The Message Bible

[Sam]

I think of The Message as a more modern version of The Living Bible since both are attempts to take the Scriptures and bring them into every day conversational English so they are more understandable.

I remember the attitude I once had toward The Living Bible. Back in the nineteen sixties the first part of it was published as “Living Letters.” I received a copy through a book club I belonged to. Being a good Apostolic/Pentecostal fundamentalist (or some might say funny mentalist) minister, I was against it. To me it was a corruption of the Word of God --the Word of God being synonymous with the King James Version, of course. It was sorta like how I remember the reaction of some ministers when the Revised Standard Version (RSV) came out in the nineteen fifties. I remember reading about one minister publicly throwing a copy of the RSV in a tub of lye. I remember seeing a picture of another minister in a magazine or in a newspaper. He had a RSV Bible in one hand and a blow torch in the other. His quote below the picture was, “It’s like the devil. It’s hard to burn.” Religion can make you do some weird things. We were so concerned about people reading some non-KJV Bible while thousands of people were reading and understanding the Bible for the first time and their lives were being changed for the good.

Well, over the years I’ve mellowed somewhat and have a different attitude toward the TLB and toward other versions of the Bible which are not King James. I have many different versions around which I have read and still read. I even like The Living Bible and have a few copies of that including the Roman Catholic Version with the imprimatur and the apocrypha.