A Passionate Mistake

Have you wondered about the Passion Translation?

These days new English translations of the Bible are popping up all the time, and it can be hard to keep up. If you're not trained in the biblical languages, it can be hard to tell whether a new translation is good or not. When I study a passage in the Bible, I like to compare several translations and even the occasional paraphrase to try and get a sense of what the text means before I look at any commentaries. Should I add the Passion to my reference shelf?

The Passion Translation of the full New Testament was released in 2017 (he's still working on the OT). Unlike most Bible translations today, it is the work of one man, Brian Simmons. The project's website says Simmons is a linguist who "co-translated the Paya-Kuna New Testament for the Paya-Kuna people of Panama." He used the usual New Testament source materials (the Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th edition) plus the Syriac Peshitta (written in Aramaic) because, he says, scholars are coming to realize that there was an earlier Aramaic version of most of the NT books before they were translated into Greek.

And it turns out most of the preceding paragraph is false.

YouTuber and pastor Mike Winger employed several respected NT scholars to critique the Passion Translation. He asked them to write papers on their findings, then he interviewed them about their work. He also did some digging into Simmons' background. The papers, the interviews, and Mike's account of his own work on this new version can be found on his website. I encourage you to listen to the interviews and/or read the papers, but you can get a sense of how things are going by listening to any one of the interviews. (The one with Darrell Bock is a good interview and the shortest.)

But as a public service, I wanted to give a brief illustration that will summarize Winger et al's findings.

In Bible translation, there are different approaches. Some strive to deliver a word for word (people usually say "literal" or "formally equivalent") translation of the ancient language and let commentaries explain difficult terms and idioms. Some try to transmit the meaning the author was trying to get across with less concern for the actual words used (sometimes called "functional equivalence"). And some try to deliver the emotional impact that the original would have had to the original audience even if that means adding some material (ie, paraphrases). (Of course, all translations do all of these things, but they all tend more toward one approach or another.)

Now to the illustration. In German, there is a phrase "du bist eine lahme ente." It literally means "you are a lame duck". But it's an idiom for "you are a dull, boring person." We might say such a person is a "wet blanket." Let's apply this to some modern translations:

NASB: You are a lame duck.
NIV: You are a dull, boring person.
Message: You are a wet blanket.
Passion: You are such a wet blanket I would have gouged my eyes out by now if the Lord hadn't activated in me a spirit of patience.

My additions are intentional. Winger's band of scholars largely agree that the Passion "Translation" is better called a paraphrase and that when it adds "explanatory material," it is generally inserting Simmons' particular brand of charismatic theology. When it isn't doing that it is ... adequate. Where it's not altogether too original it's nothing special.

So should you read the Passion Translation? I can't answer that for you, but I can tell you that I won't be adding it to my collection.