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Most train commuters to Chicago bought a copy of the Tribune to read on the trip. Kenneth Taylor used the ride to paraphrase the Bible.
At home he and his wife, Margaret, had ten children, and 141 ן} Taylor was concerned because his kids weren't understanding the family's devotional reading of the King James Version with its Elizabethan English. He began the project in 1954, finished the New Testament seven years later, and then began submitting it to various publishing houses. All rejected it, even though Taylor was employed by one of them and was well-known to all. But Taylor was convinced of the value of the product, so he and his wife decided to publish the New Testament epistles themselves in 1962. Their family savings were minimal, but they decided to invest all they had in the project.
At first the response was discouraging. Living Letters got little response at the Christian Booksellers Association in 1962. But early the following spring, Billy Graham bought a quantity and offered it on a telecast. Before Graham was finished with the offer, he had given away 500,000 copies. That was the start, but only the start. Taylor followed Living Letters with his "Living" paraphrases of the Gospels and Acts, then portions of the Old Testament, finally putting together The Living Bible, which was a phenomenal publishing success. Total sales now exceed forty million copies in the United States and Canada alone, and for two consecutive years in the 1970s it sold more copies than any book of any kind anywhere in the world.
The twentieth century was the century of excellent Bible translations and paraphrases, beginning with the American Standard Version in 1901. Selecting one hundred books that changed the century, we could have chosen several Bible translations.
The Revised Standard Version, Phillips New Testament, New
American Bible, The New English Bible, Good News Bible, New International Version, New King James Version, and The Message—all these have made their mark on the century.
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But in many ways The Living Bible was unique. It did not claim to be a word-for-word translation. It was a paraphrase, and it was targeting an evangelical market that believed in the infallibility of the very words of Scripture. The rsv had been roundly castigated for its renditions, and Taylor was venturing into the same arena. The Living Bible certainly received criticism as the work of a single paraphraser. Taylor admits in the preface to his first edition: "Whenever the author's exact words are not translated from the original languages, there is a possibility that the translator, however honest, may be giving the English reader something that the original writer did not mean to say. This is because a paraphrase is guided not only by the translator's skill in simplifying, but also by the clarity of his understanding of what the author meant and by his theology." But as a conservative himself, Taylor interpreted Scripture in keeping with his own theology, and that made his free, sometimes colloquial, paraphrase generally acceptable to the evangelical market.
Notable also is the fact that a large evangelical publishing company, Tyndale House, has blossomed out of the success of The Living Bible. In 1997 Tyndale House published the New Iiv-ing Translation, a completely new work, which is not a paraphrase but a thought-for-thought translation by a team of ninety scholars. No doubt, it will make an impact on the twenty-first century.
Kenneth Taylor began his Living Letters by paraphrasing the first verse of Romans this way: "Dear Friends in Rome: This letter is from Paul, Jesus Christ's slave, chosen to be a missionary, and sent out to preach God's Good News." Little did he realize what would develop in the next couple of decades.