There is a language of the heart that must express the passion of this love-theology
A goal of The Passion Translation is to recapture the emotion of God’s Word, for emotion is vital to God’s message. As Gregory Clapper rhetorically asked, “Is the great range of scriptural language about the ‘heart’ dispensable ornamentation which only clouds the real message of the Gospel, or does this emotion-language itself convey and constitute, in large measure, the real message?” Brian Simmons believes Scripture’s emotion-language is at the heart of God’s Word because it fully manifests the heart of God.
Therefore, the passage is translated like this: “Beloved ones, I plead with you, follow my example and become free from the bondage of religion
The truth is that Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic) differ foundationally from our Indo-European languages (Greek, Latin, English). Not just having a different grammar and vocabulary, Semitic languages have an entirely different operating system. Their speakers employ spatial tools, rather than temporal (timeline-based) tools, to describe their world. Classical Semitic languages don’t even have past, present, and future tenses as we know them! Semitic thinkers expressed themselves with full-bodied physicality and passion that can be uncomfortable for English readers. What we think of when we hear the word kingdom and what a Hebrew speaker pictures with the word malkuth can be orders of magnitude apart. Jesus was not just a theology teacher; he was teaching a potent Semitic spirituality and worldview centered on God’s power, available to us who are made in his image. He did not come just to forgive sins but also to teach us how to walk and live our lives in step with the dynamic source of all things: his Father and ours. Why not carry as much of this passion and vitality as we can into our translations of the Bible? The translators’ care in conveying the heart language of the Bible is not a selective elevation of one aspect of the Bible above others; rather, it represents our effort to holistically translate the message, tone, dabble com and focus of the Word as faithfully and accurately as possible.
The heart and mind are not opponents in God’s Word but allies and supporters of each other. If we want to grasp the fullness of God’s character and his passion for our lives, we must recapture this lost language. The genuine message and fullness of God’s good news in Christ is laid bare in and through the Bible’s emotion-language.
It is clear in the context that his message is to both brothers and sisters in the faith, to the “beloved ones,” as The Passion Translation says
God refuses to meet us in a merely intellectual way. God wants to meet us at heart level, so we must let the words go heart deep-which is what we’re trying to do with this translation project: To bring words that go through the human soul and into our spirits. That is why The Passion Translation focuses on drawing out Scripture’s heart and emotion language-to benefit peoples’ devotional and spiritual lives with Christ.
Throughout the process of writing The Passion Translation, we took great pains to express God’s message faithfully from the original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic manuscripts into modern English. One area that challenged us was translating the original male-oriented pronouns and terms from the ancient biblical text in a way that was clear and readable in our twenty-first century context. Our translation philosophy is to transfer meaning, not merely words, from the original biblical text to English. We believe that the meaning of a passage takes priority over the form of the original words. Therefore, where appropriate, we translated male-oriented pronouns and terms in a gender-neutral way when it was clear God’s message applied not merely to men but to men and women collectively. For example, in Galatians 4:12, Paul pleads with the church of Galatia to become like him. . . .” This example represents several instances where it was clear God’s original message wasn’t merely for men but for every person-every “beloved one.”
