May Goal

A few months ago, I read about a family that was reading through the New Testament in a month's time. Their reading plan was 10 chapters a day, which works out to less than a month, but when I decided to follow in their footsteps I made a plan for myself that would take 31 days - it is 9 chapters a day for 9 days, and 8 chapters every day thereafter. For me, this is a pretty hefty goal. When it comes to Bible reading, I'm kind of slow, I did after all take 2 and a half YEARS to read Proverbs...plus I've always thought, if I read it in bulk I'd miss too much to make it worthwhile. But the post I read said, that while you miss some details, you'll "be surprised how much of a bigger picture you catch" - and it's true. I have never read the Bible this way and I'm finding that individual verses I'd memorized were not exactly what I thought when taken in larger (bookwide, not chapter-wide) context.

I decided that I would choose a translation of the Bible I had never read so that I wouldn't feel so familiar with it that I just skimmed the words. I was thinking something like The Message or the Living Bible, but in March I unexpectedly got a copy of The New Testament in Modern English which was translated by J.B. Phillips. Phillips was a contemporary and friend of C.S. Lewis. In the forward he explained how he wanted to make sure the words remained relevant when he revised the translation and he was surprised at how little basic English had changed over a 12 year period (given that slang seems to change constantly). The revised edition was published 1972 and I think it remains very accessable to modern English readers.

I was curious, so I looked online and not everyone thinks it is a good translation, but not everyone likes any translation and personally my opinion is that since I cannot read Greek and Hebrew, I am really trusting God and the translator(s) that any translation I read is good enough to convey His message. Basically, there are two ways to translate - word or word or thought for thought. The Phillips translation is thought for thought. In the forward, he used the illustration of a bird - you can study it in flight, or you can kill it and dissect it, but you really need to do both if you really want to know about birds.

I'm not finished yet (and don't expect to be before the end of the month - and only then Lord willing, because the amount of time it requires daily is a lot for someone with only pockets of uninterrupted free time!), however, I like it. I feel stretched, which is something I haven't felt in a while - at least spiritually speaking. And in time I hope to do it again with a word for word translation.