Speeches are often flowery.

Further, within narrative, different characters have different ways of speaking. Their personalities and character qualities show up in their speech. You learn about the characters from the form of their words as well as their content.

In The Message, a lot of that—maybe most of it—disappears. Abraham sounds like Moses sounds like David sounds like Peter sounds like Paul. Even God talks the same way as everybody else. That’s most evident in dialogue, but it carries over into the prophetic and epistolary literature as well.

When a translation preserves those stylistic differences, you can tell the difference between Peter, the impetuous fisherman, and Paul, the highly trained rabbi from Hellenistic Tarsus. You can tell the difference between Ezra, the ready scribe in the Law of Moses, and Amos, the shepherd from Tekoa. And the more slowly and attentively you read, the more you notice, the more there is to savor.

Now, I think plastering over those stylistic differences lowers the literary quality of the work, and it renders it more difficult for us readers to pick up on the subtleties that were designed into the stylistic variations among the genres and the characters in the Scripture.

That said, I’m a firm believer in making the Scripture accessible to the ploughboy, and if losing those stylistic subtleties were the price of making the Word comprehensible to readers of a given educational or socioeconomic stratum, that’s a price I’d be willing to pay, every time.

But I don’t think that price is necessary. I wish Peterson’s eminently understandable text preserved more of those subtleties.

As I’ve said, I suspect that this is a characteristic of all paraphrases, and likely of translations of the more dynamic sort—those closest to paraphrases. The literary style becomes the style of the translator / paraphraser.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read these works, of course; as one of my college Bible professors commented, the power of the Word of God is not limited by the imperfections of its translators. We ought to read every Bible we can get our hands on. I’ve learned some things from Peterson, as has everyone who has read from The Message.

But works like this should most certainly not be the only Bible translation you read.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash