New Testament in Modern English

J.B. Phillips

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781476779812
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

An enduring scriptural treasure and a classic of Christian literature, this modern translation is a beautiful and true rendering of the New Testament. Written in 1958, The New Testament in Modern English is one of the most dynamic and lively translations to ever appear in print. Phillips' rendering of Holy Scripture into contemporary English is accessible and powerful to a modern audience. Easy to read and remarkable in its passionate depictions of Jesus and the Apostles, this book is a classic work of Christian literature perfect for anyone looking to supplement their understanding of the Bible and enrich their spiritual life.

THE GOSPELS

The Gospel of Matthew

Early tradition ascribed this Gospel to the apostle Matthew, but scholars nowadays almost all reject this view.

The author, whom we still can conveniently call Matthew, has plainly drawn on the mysterious “Q”, which may have been a collection of oral traditions. He has used Mark’s Gospel freely, though he has rearranged the order of events and has in several instances used different words for what is plainly the same story. The style is lucid, calm and “tidy”. Matthew writes with a certain judiciousness as though he himself had carefully digested his material and is convinced not only of its truth but of the divine pattern that lies behind the historic facts.

Matthew is quite plainly a Jew who has been convinced of Jesus’ messianic claim. It is probable that he is writing primarily for fellow Jews. The frequent references to the Old Testament, the sense that Jesus’ primary mission is to the “lost sheep” of the house of Israel and the implication that the Church, founded on the rock of Peter’s faith, is the new Israel, all bear the marks of a converted Jew writing for fellow Jews. He attempts to convey a logical conviction that the new teaching was not only prophesied in the old but does in fact supersede it in the divine plan.

If Matthew wrote, as is now generally supposed, somewhere between the years 85 and 90, this Gospel’s value as a Christian document is enormous. It is, so to speak, a second generation view of Jesus Christ the Son of God and the Son of Man. It is being written at that distance in time from the great event where sober reflection and sturdy conviction can perhaps give a better balanced portrait of God’s unique revelation of himself than could be given by those who were so close to the light that they were partly dazzled by it.

CHAPTER 1

The ancestry of Jesus Christ

THIS is the record of the ancestry of Jesus Christ who was the descendant of both David and Abraham:

Abraham was the father of Isaac, who was the father of Jacob, who was the father of Judah and his brothers, who was the father of Perez and Zerah (whose mother was Tamar). Perez was the father of Hezron, who was the father of Ram, who was the father of Amminadab, who was the father of Nahshon, who was the father of Salmon, who was the father of Boaz (whose mother was Rahab). Boaz was the father of Obed (whose mother was Ruth), and Obed was the father of Jesse, who was the father of King David, who was the father of Solomon (whose mother had been Uriah’s wife). Solomon was the father of Rehoboam, who was the father of Abijah, who was the father of Asa, who was the father of Jehoshaphat, who was the father of Joram, who was the father of Uzziah, who was the father of Jotham, who was the father of Ahaz, who was the father of Hezekiah, who was the father of Manasseh, who was the father of Amon, who was the father of Josiah, who was the father of Jechoniah and his brothers, at the time of the deportation to Babylon.

After the Babylonian exile Jechoniah was the father of Shealtiel, who was the father of Zerubbabel, who was the father of Abiud, who was the father of Eliakim, who was the father of Azor, who was the father of Sadoc, who was the father of Achim, who was the father of Eliakiam, who was the father of Eleazar, who was the father of Matthan, who was the father of Jacob, who was the father of Joseph, who was the husband of Mary, who gave birth to Jesus called Christ.

The genealogy of Jesus Christ may thus be traced for fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the deportation to Babylon, and fourteen more from the deportation to Christ

His birth in human history

The birth of Jesus Christ happened like this. When Mary was engaged to Joseph, before their marriage, she was discovered to be pregnant—by the Holy Spirit. Whereupon Joseph, her future husband, who was a good man and did not want to see her disgraced, planned to break off the engagement quietly. But while he was turning the matter over in his mind an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife! What she has conceived is conceived through the Holy Spirit, and she will give birth to a son, whom you will call Jesus (‘the Saviour’) for it is he who will save his people from their sins.”

All this happened to fulfil what the Lord had said through the prophet—

Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel. (“Immanuel” means “God with us.”)

When Joseph woke up he did what the angel had told him. He married Mary, but had no intercourse with her until she had given birth to a son. Then he gave him the name Jesus.

CHAPTER 2

Herod, suspicious of the new-born king, takes vindictive precautions

JESUS was born in Bethlehem, in Judaea, in the days when Herod was king of the province. After his birth there came from the east a party of astrologers making for Jerusalem and enquiring as they went, “Where is the child born to be king of the Jews? For we saw his star in the east and we have come to pay homage to him.”

When King Herod heard about this he was deeply perturbed, as indeed were all the other people living in Jerusalem. So he summoned all the Jewish chief priests and scribes^I together and asked them where “Christ” should be born. Their reply was: “In Bethlehem, in Judaea, for this is what the prophet wrote about the matter—

And thou Bethlehem, land of Judah,

Art in no wise least among the princes of Judah:

For out of thee shall come forth a governor,

Which shall be shepherd of my people Israel.”

Then Herod invited the wise men to meet him privately and found out from them the exact time when the star appeared. Then he sent them off to Bethlehem saying, “When you get there, search for this little child with the utmost care. And when you have found him report back to me—so that I may go and worship him too.”

The wise men listened to the king and then went on their way, to Bethlehem. And now the star, which they had seen in the east, went in front of them until at last it shone immediately above the place where the little child lay. The sight of the star filled them with indescribable joy.

So they went into the house and saw the little child with his mother Mary. And they fell on their knees and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts— gold, incense and myrrh.

Then, since they were warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they went back to their own country by a different route.

But after they had gone the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up now, take the little child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you. For Herod means to seek out the child and kill him’

So Joseph got up, and taking the child and his mother with him set off for Egypt that same night, where he remained until Herod’s death.

This again is a fulfilment of the Lord’s word spoken through the prophet—

Out of Egypt did I call my son.

When Herod saw that he had been fooled by the wise men he was furiously angry. He issued orders for the execution of all male children of two years and under in Bethlehem and the surrounding district—basing his calculation on his careful questioning of the wise men.

Then Jeremiah’s prophecy was fulfilled:

A voice was heard in Ramah,

Weeping and great mourning,

Rachel weeping for her children;

And she would not be comforted, because they are not.

Jesus is brought to Nazareth

But after Herod’s death an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, “Now get up and take the infant and his mother with you and go into the land of Israel. For those who sought the child’s life are dead.”

So Joseph got up and took the little child and his mother with him and journeyed towards the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was now reigning as king of Judaea in the place of his father Herod, he was afraid to enter the country. Then he received warning in a dream to turn aside into the district of Galilee and came to live in a small town called Nazareth— thus fulfilling the old prophecy, that he should be called a Nazarene.

CHAPTER 3

The prophesied “Elijah”: John the Baptist

IN due course John the Baptist arrived, preaching in the Judaean desert: “You must change your hearts and minds—for the kingdom of Heaven has arrived!”

This was the man whom the prophet Isaiah spoke about in the words:

The voice of one crying in the wilderness,

Make ye ready the way of the Lord,

Make his paths straight.

John wore clothes of camel-hair with a leather belt round his waist, and lived on locusts and wild honey. The people of Jerusalem and of all Judaea and the Jordan district flocked to him, and were baptised by him in the river Jordan, publicly confessing their sins.

But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees^II coming for baptism he said: “Who warned you, you serpent’s brood, to escape from the wrath to come? Go and do something to show that your hearts are really changed. Don’t suppose that you can say to yourselves, ‘We are Abraham’s children’, for I tell you that God could produce children of Abraham out of these stones!

“The axe already lies at the root of the tree, and the tree that fails to produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. It is true that I baptise you with water as a sign of your repentance, but the one who follows me is far stronger than I am —indeed, I am not fit to carry his shoes. He will baptise you with the fire of the Holy Spirit. He comes all ready to separate the wheat from the chaff and very thoroughly will he clear his threshing-floor—the wheat he will collect into the granary and the chaff he will burn with a fire that can never be put out.”

John baptises Jesus

Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptised by John. But John tried to prevent him. “I need you to baptise me”, he said. “Surely you do not come to me?” But Jesus replied, “It is right for us to meet all the Law’s demands—let it be so now.”

Then John agreed to baptise him. Jesus came straight out of the water afterwards, and suddenly the heavens opened and he saw the Spirit of God coming down like a dove and resting upon him. And a voice came out of Heaven saying, “This is my dearly-loved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

CHAPTER 4

Jesus faces temptation alone in the desert

THEN Jesus was led by the Spirit up into the desert, to be tempted by the devil. After a fast of forty days and nights he was very hungry.

“If you are the Son of God,” said the tempter, coming to him, “tell these stones to turn into loaves.”

Jesus answered, “The scripture says ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’.”

Then the devil took him to the holy city, and set him on the highest pinnacle of the Temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For the scripture says—

He shall give his angels charge concerning thee:

And on their hands they shall bear thee up,

Lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone.”

“Yes,” retorted Jesus, “and the scripture also says ‘Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God’.”

Once again the devil took him to a very high mountain, and from there showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their magnificence. “Everything there I will give you,” he said to him, “if you will fall down and worship me.”

“Away with you, Satan!” replied Jesus, “the scripture says,

Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.”

Then the devil let him alone, and angels came to him and took care of him.

Jesus begins his ministry, in Galilee, and calls his first disciples

Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested he went back to Galilee. He left Nazareth and came to live in Capernaum, a lake-side town in the Zebulun-Naphtali territory. In this way Isaiah’s prophecy came true:

The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali,

Toward the sea, beyond Jordan,

Galilee of the Gentiles,

The people which sat in darkness

Saw a great light,

And to them which sat in the region and shadow of death,

To them did light spring up.

From that time Jesus began to preach and to say, “You must change your hearts and minds—for the kingdom of Heaven has arrived.”

While he was walking by the lake of Galilee he saw two brothers, Simon (Peter) and Andrew, casting their net into the water. They were fishermen, so Jesus said to them,

“Follow me and I will teach you to catch men!”

At once they left their nets and followed him.

Then he went further on and saw two more men, also brothers, James and John. They were aboard the boat with their father Zebedee repairing their nets, and he called them. At once they l...