Shoppers: Cough up the cash and take a Message
Published 1/10/06
When I read recently that the Bible is one of the most frequently stolen books, I immediately thought of the time Jay Leno asked his Tonight Show audience to name any of the Ten Commandments. They couldn’t come up with one.
Apparently bookstore shoplifters—like the Tonight Show audience—have never heard of the 8th commandment, the one that discourages criminal activities ranging from petty theft to grand larceny. Little wonder then that last year the Bible Literacy Project reported that biblical illiteracy is widespread in America.
So if you must break the law and steal a Bible, let me recommend one that was written expressly for people who have never read the Bible or thought it was a impenetrable tome along the lines of, say, Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
I’m referring to The Message, a version written single-handedly by author Eugene Peterson beginning in 1990 and published in 2002. Sections of the Bible—like the New Testament or the Psalms—were released as they were finished throughout the ’90s.
Proficient in Hebrew and Greek, the original languages of the Old and New Testament, Peterson tried to capture the tone and rhythm of those renderings in everyday language.
For example, in his introduction to the New Testament, Peterson notes that there were two levels of language in the Greek-speaking world at that time. Formal language was used in texts and decrees while letters, bills, shopping lists, receipts and menus for Greek restaurants, I assume, were composed in an informal language. In other words, the stories, letters and apocalyptic poem of the New Testament were written, as Peterson says, “in the street language of the day, the idiom of the playground and marketplace.”
When I was first looking for a good translation, like any good Biblical researcher, I turned to Rolling Stone magazine and a December 6, 2001 interview with U2’s Bono. When the interviewer asked the Irish rocker what he was reading at the time, Bono responded:
“I don’t want to come off wrong in this most unholy of wars, but there’s a translation of Scriptures—the New Testament and the Books of Wisdom—that this guy Eugene Peterson has undertaken. It has been a great strength to me. He’s a poet and a scholar, and he’s brought the text back to the tone in which the books were written. A lot of the Gospels were written in common kind of marketspeak. They were not at all highfalutin like the King James Version of the Bible, from which the Goths get their inspiration…But it’s not representative of the original writings.”
It’s a pretty good summary of the Message.
Although Peterson admits to reading the Scriptures daily in their original Hebrew and Greek, he calls The Message a “reading Bible.” He wanted new readers to see that the Bible was, in fact, read-able and give it new life to old readers for whom holy writ had become a cliche. And he omitted verse numbers that were never there to begin with.
All the same, Peterson once said in an interview that he didn’t recommend that his “paraphrase” be read from the pulpit. For oral reading, he apparently prefers the “highfalutin” King James.
Even though The Message has become a bestseller and now claims seven million readers, Peterson does have his critics—those who say that his Message sounds too American, too middle class, that it’s just one man’s interpretation or that in some place, he’s altered the meanings of the text. You’ll find some interesting swipes at Peterson at Amazon.com.
All of which brings me to this point. Jay Leno needs to remember that the Bible, whether the Message or another translation, is not just an exposition of the Ten Commandments and other things you’re not supposed to do for the fear of Hell. It’s actually a work of art, an anthology of lyric poems, acrostics, epic cycles, orations, dramatic anthems, war anthems, festal hymns, elegies, litanies, sonnets, epigrams, rhapsodies, parables comedy, tragedy, satire and gospel narratives, not to mention the ten pesky injunctions of that Mosaic decalogue.
One of which the King James renders, “Thou shalt not steal.”
The Message wastes no words: “No stealing.”
When I read recently that the Bible is one of the most frequently stolen books, I immediately thought of the time Jay Leno asked his Tonight Show audience to name any of the Ten Commandments. They couldn’t come up with one.
Apparently bookstore shoplifters—like the Tonight Show audience—have never heard of the 8th commandment, the one that discourages criminal activities ranging from petty theft to grand larceny. Little wonder then that last year the Bible Literacy Project reported that biblical illiteracy is widespread in America.
So if you must break the law and steal a Bible, let me recommend one that was written expressly for people who have never read the Bible or thought it was a impenetrable tome along the lines of, say, Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
I’m referring to The Message, a version written single-handedly by author Eugene Peterson beginning in 1990 and published in 2002. Sections of the Bible—like the New Testament or the Psalms—were released as they were finished throughout the ’90s.
Proficient in Hebrew and Greek, the original languages of the Old and New Testament, Peterson tried to capture the tone and rhythm of those renderings in everyday language.
For example, in his introduction to the New Testament, Peterson notes that there were two levels of language in the Greek-speaking world at that time. Formal language was used in texts and decrees while letters, bills, shopping lists, receipts and menus for Greek restaurants, I assume, were composed in an informal language. In other words, the stories, letters and apocalyptic poem of the New Testament were written, as Peterson says, “in the street language of the day, the idiom of the playground and marketplace.”
When I was first looking for a good translation, like any good Biblical researcher, I turned to Rolling Stone magazine and a December 6, 2001 interview with U2’s Bono. When the interviewer asked the Irish rocker what he was reading at the time, Bono responded:
“I don’t want to come off wrong in this most unholy of wars, but there’s a translation of Scriptures—the New Testament and the Books of Wisdom—that this guy Eugene Peterson has undertaken. It has been a great strength to me. He’s a poet and a scholar, and he’s brought the text back to the tone in which the books were written. A lot of the Gospels were written in common kind of marketspeak. They were not at all highfalutin like the King James Version of the Bible, from which the Goths get their inspiration…But it’s not representative of the original writings.”
It’s a pretty good summary of the Message.
Although Peterson admits to reading the Scriptures daily in their original Hebrew and Greek, he calls The Message a “reading Bible.” He wanted new readers to see that the Bible was, in fact, read-able and give it new life to old readers for whom holy writ had become a cliche. And he omitted verse numbers that were never there to begin with.
All the same, Peterson once said in an interview that he didn’t recommend that his “paraphrase” be read from the pulpit. For oral reading, he apparently prefers the “highfalutin” King James.
Even though The Message has become a bestseller and now claims seven million readers, Peterson does have his critics—those who say that his Message sounds too American, too middle class, that it’s just one man’s interpretation or that in some place, he’s altered the meanings of the text. You’ll find some interesting swipes at Peterson at Amazon.com.
All of which brings me to this point. Jay Leno needs to remember that the Bible, whether the Message or another translation, is not just an exposition of the Ten Commandments and other things you’re not supposed to do for the fear of Hell. It’s actually a work of art, an anthology of lyric poems, acrostics, epic cycles, orations, dramatic anthems, war anthems, festal hymns, elegies, litanies, sonnets, epigrams, rhapsodies, parables comedy, tragedy, satire and gospel narratives, not to mention the ten pesky injunctions of that Mosaic decalogue.
One of which the King James renders, “Thou shalt not steal.”
The Message wastes no words: “No stealing.”
posted by Jack W. Williams | 6:12 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home