Alongside the committee translations described elsewhere in this series, English readers have a shelf of freer versions: J. B. Phillips’s New Testament, the Living Bible, The Message, The Voice and The Passion Translation. There is also the Amplified Bible, which goes the other way, giving not fewer words than the original but many more. These versions have reached millions of readers, many of whom found in them the first Bible they could read with pleasure. They have also been criticised, sometimes sharply.

This article asks what a paraphrase is, describes the best-known examples fairly, and considers when such versions help and what they risk. All of them are under copyright, so their wording is described rather than quoted, apart from a few words.

Paraphrase or translation?

The word paraphrase is used in two senses. In the strict sense, a paraphrase restates a text in other words in the same language. Kenneth Taylor’s Living Bible was a paraphrase in this sense: he reworded an English translation, the American Standard Version, rather than translating from Hebrew and Greek.

In the looser sense, “paraphrase” is used for any very free translation, one that expands, explains or recasts the original freely, even if made from Hebrew and Greek. The Message is often called a paraphrase in this sense, although Eugene Peterson worked from the original languages.

The boundary is not sharp. Every translation renders some idioms by their meaning (see Word for word or meaning for meaning?). What marks a paraphrase is degree: how much the translator adds, explains, modernises or reshapes, and how freely the result departs from the structure and images of the original. A useful test is whether a reader could, in principle, reconstruct the original’s main statements from the version. With a careful translation, mostly yes; with a free paraphrase, often not.

Romans 12:1–2 gives a sense of the range. Here are two public-domain translations:

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. (Romans 12:1–2, KJV)

Therefore I urge you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service. Don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what is the good, well-pleasing, and perfect will of God. (Romans 12:1–2, WEB)

The free versions described below each recast this passage much further.

J. B. Phillips

J. B. Phillips (1906–1982) was a Church of England vicar in south London during the Second World War. He found that the young people in his parish could not understand Paul’s letters in the King James Version, and, using the hours spent in air-raid shelters during the Blitz, he began translating them into modern English, starting with Colossians. With encouragement from C. S. Lewis, who wrote an introduction, the letters were published in 1947 as Letters to Young Churches. The Gospels, Acts and Revelation followed, and the complete New Testament in Modern English appeared in 1958. Phillips revised it in 1972.

Phillips translated from the Greek, but freely, aiming to make the letters sound like letters written by a real person to real people. His Romans 12:2, which tells readers not to let the world “squeeze you into its own mould,” became one of the best-known lines in any modern English Bible. He compared his work to that of an electrician rewiring an old house without being able to turn off the mains, so alive did he find the text.

Phillips is usually counted among the paraphrasers because of his freedom, but he was a careful worker, and later in life he wrote frankly, in The Ring of Truth (1967), about the responsibility of a translator.

The Living Bible and the Cotton Patch Gospel

Kenneth Taylor’s Living Bible (complete 1971) brought the paraphrase to a mass audience, selling tens of millions of copies. Its story, and its replacement by the New Living Translation, is told in The Living Bible and the New Living Translation.

A very different experiment was Clarence Jordan’s Cotton Patch Version, published from 1968 to the early 1970s. Jordan, a Baptist minister and Greek scholar who founded an interracial farming community in Georgia, retold parts of the New Testament as if they had happened in the American South of his own day. It was deliberately provocative, aiming to make the social and racial challenge of the Gospels as sharp for white Southerners as he believed it had been for the first readers. It shows that a paraphrase can be a form of commentary or preaching as well as a reading aid.

The Message

Eugene H. Peterson (1932–2018) was a Presbyterian pastor in Maryland and later a professor of spiritual theology. He wanted his congregation to hear the Bible in the voice of everyday speech, believing that the Greek of the New Testament was itself the everyday language of its time, not a formal or religious one. After he paraphrased Galatians for a book, an editor at NavPress encouraged him to do the whole New Testament.

The Message New Testament appeared in 1993. The Old Testament followed in parts, and the complete Bible was published in 2002. Peterson worked from the Hebrew and Greek, but rendered them with great freedom, in idiomatic American English, often expanding a single phrase into a vivid sentence. In Romans 12:1, for example, where the King James Version speaks of presenting “your bodies a living sacrifice,” The Message speaks of offering God one’s ordinary daily life, with a list of examples such as sleeping and going to work.

Peterson was clear about what The Message was for. He described it as a reading Bible, meant to help people hear the text afresh, not as a study Bible or a replacement for a translation in church. Many readers have used it alongside a more literal translation.

Critics argued that The Message often adds ideas not in the text, imports modern idioms and attitudes, and sometimes softens or alters meaning. Some objected when it was used as the main Bible for preaching or quoted as though it were the original. Admirers replied that Peterson’s freedom often captured the tone and force of a passage better than a literal version, and that its literary quality has helped many people hear familiar words for the first time.

The Amplified Bible

The Amplified Bible takes the opposite approach. Instead of choosing one English word for each Hebrew or Greek word, it gives several, in brackets and parentheses, to bring out shades of meaning that a single word might miss.

The project was the work of Frances Siewert, a Bible teacher who began it in the early 1950s with the support of the Lockman Foundation, the sponsor of the New American Standard Bible (see The NASB and the Legacy Standard Bible). The Amplified New Testament appeared in 1958, the Old Testament in two volumes in 1962 and 1964, and the complete Bible in 1965, published with Zondervan. An expanded edition followed in 1987, which remains available as the Amplified Bible, Classic Edition. In 2015 the Lockman Foundation published a thorough revision, citing more than fifty years of change in English.

In a typical verse, a key word is followed by a bracketed list of alternatives or an explanatory phrase in parentheses. Readers find this useful for meditation and for seeing that a word has more than one possible sense. Critics, drawing on the linguist James Barr, point to what he called “illegitimate totality transfer”: the mistake of assuming that a word carries all its possible meanings in every place it is used. In any one sentence, a word usually means one thing, and a list of synonyms can suggest richness that the author did not intend. Others note that the brackets make the text hard to read aloud. Defenders reply that the Amplified Bible never claimed to be a reading translation, and that its expansions show readers the range from which a translator must choose.

The Voice

The Voice was produced by the Ecclesia Bible Society, a project associated with the pastor Chris Seay, and published by Thomas Nelson, with the complete Bible in 2012. It combined translation by scholars with retelling by writers, musicians and poets. Its most distinctive features are typographical. Narrative dialogue is set out like a screenplay, with speakers’ names before their lines. Words added to explain the text or make transitions are printed in italics, so that readers can tell them from the translated text, and explanatory commentary is set apart from the text. It renders the divine name with phrases such as “the Eternal One” (see The divine name in translation).

Admirers saw The Voice as honest about its additions, since it marks them. Critics thought that the quantity of added material blurred the line between Scripture and commentary.

The Passion Translation

The Passion Translation (TPT), by Brian Simmons, a former missionary in Panama, has been the most controversial of recent versions. Published by BroadStreet Publishing from the early 2010s, it has appeared in stages, with the New Testament and some Old Testament books, including the Psalms. Simmons has described it as a translation that aims to convey the passion and emotion of the original, and he has said that it draws on Aramaic as well as Greek sources for the New Testament.

Scholars have criticised it on several grounds. In a review of TPT’s Psalms in the journal Themelios (2018), Andrew Shead, an Old Testament scholar at Moore Theological College in Sydney, argued that the translation adds a great deal of material not found in the Hebrew, sets aside the text in favour of the translator’s own interpretation, and so should not be regarded as Scripture at all. Other critics have questioned its claims about Aramaic sources: the Aramaic New Testament it appeals to is the Syriac Peshitta, which most scholars regard as a translation from Greek rather than an older witness. Critics have also noted that TPT’s additions are not always marked, and that it was produced by a single translator without the review of a committee.

In early 2022 the website Bible Gateway, owned by HarperCollins, removed TPT from the translations it offers. It gave no public reason beyond a general statement that it periodically reviews its content. Simmons and the publisher expressed disappointment, and TPT remains available on other platforms and in print. Its supporters say that it has helped many readers encounter the Bible with fresh devotion, and that critics have judged it by the standards of a kind of translation it does not claim to be.

When paraphrases help, and what they risk

Free versions can do real good:

  • They let readers hear a familiar text afresh, noticing what familiarity hides.
  • They can show the tone of a passage, such as anger, tenderness or humour, which literal translations often flatten.
  • They can help new readers, young readers and people with little background begin to read.
  • Read alongside a closer translation, they act as a kind of running commentary.

But they carry risks:

  • The reader cannot easily tell where the original ends and the paraphraser begins.
  • Ambiguities and difficulties in the original are often resolved silently.
  • Images, repeated words and connections between passages may disappear.
  • A single person’s theology or style can shape every page, without the checks a committee provides.

Many scholars therefore advise using a paraphrase with a translation, not instead of one, and treating it as an interpreter’s voice rather than the text itself.

Readable, but not a paraphrase

Open Word Bible’s Readable level aims at plain, natural English that explains idioms, and it can be as easy to read as some paraphrases. But it is not one. It shares one set of meaning decisions with the Balanced and Literal levels, so it may not add ideas or settle questions that the others leave open, and a reader can always compare it with the closer renderings (see Literal, Balanced, Readable). Each sentence has a reasoning record showing the decisions behind it, so additions and interpretations are visible rather than hidden. The translation is made from the SBL Greek New Testament and the Westminster Leningrad Codex and is released under CC0. Its drafts are AI-assisted and remain unreviewed until named human reviewers approve them, and existing translations and paraphrases are used only for comparison, never as the basis for its wording.

Sources

  • Phillips, J. B. Letters to Young Churches: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1947.
  • Phillips, J. B. The Ring of Truth: A Translator’s Testimony. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1967.
  • Taylor, Kenneth N. “Preface.” The Living Bible. Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1971.
  • Peterson, Eugene H. “Introduction.” The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2002.
  • The Lockman Foundation. “Preface.” Amplified Bible. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015.
  • Barr, James. The Semantics of Biblical Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961.
  • Shead, Andrew G. “Burning Scripture with Passion: A Review of The Psalms (The Passion Translation).” Themelios 43, no. 1 (2018).
  • Lewis, Jack P. The English Bible from KJV to NIV: A History and Evaluation. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991.
  • Bible quotations are from the King James Version and the World English Bible (both public domain).