The Birth of the NLT: A father, his son, and a sick Billy Graham
The Birth of the NLT: A father, his son, and a sick Billy Graham
For this Research Digest, you get to see my favorite portion of a research paper I wrote for my Foundations of Translation class.
The History Behind the NLT
The NLT’s predecessor, the Living Bible, was a widely acclaimed and controversial English translation that may have paved the way for many of the dynamic equivalence translations in use today (cf. Bowman 1973). For centuries, the King James Version was the primary version that the English-speaking church, including the church in America, used to study the Scriptures. This all changed with the advent of the Living Bible (LB). Across the country, ministers reported that their congregations switched, seemingly overnight, from the King James to the Living Bible (Bowman 1973). Some congregation members in Presbyterian churches even demanded that the minister begin reading all the passages from the LB (Smart 1979).
What caused this sudden shift?
In his article evaluating the Living Bible, biblical scholar David Garland recounts the inspiring beginning of this translation (1979, 405). The director of Moody Bible Institute’s publishing arm, Dr. Kenneth Taylor, watched the bored, puzzled expressions on his children’s faces when he read the King James Version to them during their family devotionals. English had shifted such that every “boy who drives the plow” could no longer understand the written Scriptures. An idea came to Taylor. He began paraphrasing the Scriptures so that the “doctrine and narrative of Scripture” (from a staunch Evangelical viewpoint) would “come alive” for his children. It worked! The first few paraphrases were so successful that he began spending his thirty-mile train trip to work paraphrasing the American Standard Version of 1901 on a legal pad perched on his lap.
Taylor first finished a paraphrase of the letters of Paul, entitled Living Letters. No publisher, not even his own Moody Press, would accept his manuscript. Undeterred, Taylor published 2,000 copies at his own expense in 1962. Under half of them sold that year. Reorders only trickled in. Then a copy of Living Letters wound up in the hands of Billy Graham while he recuperated from an illness in Hawaii. Billy Graham loved the translation so much that he ordered 500,000 copies of Living Letters to distribute in 1963 through the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. The rest is history. Taylor resigned from his job with Moody Press, completed the paraphrase of the New Testament in 1967, and the entire Living Bible was on the market by 1971. Bookstores, supermarkets, and even drugstores sold it. By 1979, over twenty-three million copies of the Living Bible had been sold and Living Bibles International had been formed with the express intent of translating and distributing the LB in one hundred major languages around the world.
After recounting this exciting story, David Garland joins the voice of many others in commending the lively English of the paraphrase and in excoriating the Living Bible for inserting evangelical doctrine into Scripture, mishandling textual variants, and misrepresenting itself with a scholarly air (1979, cf. Bowman 1973). By the time Garland wrote his article, though, the American public had gained an insatiable appetite for the Bible in modern English. There was no turning back. The Living Bible’s passionate public acceptance and equally passionate scholarly criticism made the perfect setting for producing a revision…
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TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read)
- The Living Bible was born out of a father’s desire to see his children engage with Scripture.
- No one was interested in the early edition of the Living Bible.
- After Billy Graham got ahold of an early edition of the Living Bible section of Paul’s letters while sick in Hawaii, he ordered 500,000 copies. Overnight, it became a national bestseller.
- The son of the translator of the Living Bible became the CEO of Tyndale and commissioned a revision of the Living Bible. That product became the New Living Translation.