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Among his mail one foggy Oxford morning, C. S. Lewis found a letter-cum-manuscript from J. B. Phillips, vicar of the Church of the Good Shepherd in London. He didn't know the man, but the vicar had said some nice things about his books and broadcasts.
As for the enclosed manuscript, well, with bombs falling and sirens wailing and buildings collapsing all around, London wasn't so unlike first-century Rome, at least from the Christians' point of view. Paul's epistles seemed right to the point.
Trouble was, the young people in Phillips' parish couldn't understand the Authorized Version. What they needed was something just a little easier to read. Hence, his own attempt at Colossians. What did Lewis think?
Immediately he put the translation to the test.
"Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ," read the eighth verse of the second chapter in the Authorized Version.
"Be careful that nobody spoils your faith through intellectualism or high-sounding nonsense," read Phillips' rendition of the same passage. "Such stuff is at best founded on men's idea of the nature of the world, and disregards Christ!"
Lewis thought he knew Colossians pretty well, but this Paraphrase, for that's what it was, seemed to hit the nail right on the head. He then read the Phillips version from beginning to end. "It was like seeing a familiar picture after it's been cleaned," he wrote to the good vicar.
That was in 1943. Subsequent sales of Phillips' New Testament in Modern English proved that there were millions of Christians on both sides of the Atlantic who needed and appreciated the restoration. And so the periodic restoration process has continued down to our own day.
In 1971, Kenneth Taylor in the Living Bible: "Don't let others spoil your faith and joy with their philosophies, their wrong and shallow answers built on men's thoughts and ideas, instead of on what Christ has said."
In 1982, the Authorized Version itself got a facelift by Thomas Nelson Publishers and a new title, the New King James Version: "Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ."
In 1993, Eugene Peterson in The Message: The New Testament in Contemporary English: "Watch out for people who try to dazzle you with big words and intellectual double-talk. They want to drag you off into endless arguments that never amount to anything. They spread their ideas through the empty traditions of human beings and the empty superstitions of spirit beings. But that's not the way of Christ."
In 1996, Taylor's Living Bible, revised and retitled the New Living Translation: "Don't let anyone lead you astray with empty philosophy and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the evil powers of this world, and not from Christ."
Biblical Paraphrase, apparently, is here to stay—a tribute to our vibrant, ever-renewing language, the most flexible the world has ever known.
So why have so many been so quick to bury Paraphrase?
I must confess that I myself am a recent convert. Like many before me, I'd always thought Paraphrase was bonkers. Why? Because my intellectual betters had told me so, and I had no occasion to say them nay. But then I began doing into English some of Christianity's Latin classics. I fully intended to do literal translations, of course, and yes, more superbly literal than any of my predecessors had managed, but I soon found myself faltering. What my betters never told me in so many words was that all translation is all too errant. Soon thereafter I concluded that if err I must, then I'd prefer to err on the side of Paraphrase rather than Literalese.
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