How The Message Began
Eugene Peterson wasn’t thinking about creating a publishing phenomenon when he started translating the New Testament. He was thinking about enlivening Scripture for the twenty or so people he had in his Sunday school class in Baltimore. And, he was angry.
“The Message was a byproduct of anger,” he said. “I was a pastor in the early '80s in a small suburban parish where they had become obsessed with security.” It was a tumultuous time in Baltimore as Peterson remembers it, “. . . and the parishioners were afraid it would spill out of the city and into the suburbs. People started buying guns and security systems and double-locking doors. I was appalled that these Christian people were suddenly reverting to their basic lowest survival instinct.”
Reacting to this frustration, he decided to begin a Sunday school class, followed by a series of sermons, on the biblical book of Galatians. “I’m going to teach them about the free life in Christ so that instead of closing in on themselves, they’ll be free. That’s what I was thinking at the time.” He gathered with twenty or so parishioners every Sunday in the basement, put on a pot of coffee, and started studying Galatians with them.
“It was just awful,” Peterson says. “They’d fill up their coffee cups and stir in sugar and cream and look at their cups and they weren’t getting it. It was just really bad. I went home after the third week and said to my wife that I was going to teach them Greek. If they could read it in Greek they would get it, they’d understand what a revolutionary text it is and couldn’t just keep living in their ruts. She agreed that would empty the class out fast.”
So Peterson did the next best thing and used his knowledge of Greek to translate Galatians into “their idiom.” He put the life back into the ancient text, words originally spoken and penned in the language of the working class. “Paul had this wild syntax with vigor and startling images he would fly into when he was excited. I wanted them to get that.” Bit by bit, he translated Galatians every week and gave everyone in the Sunday school class a copy of it. “I knew I had them the second week because after they left, I was cleaning up and their cups were full of cold coffee and they had forgotten to stir in the sugar and cream and drink it.”