Preface
Before I get into the heart of my review of The Message, I want to offer an important comment regarding Eugene Peterson the man. I do believe that Peterson has compromised his integrity and the integrity of Scripture in allowing The Message to be published as a Bible translation rather than a commentary. However, as is the practice of some, I do not stand in judgement of his salvation. I have no reason to doubt Peterson is a brother in Christ Jesus.

As an aside, Peterson’s photo reminds me of Burl Ives playing Frosty the Snowman; and how can anyone not love a combination like that?!  All kidding aside, I do see Peterson as a brother who has made some serious mistakes; but a brother nonetheless. The following critique is focused on the quality of Peterson’s work, not his eternal relationship with God.

Introduction
Since the full release of The Message in 2002, Eugene Peterson’s work has certainly captured the attention and passion of many readers. Almost immediately I noticed kids in my youth group and adults in my church turning to The Message as their primary translation. I also observed pastors, including the popular teacher Rick Warren, using The Message as their primary text for preaching. As a man given the responsibility to teach God’s Word, I responded by beginning my own investigation of Peterson’s work so that I could give the proper spiritual direction to the people who look to me for guidance.

In the past five years, I have written and talked numerous times about my concerns over The Message. I have made a good faith effort to expose what I perceive to be the deceptive and sometimes hypocritical marketing techniques employed by Peterson. In this same time, sales of The Message have soared. Emboldened by the growing market, publishers have developed entire curriculum that depends solely upon The Message as the primary text. Given these trends, I find it necessary to publish again a simple and clear exposition showing why readers must use caution when reading The Message.

This post will lay out some areas of concern that all pastors, teachers, and followers of Jesus should take very seriously. In future posts I will offer both guidelines on how to select a reliable Bible text and offer some of my own guidelines for what makes a good translation.

The vision for Peterson’s work is expressed well in this direct quote

“While I was teaching a class on Galatians, I began to realize that the adults in my class weren’t feeling the vitality and directness that I sensed as I read and studied the New Testament in its original Greek. Writing straight from the original text, I began to attempt to bring into English the rhythms and idioms of the original language. I knew that the early readers of the New Testament were captured and engaged by these writings and I wanted my congregation to be impacted in the same way. I hoped to bring the New Testament to life for two different types of people: those who hadn’t read the Bible because it seemed too distant and irrelevant and those who had read the Bible so much that it had become ‘old hat.’”

Before I post some of the problems with the actual text of Peterson’s Message, I think it is important to give a quick survey of some of the underlying problems with his approach.

Problems With Peterson’s Philosophical Approach

1. Peterson’s assertion that the New Testament was written in the “street language” of the day is misleading.
Arthur L. Farstad writes:

As a Bible translator and editor myself, I must disagree. Yes, God did use the koine or common Greek dialect of the first century. However, it was written by men whose minds were saturated with the truth and beauty of the OT Scriptures. Also, who would say that the Sermon on the Mount, the Upper Room Discourse, Romans 8, First Corinthians 13, the Book of Hebrews, or Revelation 5—to choose a few famous texts—are in “street language”? (Journal of the Grace Evangelical Society Volume 9: vnp.9.2.71)

By “updating” the Scripture in a modern “street” language, Peterson removes the historical and religious context resulting in a book far removed from the day and culture in which it is written. This qualitative decision may give some readers a fun reading experience, but it will not give a realizable understanding of the Scripture.

2. Peterson has confused the mission of the Holy Spirit with the mission of a Bible translator.
As Peterson moved from seminary teacher to pastor, he encountered a congregation that had little interest in reaching the Scripture. In the introduction to The Message he writes:

“The first noticeable difference was that nobody seemed to care much about the Bible, which so recently people had been paying me to teach them. Many of the people I worked with now knew virtually nothing about it, had never read it, and weren’t interested in learning. Many others had spent years reading it but for them it had gone flat through familiarity, reduced to clichés. Bored, they dropped it. And there weren’t many people in between. Very few were interested in what I considered my primary work, getting the words of the Bible into their heads and hearts, getting The Message lived. They found newspapers and magazines, videos and pulp fiction more to their taste.” (The Message, Introduction)

Peterson’s concern for the spiritual life of his congregation is admirable. His hope was that The Message would serve as a tool to get people interested in reading the Bible. Peterson’s underlying assumption is that his “translation” can do something the Holy Spirit is unable to do; give people a passion to read The Word. In reading The Message, I am drawn to the conclusion that Peterson has a diminished view of the Holy Spirit. The Message often eliminates the personhood and ministry of the Holy Spirit as the third person of the trinity who is given by Jesus as the beginning and source of our faith.
Galatians 3:2-4 (Click the image to read a verse by verse comparison)

3. Peterson believes the Bible, without his work to modernize it, is insufficient to transform lives.

Peterson writes, “There is a sense in which the Scriptures are the word of God dehydrated, with all the originating context removed—living voices, city sounds, camels carrying spices from Seba and gold from Ophir snoring down in the bazaar, fragrance from lentil stew simmering in the kitchen—all now reduced to marks on thin onion-skin paper” (Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading: 88).

The first problem is that Peterson’s solution is to eliminate the rest of the context; religious, historical, and spiritual, and we are left not even with the onion-skin. The second problem is voiced will by Tim Challie on his blog:

“While this is true, at least to some extent, what Peterson fails to mention is that this is exactly how God intended to give us the Scriptures. God never refers to His Word as “dehydrated” or in any way deficient. Yes, we need to invest time and effort in knowing, studying and understanding them, but we do so knowing that the Scriptures, exactly as they are, are just what God desired that we have. Any fault we perceive in them is a fault within us.”

4. Finally, even if the Bible is God’s “dehydrated” Word, the solution is not Peterson’s “street-language” commentary.

What we need is utter dependence on the living Water, the Spirit given by the Father, who brings freshness to the written Word so we can drink it into our life. Peterson’ solution to spiritual apathy is to transform the Bible rather than transform people.

Based on all I have read, it seems that Peterson, confronted with a people apathetic to God’s Word, relied on his own ability to transform the Scripture rather than doing the hard work of teaching and allowing God to transform the people. Compare Peterson’s approach to just two actual paraphrase-translations.

Kenneth S. Wuest’s “The New Testament : An Expanded Translation” is prefaced as follows,

“THIS translation of the New Testament, unlike the standard translations such as the Authorized Version of 1611 and the American Revised Version of 1901, uses as many English words as are necessary to bring out the richness, force, and clarity of the Greek text. The result is what I have called an expanded translation. It is intended as a companion to, or commentary on, the standard translations, and as such it complements them in several important respects.”

Challies writes the following based on his comparison of the ESV. His conclusion stands for both the ESV and Weust’s paraphrase.

“It is interesting and helpful, I think, to compare Peterson’s philosophy of translation to that of the English Standard Version. In the preface to the ESV we read,

“The ESV is an ‘essentially literal’ translation that seeks as far as possible to capture the precise wording of the original text and the personal style of each Bible writer. As such, its emphasis is on ‘word-for-word’ correspondence, at the same time taking into account differences of grammar, syntax, and idiom between current literary English and the original languages. Thus it seeks to be transparent to the original text, letting the reader see as directly as possible the structure and meaning of the original.”

Note the difference. The ESV seeks, in so far as possible, to bring the original text before the reader. Peterson seeks to bring about the understanding and response of the original reader. The ESV values words while Peterson values response. [emphasis mine]”

With this basic understanding of Peterson’s approach, the next post will move into a direct verse by verse comparison that will demonstrate why The Message is NOT a translation or a paraphrase, but a commentary.

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