The Living Bible
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The Living Bible (TLB) is a English version of the Bible by Kenneth Taylor released in 1971. Unlike most English Bibles, the volume is a paraphrase. Mr. Taylor was quoted as having said that he paraphrased the American Standard Version as a project for several years, largely while commuting to his job in Chicago by subway.
The Living Bible was well received in many moderate Evangelical circles, in part because of its publication by Tyndale House, a publisher with impeccable Evangelical credentials. Youth-oriented Protestant groups such as Younglife accepted it very readily. In 1962 Billy Graham received a copy of the Living Letters – the title of the first-published portion of the Living Bible containing New Testament epistles – while in a hospital in Hawaii. He was impressed with it enough to order 50,000 copies of the Living Letters for use in his "crusades". Later, he ordered an additional 450,000 to 600,000 copies of Living Letters for his crusades.
The Living Bible was a best-seller in the early 1970s, largely due to the accesibility of its modernized language, making passages understandable to those with little or no previous background in Bible study. A year after the 1971 release, the Living Bible was the most popular Bible sold in America. In 1973 Taylor received royalties of roughly 8 million US dollars. By 1974, those royalties had swelled to more than 29 million dollars. By 1997, 40 million copies of The Living Bible had been sold.
With this level of acclaim and acceptance came criticism, especially from conservative circles. The criticism took several forms, but generally fit one or more of the following:
- The Bible is too sacred to be paraphrased. This shows a lack of respect for the text and is too likely to reflect the biases of the paraphraser.
- The paraphrase is too infelicitous of phrase in some instances.
- Mr. Taylor was devoid of linguistic, theological, or other qualifications sufficient to have his work taken seriously.
Dr. Bill Ruhl, a Church of Christ minister in Nashville, Tennessee, wrote a tract containing most of these criticisms and several others. Other very conservative leaders followed suit in some instances. Supporters of Taylor accused these critics of smallmindedness and replied that many of their attacks were more of a personal nature than serious crticisms of the work.
In his own defense, Taylor claims that he never intended for his paraphrase to be used as the reader's sole source of Biblical knowledge, or as an aid to serious, scholarly study, but rather to put the basic truths of the Bible in language which could readily be understood by the typical reader without a theological or linguistic background, and that he had never represented himself as a professional Bible scholar or his work as a translation. Largely in response to the criticisms, however, plans were made to supplant the paraphrase with a translation that would incorporate the simplicity of language of The Living Bible. The Living Bible has since been replaced by the New Living Translation, released by Tyndale House in 1996.