The Work
The Living Bible was published in its complete form by Tyndale House Publishers (Wheaton, Illinois) in 1971, though portions appeared earlier: Living Letters (Paul's epistles) in 1962, Living Prophecies in 1965, and other sections progressively through the 1960s. Billy Graham's endorsement of Living Letters at a 1963 crusade was decisive in establishing the project's evangelical legitimacy and boosted sales enormously. The complete Living Bible was the bestselling book in the United States in 1972 and 1973 and remains the bestselling Bible in American history.
The book is not a translation but a paraphrase: Taylor did not translate from the original Hebrew and Greek but rewrote the American Standard Version (1901) in contemporary English, making interpretive choices that are embedded in the paraphrase itself rather than in footnotes. This distinction - paraphrase vs. translation - became significant in evaluating its accuracy, and led to the scholarly revision known as the New Living Translation (NLT), published in 1996, which translates directly from the original languages.
Biblical Engagement
The Living Bible's significance for biblical engagement lies not in new scholarship but in its transformation of the relationship between millions of Americans and the biblical text. Taylor's stated goal was to make the Bible readable by his ten children at the dinner table - to produce a version that communicated naturally in American English without the formal register of the KJV or the flat literalism of the ASV.
Romans 3:23 in the Living Bible: 'Yes, all have sinned; all fall short of God's glorious ideal.' The KJV reads: 'For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.' Taylor's paraphrase captures the meaning accessibly and adds 'ideal' as an interpretive gloss - a word not in the original but consistent with the meaning.
Ephesians 2:8-9 in the Living Bible: 'Because of his kindness, you have been saved through trusting Christ. And even trusting is not of yourselves; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good we have done, so none of us can take any credit for it.' The KJV reads: 'For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.' Taylor's version is more immediately comprehensible to a modern reader with no theological vocabulary.
John 3:16 in the Living Bible: 'For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that anyone who believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.' This is very close to the KJV ('For God so loved the world...') but adjusts the word order for natural American English.
Psalm 23:1 in the Living Bible: 'Because the Lord is my Shepherd, I have everything I need!' The exclamation mark is characteristic: Taylor frequently adds punctuation that emphasizes the emotional register of the original, making the personal and relational dimensions of Scripture more vivid.
Author and Context
Kenneth Nathaniel Taylor (1917-2005) was born in Portland, Oregon, and educated at Wheaton College, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Northern Baptist Theological Seminary. He served as director of Moody Press from 1947 to 1963, during which time he began the paraphrase project that would become the Living Bible.
Taylor's motivation was entirely practical and pastoral: he was a committed evangelical layman (and, later, ordained as a Presbyterian elder) who found that his family's Bible reading was not producing genuine engagement with the text. His children could not understand the archaic language of the KJV. He began paraphrasing Paul's letters at his commuter train into Chicago, revising them in the margins of his Bible.
The publishing history reflects the project's tentative beginnings. Taylor self-published Living Letters in 1962 through Tyndale House, which he had founded himself to publish the project. Graham's endorsement was the turning point: it provided both legitimacy and distribution. Tyndale House grew to become one of the largest Christian publishers in the world on the basis of the Living Bible and its successors.
Reception and Controversy
The book's reception was polarized. Among lay evangelical readers, particularly families with children and new Christians, it was immediately transformative. For millions of readers who had found the KJV impenetrable, the Living Bible opened Scripture for the first time. Radio Bible teachers, Sunday school programs, and youth ministries embraced it.
Among biblical scholars and theologically trained ministers, the reception was more critical. The paraphrase's tendency to embed theological interpretation in the text itself - rather than in footnotes - was seen as problematic. Taylor's Dallas Theological Seminary formation shaped his paraphrase in directions consistent with dispensational theology; readers from other theological traditions found that his interpretive choices sometimes distorted the text. His rendering of Romans 9 (the predestination passages) was particularly criticized for softening the Reformed reading.
The translation-vs.-paraphrase distinction became a standard issue in evangelical discussions of Bible translation. Taylor himself was forthright about the Living Bible being a paraphrase and encouraged readers who wanted an accurate translation to read the KJV or NASB alongside it.
The New Living Translation
In 1989, Tyndale House commissioned a team of ninety evangelical scholars to produce a revision of the Living Bible based directly on original language translation rather than paraphrase. The result - the New Living Translation (NLT), published in 1996 - retains Taylor's commitment to accessibility and contemporary English while achieving the accuracy of a genuine translation. The NLT has largely replaced the Living Bible in academic and ministry contexts while sharing its readability goals.
Theological Significance
The Living Bible's theological significance is primarily sociological: it democratized Bible reading in twentieth-century America in a way that no scholarly translation could have achieved. By making the text immediately comprehensible to readers without theological or linguistic training, it fulfilled the Reformation principle of Scripture in the vernacular - the right of every believer to read God's word in their own tongue.
The book also raised, in popular form, the question of translation philosophy: what is the goal of Bible translation? Formal equivalence (reproducing the form of the original as closely as possible) or dynamic equivalence (reproducing the meaning in the most natural contemporary expression)? The Living Bible's success demonstrated the popular appeal of dynamic equivalence; the subsequent history of American Bible translation - RSV, NIV, NLT, The Message - is partly the story of negotiating between these two principles.
Legacy
The Living Bible sold over forty million copies. It introduced the model of 'thought-for-thought' translation that shaped the development of the NIV (1978) and NLT and influenced every subsequent accessible translation. It helped establish Tyndale House as a major publisher and laid the foundation for the NLT's scholarly revision. Through the NLT - which is now the second bestselling Bible translation in the United States after the NIV - Taylor's commitment to accessible contemporary English has continued to shape American Bible reading.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers interested in the Living Bible's approach should compare its text with the KJV and with more recent accessible translations (NLT, NIV, CEB) on passages like Romans 8, John 3, and Psalm 23. The differences reveal the interpretive choices embedded in every translation and the theological stakes of translation philosophy.
Further Reading
- Mark L. Ward Jr., Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible (2018) - the most accessible treatment of translation philosophy for evangelical readers. - Bruce M. Metzger, The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions (2001) - provides the historical context for the Living Bible within the broader history of English Bible translation. - Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (2006) - Peterson, whose The Message paraphrase followed the Living Bible tradition, reflects on the relationship between Bible translation and spiritual reading.