Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Translation
Review: If you're looking for a more 'updated' translation of the New Testament, this book is definitely worth a look. I agree with a prior reviewer who mentioned that in reading this book your mind will undoubtedly compare and contrast this translation with others that you've read in the past. It's really quite an enjoyable exercise!I must also say a few words about issues raised in a previous post as they relate to this book. First off, it was J B Phillips' intention to follow this work up with a similar translation of the Old Testament, but unfortunately he never had the chance. Neither he nor any other Christians that I come into contact with desire to clip Jews and their history out of God's redemptive plan. Quite to the contrary - the Christian church is and will continue to be a bastion of Jewish support. Secondly, the knock on the New Testament as 'a collection of pawns in a cosmic chess match between good and evil' reflects a pretty poor understanding of the material contained therein. Furthermore, to say that the book's central character, Jesus Christ, is a vindictive man who only sees black and white again misses the point. Jesus was very much about forgiveness, and on numerous occasions rebuffed people for their unbending interpretation of sin and punishment.
Rating:
Summary: The best modern English translation by far
Review: In an age when there are nearly twice as many new Bible translations released in the last forty years as in the previous four hundred before that, it is easy for people to get confused. Given that almost all of those many Bibles released in the last forty years are paraphrases, why not skip the rest and go with the very first modern paraphrase, J. B. Phillips' "The New Testament in Modern English"? Written in 1958, the Phillips Translation is, quite simply, one of the most dynamic and energetic Bible translations ever put on paper. It seethes with action, power, and transcendence. Jesus is shown as fully man (and yet fully God) in a way that makes us love Him even more. Phillips captures Jesus in such a way that we truly recognize Him as our brother, but always as our Lord, too. But Phillips gives us more than simply a passionate Jesus of the Gospels, he gives us the gentle, yet forceful Epistles, emphasizing the fact that they were truly pastoral letters. He phrases things so beautifully that they come alive and feed the heart. For instance, contrast his translation of Romans 12:1-2 with other recent paraphrases: Phillips:
"With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give him your bodies, as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by him. Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity." New Living Translation:
"And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice--the kind he will accept. When you think of what he has done for you, is this too much to ask? Don't copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will know what God wants you to do, and you will know how good and pleasing and perfect his will really is." The Message:
"So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life--your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life--and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you." Doesn't the Phillips do a better job of capturing the power of Paul's writing while also avoiding the pitfalls of difficult wording? (Nor does it pander to cultural relativism.) Despite not being a word for word translation, it sticks remarkably to the ideas of the original text as shown below in the more literal King James Version translation: "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God." Having translated the Book of Romans myself back in college, I can appreciate the singlehanded success Phillips enjoys in capturing the tenor of the Greek, while simultaneously not being condescending or too loose with ideas. In my many years of reading the Phillips Translation, I have yet to find a single verse that imparts a controversy that would create any doctrinal questions. The nature of the Phillips translation makes it an excellent Bible to simply read. Phillips originally did not include verse markings, so the text was not broken up by numbers, making it more book-like. For this reason, this is one of the finest devotional Bibles written. If there is to be any quibble, it lies in the fact that Phillips was British and not American, so his translation does have a few phrases that are better suited to British English than American. But these are few and far between, being far less noticeable than some of the liberties that American translators have taken in many of the modern Bible paraphrases. Some may also fault the fact that Phillips does not attempt to update direct quotes from the Old Testament when they are used in the New Testament. (Different revisions exists, some which use the New King James when quoting OT texts and others with the American Standard Version.) This may seem a bit odd to some when the style of phrasing changes, but since Phillips did not translate an Old Testament, it is a translator's prerogative that can be justified. For those who would like to get a feel for the Phillips New Testament, it is available online. My personal take is that it is the best modern paraphrase available, is a great companion for Bible study (though not as the primary source - stick with a literal translation for that), and is particularly well-suited for continuous reading. J. B. Phillip's work continues to amaze me with its superb blend of simple modernity, accuracy, and power. Highly Recommended!
Rating: 
Summary: a poor read
Review: Northrop Frye used to stress the importance of reading the Bible - Old and New Testament - as a unity, as a continuous story. He thought this would follow the intentions of the final editors most closely. This is true. However the faithful seems to be more likely to ignore the larger concept and prefers to be curiously selective in his or her reading. The quoting is usually all over the place without any regard for context and focusses often entirely on the so called New Testament. However - Jews too are part of our heritage. Western culture is not identical with an entirely Christian world; thank goodness! Without our classical heritage and without Jewish contributors, our civilization would be poorer and less interesting. And of course Jews - secular and religious - represent a section in the cultural spectrum that couldn't care less for the significance of the New Testament, except for the reprehension and bodily grief caused by waving the thing into their faces. As for me: the Bible is a book of imaginative literature. It's the only way I care reading it. In my review on the The King James Bible I have already said that the New Testament strikes one as something of a letdown. The Old Testament is the militant monument to a nation; this sorry appendix is the first example for the most popular genre on our bookshelves: the self-help manual. How to repair your car and loose weight in seven easy steps. The narrow horizon of vindictive but purblind sectarians who can see things only in two colours: black and white. Everybody in this picture is barely more than a puppet in a cosmic chess game between good and evil. Except for John the Evangelist and passages from Luke, the quality of writing is generally poor. It takes a St. Augustine to defend Paul's rhetorical skills in 2 Cor. 11:16-33. Somebody seems to have taken a chapter out of Dostoyevsky at his worst: everybody wallows in hysterics and the "disciples" binge on self-humiliation and sin their way to Jeeesus. Whether New Testament or Dostoyevsky: they spoil my day. I detest the anti-intellectual bias and the folksy mythology. I detest this phony offer of effortless shortcuts and the presumptuous glorification of the disenfranchised as the secretly privileged. Fast food for the simple minded, quick fixes for the hopeless. In fact, I have always considered " who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" (Mt. 3:7) a fair question. There is something woolly and sickening in all these hysterics over an (ultimately broken) promise (Mk. 9:1, 13:30; Mt. 10:23; 1 Cor. 16:51; 1 Thess. 4:15-17). The book aims at the lowest common denominator and it doesn't improve the aspect, when the arrogance of self-styled innitiates into some homespun "Gnosis," chooses to walk in the shroud of meekness. The period was teeming with religious con-artists. Apollonius of Tyana, Peregrinus Proteus and Alexander of Abonuteichos plied their trades in the eastern bazaars, healing and soothsaying, with stories of Apollonius' birth by a virgin following on the imposter's heels. Exposing the baloney was as ineffectual then, as it is now. Despite the charlatan's exposure by the satirist Lucian (c.120-c.190 AD.) the cult of Alexander of Abonuteichos continued for centuries and is even commemorated on coins of the period. Those were credulous times and the general decline of Hellenistic sciences and public education didn't help the situation at all. Surviving a snake bite was evidently enough for the inhabitants of Malta to believe that Paul himself was a god (Acts 28:6). And Paul and his companion Barnabas had to go to some lengths to convince the Lycaonians of Lystra that they were not deities, for the locals immediately sought to sacrifice to them as manifestations of Hermes and Zeus, simply because a man with bad feet stood up (Acts 14:8-18). It explains how the claptrap in 1 Cor. 2:14-15 could ever be taken seriously: "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man (sic!)." Somebody give me my flyswatter. I think I could make a very good case, to deny altogether a grand unity that bridges both parts of the Bible, as Northrop Frye proposes in his "Great Code." No doubt the Tanakh is the New Testament's point of reference, which in itself is already a con-act. Clearly the Old Testament is not constructed to suffer this ludicrous appendix as a conclusion to its own story. Old and New Testament are telling two different tales. When progressing to a Christian canon, the councils deliberated on the best arrangement to establish the apparent symmetry between what Frye used to term as "types" and "anti-types." A typical case of "hindsight reading," but little more. For the interested, the archive on my website details the story and structure of the New Testament and how it developed from the gospels to "Revelations," which the editors not without hesitation had added as the capstone to the edifice. It appeared to be the only conclusion that could interpret and put in context the incidents and proclamations collected in the texts, which were documents from a bygone period of hope to overturn Roman rule in a great cosmic cataclysm. After Constantine's edict of toleration in 314 AD, this was no longer on of course - but by then the canon had solidified.
Rating:
Summary: Great Translation!
Review: Really helps you understand the scriptures better.
Rating:
Summary: The wit of Jesus shines through
Review: The reviewers below are right--this is a _fun_ translation. The obvious wit and humor of Jesus easily shines though, unlike the unreliable and nearly worthless King James mistranlation. For example, when his disciples get scared, Jesus essentially teases them, "What wrong, little-faiths? Lost your nerve?" This is a pleasure to read. Written the way people talk (and I'm sure people thousands of years ago talked just as people do today), this version, although written in 1958, should still be an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in the Bible.
Rating: 
Summary: Voluptuous verbage & intense insight
Review: This is a fun modern-english PARAPHRASE translation of the New Testament. It makes the NT a pleasure to read, and it is a nice resource for understanding the New Testament. The flow of the translation is smooth, and the footnotes are minimal. The sometime awkward and archaic King Jame's language does not get in the way of the message of the NT. Mr. Phillips workde with C. S. Lewis on the translation, which is why it is such a pleasure to read. The main drawback of this edition of the NT is that there is no versification (as was had in previous editions), which make comparison a bit more difficult. Futhermore, it is a paraphrase edition, and, at times, is loose with the translation of the text. I would like to see a CD-ROM edition of this paraphrase translation!
Rating:
Summary: Very Understandable
Review: To get right to the point, this is a great translation. I am walking away from my study time with a clearer understanding of the passages I've read. I was a die-hard King James man and was leary of modern translations. I wanted to get a version that was accurately translated into today's english. I find this to be a reliable translation. I think that this Bible is presently out of print, but worth getting even used. Hopefully they will make another print soon. God bless you!!
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