This interview with David Fish was a favorite of mine. David came prepared, and he brought fire against the strange fire—I don’t think that terminology is overblown—in The Passion Translation. David showed that Brian Simmons repeatedly misunderstood, added to, and altered Scripture passages. Every paraphrase does the latter two things, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with them, no matter how awful that initially sounds. I myself paraphrased four New Testament books for my Sunday school class, and I freely “changed” the Bible in order to make it shorter and more easily understandable—but only after a lengthy explanation of what I was doing. What I did not do, or tried my hardest not to do, was do that first thing: misunderstand Scripture. Brian did.
I felt a bit like a KJV-Onlyist, I must admit, as I was lambasting this translation. There’s something kind of delicious about severe critique. I don’t want to come to love that taste. I’d like to think, however, that David and I have done the homework necessary to be trustworthy—something I cannot say with honesty for most KJV-Onlyists. And I shouldn’t really say I lambasted TPT: we gave careful critiques based on original language knowledge. TPT seems to me to land in the category of the Pharisees in Matthew 23, though not quite in the priests of Baal in 1 Kings 19. Simmons has been given every opportunity to know better; he claims he does know better. But what he has produced is so openly flawed and deceptive (whether purposeful or not, I don’t know; but he specifically claimed that TPT was based on Aramaic and then walked that back—how does one explain this charitably?) that it is worthy of excoriation.
But only, again, if you do your homework.
Some commenters were defensive after watching this video: if The Message is okay, they said, then TPT should be, too. And I will grant two big and related criticisms of The Message, which I’m listening through this year: Eugene Peterson was inconsistent in his use of translation versus paraphrase within his work, and was therefore (?) inconsistent in his description of his work as either a translation or a paraphrase. There is a lot of translation in The Message, and a lot of it is just fine. There is a lot of paraphrase in The Message, and a lot of it is great. If people don’t get an explanation or don’t really understand translation versus paraphrase, The Message could do harm not wholly unlike that of TPT. They could think that God really said the words “Smart-Mouth College” in Psalm 1 or that he was soft on homosexuality in 1 Corinthians 6.
But there is also a huge difference between Peterson and Simmons: Peterson was actually far, far more disciplined with the use of original languages than Simmons. As I listen through The Message—I’m in 1 Samuel right now, right after the Israelites demand a king—I’m not detecting added phrases or hamhanded decisions. And Peterson didn’t invent bizarre claims of divine inspiration or make openly ridiculous linguistic claims to justify his work. I read Peterson’s Eat This Book, which revealed a lot of Peterson’s thoughts on Bible translation. It was a phenomenal book: Peterson knew what he was talking about. From the very first moment I encountered TPT my crackpot alarm went off: I could tell that this well-spoken and apparently sane man nonetheless had bought into weird, fringe views of language.
Some of them are discussed in this video. TPT deserves the five-alarm fire it has created.
One more comment, though: Multiple commenters are lambasting Logos Bible Software for continuing to include TPT. Let me share with you what I wrote back to one of them. I do not speak for Logos, but at the end here I’ll cite what Logos leadership has said.
I think you actually want Logos to carry TPT, because it’s mostly “professionals” of one sort or another who use Logos. Pastors and other Bible nerds, we called them when I worked there. Logos purposefully carries tons of stuff that the founders/owners/employees disagree with. Pastors and other Bible nerds need and want those resources in their libraries. The sole criterion (though market forces have nudged this a bit, I think it’s still useful) is relevance to biblical studies. TPT, precisely because of its faults, very clearly meets this criterion. Inclusion in Logos is not the same kind of endorsement that inclusion in YouVersion or BibleGateway is, in large part because Logos users are expected to know what they’re getting.
Think, too, of what removal of TPT means for Logos: it means paying hostage takers. It means that pressure campaigns to have something removed can be successful. And not everyone who wields that power will do it for good, as you and I of course would!
I myself made a complaint like this a few years before coming to Logos. I was satisfied by a response like the one above—enough to come work there. Here is founder Bob Pritchett’s classic statement on the matter.