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As society changed and the Bible seemed increasingly foreign, a variety of attempts were made to make the Book more accessible.

In the 1940s, J.B. Phillips began producing his New Testament "in modern English," as the title eventually proclaimed. He followed an already established British tradition of offering expansive, interpretive readings of Scripture that tried to lay out in easily understandable language what was said more briefly and pregnantly in Scripture. Phillips's work got many people reading the Bible again, in paraphrase form. In America, the director of Moody Press, Kenneth Taylor, realized that his children were not understanding the Bible as it was devoutly read at the family dinner table. So, on his daily train ride to work, he began to rewrite the family King James Version in language that his kids could understand and enjoy. It turned out that The Living Bible (its eventual name) not only helped the Taylor children but fulfilled the desire of millions of Americans for a Bible that was not difficult, a Bible that made sense to them.

Phillips and Taylor both retold the Bible in familiar, explanatory languageâ"a procedure FE translations imitate. Phillips worked from the original languages; Taylor did not. But they helped pave the way for FE translations.

A Christian missionary translator and linguist, Ernst-August Gutt, believes that there can be several types of translation (one of which is FE), depending on the purpose and audience of the translation. What is crucial is that readers are made aware of what type of translation they are dealing with. A paraphrase or story Bible is not a translation, though it is useful for many readers.

FE translations (again, most Bibles today) often change the language, images, and metaphors of Scripture to make understanding easier. But for serious study, readers need a translation that is more transparent to the "otherness" of Scripture. We need a translation that allows the Bible to say what it says, even if that seems strange and odd to readers at first glance. If God is "other" than we are, we should be willing to work at the "otherness" of the Bible, in order to understand what the Lord is saying through his Word. The purpose of the Bible is not to make Jesus like us, but to make us like Christ. The Bible is designed to change us, to make us different, heirs of Abraham according to the promise fulfilled in Christ (Acts 2).

We need translations for people who are eager and willing to make the effort to overcome the difficulty of reading a book that is in fact foreign to us. Indeed, when we come to serious Bible study, whether in a church group, Sunday school, or college classroom, this type of translation becomes necessary, for we are trying to get as close as possible within the limits of our own language. When the martyr and translator William Tyndale did this, he shaped the English language in ways that were biblical. The KJV translators who inherited Tyndale's work gave the English-speaking world a Bible that shaped its language, life, and faith for hundreds of years. The danger of FE translations is that they shape the Bible too much to fit our world and our expectations. There is a danger that the Bible gets silenced because we have tamed and domesticated it.

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October 22 2001, Vol. 45, No. 13