Living Bible

Christian Century, May 23, 2001 by Beverly Roberts Gaventa

Living Bible: Originally published in 1971 and offered at the local grocery store along with Reader's Digest and TV Guide, this version of the Bible has sold over 40 million copies in the U.S. and Canada alone. Kenneth N. Taylor and his successors surely intended good with their labor. They wanted to produce a Bible that everyone could read and understand. What has emerged, however, is not simply an accessible Bible, but a sanitized Bible, one rendered safe from all ambiguity and provocation.

Examples present themselves on virtually every page. The genealogy of Matthew includes the piercing recollection that David was Solomon's father "by the wife of Uriah." The Living Bible, by stunning contrast, tells readers that Solomon's "mother was the widow of Uriah." No exalted vocabulary required this rendering, which ignores both Matthew's Greek and the story of David and Bathsheba. Near the end of Galatians, Paul writes that "there is neither circumcision nor uncircumcision but new creation," but here it emerges as, "It doesn't make any difference now whether we have been circumcised or not; what counts is whether we really have been changed into new and different people" (6:15). The gospel as God's cosmic act has shrunk into a human improvement.

--Beverly Roberts Gaventa, professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.