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Eugene Peterson has worked on The Message, his rendering of the Bible in contemporary language, for 12 years. This year he can celebrate the arrival of The Message as a complete text. Peterson's work has won praise from diverse readers—from the Protestant contemplative Richard J. Foster to football coach Bill McCartney, and from theologian J. I. Packer to rock star Bono. The Message began taking shape when Peterson was leading a Bible study at the church he founded, Christ Our King Presbyterian in Bel Air, Maryland, and he sought to make Galatians more accessible to his class. After John Stine, an editor at NavPress, read Peterson's treatment of Galatians, he suggested that Peterson begin writing similar versions of other New Testament books. Peterson recently spoke by phone with CT associate Douglas LeBlanc on the challenges of writing a paraphrase translation.

Was there a breakthrough moment when you became convinced that you should expand your work from Galatians to the rest of the New Testament?

I was a reluctant participant in this. I really didn't think that I could do it or that it could be done. But I agreed with my editor, John, that I would. In some ways Paul is easy. There's a lot of challenge to Paul, but the gospels are something quite different. There's a kind of clean, lucid clarity to them, and I just didn't think I could do that. But I agreed to do 10 chapters of Matthew and then let John decide whether he thought we could do this. And so it was just as bad as I thought it would be. It was very wooden, and it just wasn't working. I just kind of let go and became playful. And that was when the Sermon on the Mount started. I remember I was down in my basement study, and I did the Beatitudes in about 10 minutes. And all of a sudden I realized this could work.

Did anyone who read the early versions make significant suggestions?

I sent a few pages to my son; he was in graduate school at the time. It came back, and he had all these words circled with the initials TC in the margin. I called him up and said, "Leif, what is tc?" He said, "Tired cliché." I said, "How do you define a cliché?" And he said, "If I've heard it once, it's a cliché."

Do you sometimes use The Message for your own devotional reading?

My wife does, but I don't. Actually, I don't want this to sound wrong, but for most of my adult life I have read the Bible in Greek and Hebrew. I still do that. When I finished the New Testament, I really couldn't read The Message. It was like I lived in that world, and I didn't know if it was going to be accepted. I just put it away. But occasionally now I'll pick it up and remember what I was doing.

What are the challenges of translating Scripture into the language of the street?

It's very different than trying to give a literal translation. With a conventional translation you're trying to be as close to the original culture and grammar and Greek syntax and Hebrew syntax as you can be, and invite the reader to enter that world and understand it in those terms. When you're doing a paraphrase translation like I've done, the demand is not on your demonstrating that world, although you kind of do that, but there's more of an imagination and a poetic aspect to it, because you're trying to recreate those rhythms or those images and metaphors in this culture. I don't think I could have done this if I wasn't a pastor.

What advice would you give to anyone who attempts a paraphrase?

It's interesting that my two most well-known predecessors, J. B. Phillips and Ken Taylor, had the same context to work in as I had. Phillips was a pastor, and Taylor was a father and a layperson. Phillips did his first thing for a youth group, and Taylor did his for his children. I think if there's any counsel for this kind of translation work, you just have to be immersed in the everyday. You don't go off to an ivory tower someplace and surround yourself with dictionaries and grammars. Although you've got to know those things, those are a presupposition; that's not the world you immerse yourself in.

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October 7 2002, Vol. 46, No. 11