The Message(MSG)

The Message is Eugene Peterson's rendering of the Bible into contemporary, conversational American English, published by NavPress. The New Testament appeared in 1993, and the complete Bible — a project that took Peterson roughly ten years altogether — was finished in 2002. Peterson was a pastor, seminary professor, and poet who had spent decades teaching and preaching before beginning the project, aiming to recapture, in his words, the tone and conversational energy of the original Greek and Hebrew for readers who found Scripture either too distant or too familiar to really hear anymore.

What sets The Message apart from this site's other translations is category, not just style: it's a genuine paraphrase, restating the text's meaning in Peterson's own words well past the point of thought-for-thought translation, rather than tracking the original wording and structure the way even the freest translations here do. That puts it in a different bucket from every other entry on this site, which is why its Philosophy classification is "Paraphrase" rather than a place further along the Formal-to-Dynamic scale.

It's also a different kind of paraphrase than most: Peterson worked directly from the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek himself rather than restating an existing English translation the way, for instance, the 1971 Living Bible restated the 1901 ASV. His work was then reviewed by a team of twenty Old and New Testament scholars from major evangelical seminaries for faithfulness to the original languages — a level of scholarly oversight most paraphrases don't have.

On gender language, The Message generally uses inclusive phrasing for people in general — "human beings" rather than "man" — consistent with its overall goal of natural, contemporary English. Formatted as continuous prose in a single column, without verse-by-verse line breaks, it reads more like a book than a reference text.