It is a version for our time-designed to be read by contemporary people in the same way as the original koin Greek and Hebrew manuscripts were savored by people thousands of years ago. That is what The Message seeks to accomplish for contemporary readers.
There is a need in every generation to keep the language of the gospel message current, fresh, and understandable-the way it was for its very first readers. His primary goal was to capture the tone of the text and the original conversational feel of the Greek, in contemporary English. For more than two years, Peterson devoted all his efforts to The Message New Testament. As he shared his version of Galatians with them, they quit stirring their coffee and started catching Paul's passion and excitement as he wrote to a group of Christians whom he was guiding in the ways of Jesus Christ. So he began to bring into English the rhythms and idioms of the original ancient Greek-writing straight out of the Greek text without looking at other English translations. Peterson's parishioners simply weren't connecting with the real meaning of the words and the relevance of the New Testament for their own lives. I hoped to bring the New Testament to life for two different types of people: those who hadn't read the Bible because it seemed too distant and irrelevant and those who had read the Bible so much that it had become 'old hat.'"" I knew that the early readers of the New Testament were captured and engaged by these writings and I wanted my congregation to be impacted in the same way. Writing straight from the original text, I began to attempt to bring into English the rhythms and idioms of the original language. Why was The Message written? The best answer to that question comes from Eugene Peterson himself: ""While I was teaching a class on Galatians, I began to realize that the adults in my class weren't feeling the vitality and directness that I sensed as I read and studied the New Testament in its original Greek.