The Deacon's Bench
Those of us who grew up with the “Good News for Modern Man” in the 1970s can be forgiven for feeling a sense of deja vu. But here’s some news about a new translation of the Bible that you’ll be hearing about, from NCR:
The Message is relatively unknown to Catholics because it is a Protestant Bible. It was translated by a Protestant scholar, omits several books that are in Catholic versions, was published by a Protestant outlet, NavPress, and until now, was not reviewed or promoted in Catholic media. The translations for The Message were published in parts over a nine-year period between 1993 and 2002, when the full work was released.
The partial and complete books have had an amazing reception, with some 15 million copies sold to date, said Don Pape, NavPress publisher. “The contemporary style is so winsome,” Pape told NCR, “that people get hooked on it. Its popularity seems to transcend denomination and age. It especially appeals to young college-age groups, artists, singers and songwriters.”
Now a Catholic version has arrived, called The Message: Catholic/Ecumenical Edition. It is identical to the original, except that the omitted books have now been included. They are the so-called deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament (including Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Baruch, Wisdom, Sirach, and additions to Esther and Daniel). William Griffin, a friend of the original translator and a retired editor at Macmillan Publishers, translated these.
Griffin said he used the Catholic-approved New Latin Vulgate as the basis for his translations. The Latin was no problem for him, he said, but finding English expressions that were both faithful to the Latin meaning and suitable for a contemporary audience was a challenge.
Here is a sample of Griffin’s work from the Book of Wisdom: “The unjust … are slackers not caring a fig for justice or the Lord. Without wisdom or understanding, their life’s a bust. … Their wives don’t have a brain in their heads; their children are disasters waiting to happen; their generation — there’s not a good word to say for it.”The creation of this Catholic version, said Pape, was much encouraged by Greg Pierce, publisher of ACTA, a small, Catholic-oriented press in Chicago. When he heard NavPress was considering a Catholic edition, Pierce met with their executives and was authorized to publish the book, all 1,983 pages.
“I discovered The Message by accident some years ago,” explained Pierce. “I ran across an art book that contained several incredible images from the New Testament in The Message translation. I was blown away. I began to use it in my writings and encouraged my authors to do the same.”
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