The Message

The Message (MSG) is an English rendering of the Bible by Eugene H. Peterson, published in complete form in 2002 by NavPress. It is a paraphrase rather than a translation in the usual sense: it seeks to carry the force, tone and idiom of the biblical writers into contemporary spoken English.

History and Context

Eugene Peterson, a pastor and scholar of biblical languages, began the work while teaching Galatians to his congregation in Maryland. He found that his hearers listened to Scripture as though it were a distant, formal document, when the Greek in front of him was direct, urgent and often colloquial. He started rendering passages into the English his congregation actually spoke.

The New Testament appeared in 1993, followed over the next decade by the Old Testament in stages — the wisdom books, the prophets, the Pentateuch and the histories — until the complete Bible was issued in 2002. The project occupied Peterson for more than ten years.

Method

Peterson worked directly from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, but his governing question was one of register rather than of vocabulary: how would this have sounded to someone who heard it in its own language, and what English would produce that effect now. Hebrew poetry becomes English poetry with its own rhythms; Paul's arguments take the pace of speech; proverbs land like proverbs.

That method necessarily involves interpretive choices that a formal translation avoids, and Peterson said so plainly. The Message was written to be read continuously, as a companion to a standard translation rather than a replacement for it — a point he made repeatedly and one that the version's prefaces preserve.

Distinctive Features

• Contemporary idiom: the language is current, informal and unmistakably spoken.
• Preserved literary genre: poetry reads as poetry, narrative as narrative, letters as letters.
• No verse numbers in the body: most editions group verses in ranges, which encourages reading whole passages rather than isolated lines.
• Single authorship: one voice runs through the whole Bible, giving it a coherence that committee translations do not have — and a subjectivity they avoid.

Use and Importance

The Message is widely used in devotional reading, youth ministry and public reading where the aim is to let a familiar passage be heard freshly. Preachers frequently read a passage from it alongside a formal translation to recover the surprise of a text worn smooth by repetition. It is not intended for word-level study, and Peterson was explicit that it should not be used that way.

Contemporary Relevance

Since Peterson's death in 2018 The Message has kept a substantial readership, and it remains one of the most recognisable English renderings of the Bible. Its enduring contribution is a matter of hearing: it restores to readers the sense that the biblical writers were speaking to actual people, urgently and in their own tongue.