A Plowman's Bible?

Like many another evangelical Christian, Kenneth Taylor liked to gather his family round him after dinner in their Wheaton, Ill., farmhouse for evening prayer and a bit of Bible reading. The trouble was, Taylor observed some years ago, that his children could not quickly grasp the archaic English of the King James Bible. An ordained minister who was then director of the fundamentalist Moody Press in Chicago, Taylor decided to try paraphrasing the Scriptures for his youngsters--an experiment to which the children--then numbering nine--quickly responded.

Now, after 17 years and one more child, that family paraphrase has grown into perhaps the world's fastest-selling Bible. Since the publication of the complete Old and New Testaments last August, The Living Bible (Tyndale House-Doubleday; $9.95) has sold more than 2,000,000 copies. Billy Graham has ordered 600,000 special paperback versions for an autumn television crusade.

Sousa Touch. Taylor's paraphrase (which does not carry his name anywhere in the current edition) was not always so popular. It took him seven years --from 1955 to 1962--to finish the New Testament Epistles, working nightly in one of the farmhouse's bedrooms and in the mornings on the commuter train to Chicago. Living Letters, he called them. But even the very firm he directed, Moody Press, declined to publish his paraphrases. So Taylor decided to publish them privately. A printer friend ran off 2,000 copies on credit, and Taylor took some of them to the 1962 Christian Booksellers Convention. He sold 842 copies--but there were no reorders for four months. "Then they started coming in," he recalls. In 1963 Billy Graham ordered 50,000 copies of the Epistles, then asked for 450,000 more.

Once he got the knack, recalls Taylor, the paraphrasing came more quickly. The Old Testament prophets (Living Prophecies) followed the Epistles; then came the Gospels. Taylor rewrote passages again and again. Even now he calls The Living Bible a "tentative edition" and notes that "suggestions will gladly be considered." Though he has drafted scholarly consultants to read and criticize his work, Taylor admits that "none [of them] feels entirely satisfied with the present result."

To be sure, the "present result" lacks the literary cadences of The New English Bible and the translator's precision of the American Bible Society's Good News for Modern Man. It may be just a shade too enthusiastic in its use of exclamation points ("Then he heard a voice!"), and sometimes a bit of color seems to be lost. In Mark's Gospel, when John the Baptist talks about the Messiah as "he who is mightier than I, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie," Taylor makes the allusion more straightforward: "I am not even worthy to be his slave." In the Book of Daniel, when Nebuchadnezzar makes a gold image and orders people to worship it when they hear the sounds of "horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp," Taylor offers instead a touch of Sousa: "When the band strikes up." Despite such lapses, Taylor's Bible is easy to read and remarkably understandable.

Taylor does not expect his Bible to be a substitute for the translations currently available. He argues that Christian homes need both a "reading Bible" and a "study Bible," for which he recommends one of the standard translations. His personal "study" Bible is the New American Standard, a fundamentalist favorite, though he used the older American Standard of 1901 as the basis for much of his paraphrase.

Taylor's version may disturb some ears, but its thought-for-thought rendition is not very likely to distress believers with any newfangled doctrinal notions. "The theological lodestar in this book," says Taylor in an anonymous preface to The Living Bible, "has been a rigid evangelical position." Mysteriously, halfway through the paraphrase, Taylor lost his voice, and still speaks only in a hoarse whisper. A psychiatrist who examined him suggested that the voice failure was Taylor's psychological self-punishment for tampering with what he believed to be the word of God.

Kenneth Taylor has not grown rich from The Living Bible, though he could have. Profits have enabled him to start and maintain a prosperous publishing firm, Tyndale House, which now produces some 40 titles a year. His salary as Tyndale's head has allowed him to move his family out of the old farmhouse and into a new home. But all author's royalties from the Bible--$1,500,000 last year--go into the Tyndale House Foundation to be dispensed to various causes, including some 60 foreign paraphrases currently under way or completed. Taylor, now 55, says his mission is simply that of 16th century Translator William Tyndale, who wanted to bring the Bible to "every plowboy." Says Taylor: "I'd like to emulate Tyndale in everything but his death." Tyndale, for his efforts, was strangled and then burned at the stake.

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