The Message Outreach Edition, Large Print (Softcover) The Bible in Contemporary Language

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a man who shares your surname eugene peterson's book uh the message

and what i was struck by in this version of acts was the vivacity of the lividness and vitality of the book and how the sense of urgency of christianity that it you know think of the critiques are often slung in your direction conservatism it stayed but you know this is a very sort of and admittedly it's 2000 years old but a very sort of a vibrant call to arms an urgent sense that oh my god we're living we're living in an atrophying and dying ideology we must become alive with christ we must change the world and and and even the accounts that are given in there are accounts of people jailed and on trial that even though it is literally biblical they're not that it's very distinct from the old testament with its locusts and its deserts and its tribes and its manner now it sort of feels overtly and and literally political

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And you have actually also, you are a writer but also a translator. The message, your translation of the Bible is revered by so many people, different kinds of people from Bono who recently interviewed you to one of our producers, Lily actually, whose father was a pastor.

Yes, she told me. And from Columbia and used the message with his congregation of people whose first language was not English.

But what you said a minute ago about the poetry of the text is even in many of the translations many of us grew up with, not evident.

I didn't realize, when I did the message, I had no idea what I was doing to tell you the truth. I had a congregation of people that didn't read books.

So I started translating the Bible in their language not knowing what I was doing. And suddenly they started paying attention to me in a way they never did before.

I think people who use language have to be pretty subversive. And if they don't learn how to use language, I mean we've got a-

I didn't know what I was doing when I started out. And then it just kind of grew and grew and grew.

And finally, you know, the publisher said I'd done the New Testament and he said you've got to do the Old Testament. And I thought I can't do that.

But then I thought well maybe I, because I really enjoyed it. I felt, you know, felt alive discovering the poetry of the Bible.

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I read a book by Peter sent a wrote the message Bible he's in heaven now he said that adolescence is the gift to the middle-aged man to keep us from stagnating because when we are forced to confront what we never grew through in our children it keeps us from lying down and dying in the state that we're in