Journal Week 50: A Year With The Message

Awhile back I shared that on the first Sunday of Advent last year I started a daily Bible reading plan to read through the Bible in a year.

Well I finished that plan, and really enjoyed the experience. So when the first Sunday of Advent came around this year I rebooted the plan and have started to read back through the Bible again.

Last year the translation I used was Bibliotheca's version of the American Standard Version. The ASV is a very literal translation. So much so it was found to be too clunky with its sentence structure (Greek and English being very different in this regard). Thus the whole ASV family of revisions: The Revised Standard Version (RSV), the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), the New American Standard Bible (NASB), and the English Standard Version (ESV).

For this year's reading I wanted to jump out of the "literal" family of translations (formal equivalence translations) to something more dramatic (dynamic equivalence translations). There are a host of options here, from The Voice to the New Living Translation.

But Jana, knowing of my plans, bought me a very nice copy of the late Eugene Peterson's The Message. I have zero experience with The Message, but I know so many people who have been blessed by Peterson's translation.

So far, I'm toward the end of Genesis now, I'm really enjoying the experience. I think this might set up a tradition going forward, alternating each year between literal and "dynamic" translations.

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