The Living Bible: For Children Only?

Last january Chicago celebrated my twenty-fifth transatlantic trip with the worst winter in the city’s recorded history.

To counter what my host described fearfully as “cabin fever,” I spent much of my nonworking time during those two months exploring his magnificent library. There I found a bunch of news clippings about the Living Bible from the five years following its 1971 publication; these reactions confirmed the high incidence of lunacy in the evangelical world. As Barbara Stoops put it, “It’s hard to convince some church folk that God didn’t actually present Moses with a richly bound copy of the King James Version up there on Mount Sinai.”

The defense of orthodoxy brings out the worst in some writers; the spirit of 1 Corinthians 16:13 is not necessarily violated by rendering “Quit you like gentlemen.” Infallibility attaches only to Scripture, not to the words of its self-appointed champions. There are times when we have to speak out stoutly for that which we most surely believe, but not in graceless, intemperate language that attacks personalities, impugns motives, and blights fellowship. Ministers of rebuking should recall John Newton’s counsel: “Do it in secret, in season, and in love.”

But back to the LB. To Carl McIntire it was “the worst of all the different new Bibles that have been produced.” A.D. complained that it used the first person in Psalm 132, “whereby David is unjustifiably made the author,” and introduced substitutionary atonement (“a particular and possibly incorrect theory”) into Romans 3:25 and 1 John 2:2. A Texas columnist had another angle. “Can you imagine,” he scoffed, “any English professor urging a modernized version of Shakespeare to meet the modern hippie vocabulary?” The writer went on to plug his own “Bible booklet.”

Some resented the LB’s simplicity. A Toledo newspaper quoted a Bible college professor’s view that the Bible was not intended to be “simple and easy,” that biblical versions produced by a group were superior to those translated only by one man, and that the LB was “originally produced for children.” The Winnipeg Free Press echoed a similar point, but with an added twist: the LB, it objected (whose publishers “are naturally anxious to make as much profit as possible”), “allows simple minds to understand instantly and easily,” but offers no challenge to “those people who have come to believe that reading is an intellectual exercise.”

Another question-begger was a comment on the Roman Catholic-approved edition that had met with a sympathetic reception. Monsignor Joseph G. Bailey, in the North Country Catholic, criticized the bishop who had given it the imprimatur. His reasoning: the LB’s warning against reciting the same prayers over and over as the heathen do (Matt. 6:7) might be a dig at Catholics as well as heathen.

The South-West News-Herald was horrified by the LB’s rendering of Genesis 4:1. “Does this mean,” it asked, “that every time a baby is born in the Bible we have to explain to a child how it was done?” The outraged writer went on to wonder how “those sex-oriented authors” would cope with nursery rhymes. Children could now be told “that Jack and Jill really weren’t thinking about fetching water when they went up the hill,” or enlightened on “why the old woman in the shoe had so many children.”

There was, of course, another side. Jeannie C. Riley of “Harper Valley P.T.A.” fame attributed her conversion to reading “a Bible I could understand.” In 1972 and 1973 the LB was the best-selling nonfiction book in the USA; in 1979 it reportedly accounted for over half of all Bibles sold here. During one summer month in 1974, tourists took 100,000 copies of the LB New Testament from U.S. motel rooms, in response to an invitation from the World Home Bible League. The paraphrase became a major item on sale in J.C. Penney and other stores.

Asked what he would put in a bicentennial time capsule to represent American life in 1976, singer Pat Boone opted for the LB, calling it “the single most important contribution America has made to the world.” As a group of professional athletes left a 1976 White House “Prayer Brunch,” each was presented with a copy of the LB signed by Gerald and Betty Ford. Trans-America runners Tony and Joel Ahlstrom announced that they would give each U.S. senator and congressman a copy in order to call attention to the “real crisis in this nation.”

And not this nation only. The aim of Living Bibles International, a nonprofit ministry, is to put the paraphrase into the 100 major tongues of the world, used by 90 percent of the world’s population, with cassettes made for those who cannot read. Sales of all editions have now topped the 24-million mark.

Kenneth Taylor spent 14 years in preparing his paraphrase. His name does not appear on the cover. “I’m more interested in people reading the Bible than I am in them reading this particular edition of the Bible,” says the man who received the first Nelson Bible Award from one of his business competitors. Improvement on the first text of the LB has been an ongoing process. Taylor has sought advice from expert linguists, and is always grateful for suggestions, some of which have led to the dropping of one or two infelicitous phrases. “For study purposes,” he had earlier advised, “a paraphrase should be checked against a rigid translation.”

In 1974 it was found that more than 37 percent of those who purchased the work were in the 35–49 age category, but for younger people, too, this has become a living Bible. Twentieth-century America has confirmed the words of the sixteenth-century biblical translator after whom Taylor named his publishing house. “I had perceived by experience,” wrote William Tyndale, “how that it was impossible to establish the lay-people in any truth, except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother-tongue.” The success of this book in modern narrative style has also taken people back to the KJV to find how the traditional text puts things.

Conclusion: I disagree strongly with the minister who wanted to do away with all other Bibles and use only the LB. On the other hand, it is indisputable that the LB has done what the KJV, NASB, RSV, and others have failed to do: confront many people with something more than printed propositions—that Word of God which is living, which is personal, and which is Jesus Christ.

J. D. Douglas is an author and journalist living in St. Andrews, Scotland.

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