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The Voice New Testament

Posted Nov 11, 04:06 PM | 3 comments | by Editor | Link

By Brian McLaren:

When Chris Seay invited me to be part of this project, my first thought was, “Don’t we have more than enough Bible translations already?” I confess to being a little cynical about “The In-Line Skater and Skateboarder’s Bible” and “The Nuclear Weapons Manufacturers’ Bible” and that sort of thing.

But it turns out Chris is a hard guy to say no to. (Remember, he wrote a book on the Sopranos.) First, he told me that a big chunk of the proceeds would go to mission work. Then he explained the philosophy behind the project.

Works like J.B. Phillips’ translation and more recently Eugene Peterson’s The Message have done us a great service. They have given us Bibles with literary style. But unfortunately, they have rendered the whole Bible into one literary style. That is an improvement over tofu-vanilla scholarly translations in many ways, but one of the fascinating things about the Bible is that it is the work of forty-some writers, each with their own unique style. So The Voice would do something unique: it would pair writers who write with a distinctive literary style together with scholars who would pay close attention to accuracy in light of our best scholarship.

The project would also keep in mind rediscovering the Bible as an oral text, something to be heard aloud as well as read silently. It would be a storytellers’ Bible, drawing structural elements from drama and screenplays along with poetry and prose.

I still wasn’t completely convinced until Chris told me he wanted me to do Luke and Acts. If my assignment had been Leviticus or 2 Chronicles, I might have responded differently, but how could anyone turn down Jesus, Holy Spirit, and the early church?

The project had a profound spiritual impact on my life. As a preacher, I’ve always dealt with Luke and Acts one passage at a time, but working on the books as a whole, I noticed their larger structure—themes that play out across many passages but which wouldn’t be noticed in one taken separately. As well, I was forced to ask some pretty basic questions that too few of us ask. For example …

• What would a term like “Son of God” have meant to the original hearers in the first century?


• What about “Son of Man”?


• What about “Christ,” or “salvation,” or “baptism,” or “born again”?

In each case, these words tend to have for today’s readers either a vaguely religious meaning, or a meaning that took shape in the 4th or 17th or 20th centuries. But what if the words would have had a very different meaning for their original hearers? How could that meaning be understood and communicated today?

We did a lot of vigorous and good-natured arguing about many of these terms. Sometimes my opinions were accepted (as in translating “Christ” as “Liberating King” or baptism as “ceremonial cleansing”) and some weren’t (as in translating “Son of Man” as “New Generation of Humanity”). But the process showed me more than ever that translation can’t be separated from interpretation, and the theological biases of the interpreters are a bigger factor than I had realized. This was another strength of the project—to have a team with differing theological perspectives hammering out how passages should be rendered.

I just got my first copy of the completed New Testament a few weeks ago. It turned out even better than I had hoped. I was just reading this morning, and it was hard to put down because it felt like I was reading an integrated story, not a choppy collection of verses.

So, looking back, I’m really grateful to Chris Seay—for having this vision, for pushing hard and not giving up when people like me were less than enthusiastic originally, and for bringing it to this wonderful point of having the New Testament completed. I know many churches and many people are going to be blessed and helped, and through this project, they will hear God’s voice.

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Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, pastor, and networker among innovative Christian leaders, thinkers, and activists.

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