We get comfortable with a translation and come to understand it but we forget what it is like for a person to read Scripture for the first time. It is possible for us to inadvertently do the same thing by encouraging the use of an English translation that has to be explained by an expert. The church has a long history of withholding access of the Biblical text from the average person. In a time of biblical illiteracy, more readable, and more accessible should be a priority. It is theologically safer and is available to all who can read.

It seems to me that God has intended the second. There are two basic ways to get at the truth of Scripture: one is archeology in the text (digging deep) and the other is flying over the whole landscape (wide reading of the text). Anything to help remedy this is very important to me. Several decades of teaching college freshman makes a trend obvious: we are becoming ignorant of basic Biblical truth. This is first because I think it is a desperate need among Christians. Here’s why: The NLT encourages Bible reading The NLT is the Bible I have been waiting for all my life. One finds out about the goals, methodology, rationale, and in some cases, the scholars who did the translating (as in the NLT). What a person needs to do when evaluating a translation of Scripture is to read its preface. I encourage my students to use the latest edition.

It is true and in the earlier versions of the NLT there was considerable carry over. (You hear about the guy who was reading the book on anti-gravity and couldn’t put it down?) Many people assume the NLT is just an update of that old paraphrase and so haven’t taken a serious look at it. I remember asking my sports crazed friend what he did that Sunday afternoon and he said he got started reading the Living Bible and couldn’t put down. It was the number one selling book in 1972 and 73. The original Living Bible paraphrase by Ken Taylor was published in 1971 and sold over 40 million copies. For about five years now the New Living Translation has been my Bible of choice. I was raised on the KJV and then switched to NASV the year it came out, then to NIV as soon as it was available-one can see my trajectory (nice term, mmm).

I once heard about the guy who explained his experience in Bible college as “three years of study to find out what the KJV meant in English!”īible translation and textual criticism are important to me.

The living bible paraphrased 1971