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This interview was originally published in the October 5, 1979, issue of Christianity Today.

"Six years ago our only son died suddenly from a brain hemorrhage. I knew I had to have God's Word to find the comfort and strength I so desperately needed. The Living Bible had just come out, and I read and reread it. At last! I had found a Bible I could understand. I've grown in my Christianity during the past six years from a lukewarm believer into an evangelical Christian, and I want to pay tribute to you for helping in my growth."

"I have been a Catholic sister for over 30 years. 1 was no stranger to the Bible, but never before have I experienced such joy and, yes, excitement in Scripture. "

Scholars continue to debate the merits of the Living Bible; but letters such as these, addressed to Kenneth N. Taylor, affirm for him its original purpose: to see lives changed through understanding Scripture. Taylor's first paraphrases appeared more than 15 years ago. Today, well over 20 million copies of the entire Living Bible, and several million more Living Letters (the New Testament epistles) and other portions have been sold.

A seminary-trained clergyman who has never had a pastorate, Taylor, 62, has been involved in publishing for most of his adult life. Using his pen as a pulpit, he has preached to millions of readers all over the world. But although his work has made him famous, he remains a retiring and modest figure, "one of the few people I know who has not allowed wealth to change him," says a colleague. "He simply has not been corrupted by money or prestige. His spiritual intensity and commitments are unquestioned."

After taking an undergraduate degree in zoology at Wheaton College (Illinois), he attended Dallas Theological Seminary for three years, and graduated from Northern Baptist Seminary in 1944 with a master's degree in theology. For three years he edited Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship's magazine, HIS, and for 15 years was director of Moody Press in Chicago. He left that position in 1962 to publish the Living Bible. He has also authored 10 children's books, including his best-selling Bible Story Book.

How many publishers originally turned down the Living Letters paraphrase when you first tried to get it published? And how did you react?

Probably five or six publishers, some secular and some religious, returned the manuscript. There was the feeling lurking in the back of my mind that it might be better to publish it personally so that there would be more control and more opportunity to give it undivided promotional attention. Sometimes I've been asked whether I expected such a vast circulation to occur, and I really don't know how to answer that, because God did give me some intimations that it was going to have a wide usefulness: I felt that since reading the completed manuscript helped me so much in my own understanding of the Word of God, others with less than my seminary education would be even more greatly helped in being able to understand the Bible easily.

So my emotional reaction was very mixed. I was disappointed, but excited that perhaps God was going to let me publish it myself.

What kind of pressures did you face as you translated the Bible?

There was an enormous burden on my soul for complete accuracy on the one hand, and complete readability and understanding on the other. A paraphrase is an entirely different kind of translation. A standard translation can best be termed a "word-by-word" or "phrase-by-phrase" translation, because a "dynamic equivalent" English word or expression is found to replace the Greek or Hebrew word in the original manuscript. But it is almost impossible to find an exact equivalent, so the result is a series of English words reconstructed into a fairly readable English sentence, but not quite accurate and often not conveying what the various Bible writers were really saying.

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June (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49