Actually, dragon may be a misremembered example. (They show up, but only in metaphors and dreams.) But unicorns and satyrs are mentioned.
It actually comes from looking at the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament made around the era of the New Testament. The Greeks are the ones who would use a mythological animal if they were unsure, and then the KJV kept that translation if they were also unsure.
So they had a 1600+ year history to fall back on.
There’s a dragon in Revelation, but that’s a symbol for the Devil. There’s also a dragon in the Greek version (Septuagint) of the Book of Daniel, but Jews and most Protestants don’t consider it part of the original and accurate text of Daniel (Catholics and Orthodox Christians do).
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I know that’s how it is marketed, but The Message is a paraphrase of the Bible in the same sense that West Side Story is a paraphrase of the epic of Gilgamesh.
I know that’s how conservatives ‘marketed’ it ;), but it’s actually a decently done paraphrase. Those who aren’t conservative or fundamentalist in their Scripture will likely find a lot of good in it. Most mainline churches don’t have big issues with it (no surprise as Peterson is a Presbyterian).
I’m not all that familiar with the Message, but I looked it up since I was intrigued by Alan Smithee’s comment, so I looked up how it dealt with one of the most famous and most difficult to understand passages, John 1;1-14, which I quote below. If this is typical of the Message, it’s a…very problematic translation. Not because it’s liberal or conservative, or colloquial, or even particularly inaccurate, but mostly because it’s written in really terrible English. It’s colloquial without being comprehensible.
“Life” and “Light” are words, after all: “Life-Light” is just a confusing neologism that Peterson made up. So is “sex-begotten”, for that matter: at least the King James uses simple words like “born of the flesh”. How is “moved into the neighborhood” any easier to understand than “lived among us”? It’s not, it just is a ham-handed attempt to seem cool and colloquial. Never mind that there are weird digressions that aren’t in the original text, and never mind (too) that the text is a lot longer and less concise than the ESV, the KJV, the NRSV translations, or for that matter than the Greek or Latin.
And at the end of course this passage is just as confusing to the reader as any other translation. This is of course because the confusion isn’t an artifact of translation, it’s present in the original Greek: John uses “The Word”, with all of its multiple meanings, to refer to Jesus, which is by design going to be a difficult concept to understand, and Peterson doesn’t do anything to make it any easier.
“The Word was first, the Word present to God, God present to the Word.
The Word was God, in readiness for God from day one. Everything was created through him; nothing—not one thing!—came into being without him.
What came into existence was Life, and the Life was Light to live by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness; the darkness couldn’t put it out. There once was a man, his name John, sent by God to point out the way to the Life-Light. He came to show everyone where to look, who to believe in. John was not himself the Light; he was there to show the way to the Light. The Life-Light was the real thing: Every person entering Life he brings into Light.
He was in the world, the world was there through him, and yet the world didn’t even notice. He came to his own people, but they didn’t want him.
But whoever did want him, who believed he was who he claimed and would do what he said, He made to be their true selves, their child-of-God selves.
These are the God-begotten, not blood-begotten, not flesh-begotten, not sex-begotten. The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out, true from start to finish.”
I’m not sure about that- Greek certainly differentiates between “man as opposed to animal” and “man as opposed to woman”, as does Latin (I don’t know about Hebrew or Aramaic) so you can make a reasonable ‘authorial intent’ case that anthropos (or homo in the vulgate) should properly be translated “person”. My understanding was that the big reason conservatives object to gender neutral language isn’t because of actual linguistic, textual or historical considerations, but because they see it as a concession to modern social ideals which they disapprove of. (And also, because using gender-neutral language about Jesus, or to translate Old Testament verses which they think refer to Jesus, e.g. “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly”, risks losing a sense of Jesus’ particularity).
Speaking of historical-critical scholarship, which is something I’m not generally a big fan of: there is one way in which the NRSV is actually superior to most ‘conservative’ translations, from a ‘conservative’ point of view. The authors of the NRSV were fair minded enough to provide alternate readings in footnotes or brackets, including the Textus Receptus readings: their translation philosophy seems to have been “we think this is the best reading, but if you want other ones, here they are”. So if you really want to know what the Textus Receptus says, you can find it by (carefully) reading the NRSV: you won’t find it by reading the NIV.
Some stuff is difficult to read the way Peterson does it, but I don’t think John 1 is all that horrible, to be honest. It’s not great and I’m not fond of “Life-Light” (it’s clunky, but I see what Peterson is trying to do), but I don’t find anything wrong with “sex begotten” or “moved into the neighborhood” (which is a term I’ve heard in more than one sermon - I wonder if they teach it in seminary).
I do find that Peterson’s paraphrase is far better in dealing with the Old Testament. I find his write up of Creation in Genesis 1 to be very well done.
Though, if it helps, Peterson never intended The Message to be read in churches. He just wanted to offer a paraphrase that captured the vitality and passion of Scripture, rather than some dull writings. Here is a Christianity Today interview with him: ‘I Didn't Want to Be Cute’ | Christianity Today
It’s not as if the NIV doesn’t do this. There are tons of footnotes about alternate renderings. It doesn’t label them as much. And I don’t know if it covers every change from the Textus Receptus, but they are there.
The one thing I do know is that no verses are removed. Those not found in early manuscripts are either in footnotes, or, for long passages, just bracketed with disclaimer text.
Actually, Hector_St_Clare, there’s no dispute between us. I don’t claim that “truest to the original texts” is what makes a translation “best”; I was just offering it as one possible example of what a reader might be looking for. You offered some other examples of what a reader might be looking for, and that’s fine, too. Personally, I don’t have a strong opinion on the matter, myself.
Though I will add, it’s really really helpful if you get a version that has a lot of footnotes. There are a lot of things that won’t be captured in any translation, like the Hebrew puns (there are a ton of those, including pretty near every single proper name in the entire Old Testament) and traditional interpretations of particular passages (like, which OT verses are often taken as references to Jesus, and there are a ton of those too).
Oh, and
The irony here is that most of the “old traditional” Bible translations which are favored for their formal, non-familiar language are just previous generations’ attempts at making an accessible version using their culture’s familiar language. The ultimate example of this would be the Latin Vulgate, favored by many Catholics for exactly that reason: The very name “vulgate” means “for the common people”, and it was controversial at the time because many thought it was sacrilegious to translate the New Testament from the original (holy, unfamiliar, scholarly) Greek.
Recommend that whichever the version, Richard Pearse, you get one that includes the Western Church OT Apocrypha (Tobit, Maccabees, Judith, extended chapters of Esther and Daniel, etc.) due to their relevance to Western religious/literary culture.
Regarding Versions: The traditional hotel room Gideons’ Bible has been the KJV because, hey, tradition and hey, public domain. But at some point they also wanted a more modern/accessible translation available and at first it was the “New KJV”; later they introduced the NIV but that was widely panned and back they went to NKJV, and later yet again because of royalty issues they changed to a modified edition(*) of the ESV. That is for Gideons USA – their branches in other English-speaking countries are likely to use Bible versions that are in wide use in those countries (and involve a reasonable royalties deal(**), natch).
The version variations as you may imagine have brought upon the Gideons quite some heat from fundamentalists and traditionalists as they happened. There is a whole lot of KJV-olatry among the evangelical/fundie segment of the population.
(* The modifications done to avoid one of the major objections to NIV, which was the relegation of some Reveived Text passages whose originality was challenged to mere footnotes; the Gideons’ edition of the ESV reinserts those passages into the main text.)
(** “modern” Bible translations are copyrighted under current law of the land like any other translation; when you’re giving away the product, you will be a bit cost-sensitive)
BTW Gideons’ has an iOS/Android Bible App, because, of course they have one.
Just for the most obvious examples, “thou/thee/thine” - this is the use of Second Person Familiar, the equivalent of the Spanish tu or the German du.