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The living word

Christianity Today is reporting the death of Ken Taylor. Most of you are scratching your head wondering who the heck Ken Taylor is.

Ken Taylor founded Tyndale House publishers and founded the Christian Booksellers’ Association. But his most unique achievement is “The Living Bible,” a readable Bible paraphrase which has been shared by millions.

When I was growing up, my first copy of The Living Bible (in a youth-oriented paperback edition called “The Way”) was a landmark for me. Here was a Bible I could understand! It sounded relevant and lively and colorful.

Let me backtrack a bit for a few of our readers and explain the difference between a Bible translation and a paraphrase. A translation, whether it’s the old King James Version, the New International Version or the New Revised Standard Version, attempts to translate word-for-word from the original Greek, Latin or Aramaic texts — the oldest and best ones available. There are actually some older, and by implication more authentic, texts available to today’s translators than were available to the KJV translators. Usually, a team of scholars works on the project.

A paraphrase is a slightly different affair. In the case of a paraphrase, the author is looking to convey the meaning of the words. Perhaps a literal translation of the original Greek involves a saying or metaphor that is lost to today’s generation. A paraphrase writer might seek to replace it with an English-language equivalent.

“The Message,” by Eugene Peterson, is probably today’s most popular paraphrase. It omits verse numbers because in some cases the original sentence structure has been reworked to the point that it would be hard to say that here is verse 6 and there is verse 7. (There’s nothing sacred about the numbering system, anyway; it was added by Bible scholars centuries after the original writers.)

Paraphrases are often the work of an individual, such as Ken Taylor or Eugene Peterson, although in both cases the creator submitted his work to scholars for review.

Some people are suspicious of paraphrases because of the notion that they are one step removed from the original text; the need for interpreting the intent and context of the original manuscript gives a chance for personal bias or other corrupting influences to slip in. Those people would rather base everything on a translation, for safety’s sake, and then make it the job of ministers, teachers or scholars to explain any lost metaphors or what have you. That way, even though there’s still a chance for human error to slip in, one speaker or preacher will tend to counterbalance another.

But (even though I carry a translation most of the time) I think paraphrases are incredibly important. If something like The Living Bible or The Message can open someone’s eyes, and make them think of the Bible as a real story about real people, it’s an incredible motivational tool. If it makes people read more of the Bible, or read it more often, that’s a powerful benefit.

Ken Taylor first paraphrased the New Testament and called it “Living Letters.” According to CT, the book became an immediate success after Billy Graham, who recognized its potential, offered copies of it to his TV viewers. Taylor formed Tyndale House to market his paraphrase, and soon branched out into other titles as well, from “The Cross and the Switchblade” to the “Left Behind” series of recent years.

A few years back, the company released “The New Living Translation” — an attempt to blend the scholarly approach of a translation with the readability of a paraphrase.

I often complain about the insularity of Christian publishing — we should be trying to influence the greater culture rather than creating our own subculture — but there’s no question of Tyndale House’s achievements, or Ken Taylor’s.

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