Reporting the Truth.
Restoring the Church.
By Daniel Silliman
The Passion Bible has come under fire again after allegations from a Texas pastor that the translation and its footnotes contain extensive instances of plagiarism. (RR graphic)
A pastor at a nondenominational church in Texas says he has uncovered extensive evidence of plagiarism in the Passion version of the Bible.
David Fish, the formation minister at New River Fellowship, 25 miles west of Fort Worth, told Roys Report (RR) he found “smoking gun after smoking gun after smoking gun.”
The latest edition of the Passion New Testament, with Psalms and Proverbs, has sold more than 1 million copies and is available in Christian bookstores and major retail outlets, including Walmart and Target.
The Bible has been widely endorsed by independent charismatic ministers and praised by regular readers, who say this version “stirs the heart” and contains so many outstanding, illuminating and insightful footnotes.
Others have been critical, arguing the Passion Bible is a paraphrase, not a translation, and takes too many liberties with the original texts. Pastor Brian Simmons is lead translator for The Passion Translation—a controversial Bible version, which has been pulled from Bible Gateway. (Screengrab via YouTube / BroadStreet Publishing)
Fish says the problems go beyond that. He argues the Passion Bible — including those beloved footnotes — is “chalk-full of plagiarism.”
“It’s undeniable,” Fish told RR. “How many smoking-gun-instances of plagiarism do you need before you pull something and recognize there is a serious problem?”
Fish has posted online two spreadsheets with more than 100 examples, starting with Paul’s epistles to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians.
He started looking into the Bible translation after receiving a lead from a British Pentecostal minister who found basic errors in its Greek translations. Fish, suspecting that the translator didn’t know the original biblical languages, began to examine unusual word choices in the Passion Bible.
He found scores of verses where the Passion uses phrases that appear in popular paraphrases such as Eugene Peterson’s “The Message” but in no other English version. He’s also found many footnotes claiming to have discovered a nuance in the Aramaic that match, word for word, the observations of an eccentric independent scholar.
Mark Strauss, one of the translators of the New International Version of the Bible, told Fish that the number of examples he found raises serious concerns.
“If it happened very occasionally, it might be by accident,” Strauss said. “One turn of expression might be by accident, but you wouldn’t expect that a lot. It looks suspicious. There’s no doubt that it looks suspicious.”
Broadstreet Publishing, the Minnesota company behind TPT, did not respond to an email from RR.Passion Bible faces plagiarism allegations after a Texas pastor claims extensive copying from other sources in its translation and footnotes, sparking controversy over its authenticity.
(Source: BroadStreet Publishing)
The lead translator, Brian Simmons, has previously dismissed criticism of his work as “cancel culture” and does not appear to have addressed allegations of plagiarism publicly. One entry on the Passion Bible’s FAQ page says the work went through a rigorous review process and “every book (including the numerous footnotes) is evaluated by respected scholars and editors.”
Simmons has not been trained as a translator or linguist. He previously worked as a missionary in Central America and helped Bible translators do “comprehension checks” with native speakers of Paya-Kuna.
Fish first presented his evidence of plagiarism in a 4.5-hour episode of the Minor Prophets podcast on June 4 with ministers JonMark Baker and Mike Winger.
The three men have launched a petition asking YouVersion, the world’s most popular Bible app, to stop offering the Passion. In 11 days, more than 16,000 people have signed.
‘People should be demanding refunds’
Winger, a pastor trained at Calvary Chapel in Southern California and who has a popular YouTube channel, first raised concerns about the Passion Bible in 2018. He was one of the people who successfully pushed Bible Gateway, the first multilingual, multi-translation Bible website, to remove the Passion translation from its list of available versions.
Winger said the evidence that Fish uncovered goes much further than what he found to discredit Simmons and his Bible.
“People should be demanding refunds,” he said on the Minor Prophets podcast. “There needs to be a mass recall on every version and every edition.”
Winger called the Passion Bible a “disaster” and Simmons a “fake.”Podcaster Mike Winger raised concerns about the Passion Bible in 2018. (Source: Youtube screenshot)
“This is a guy who — through all the evidence we’re seeing — is knowingly perpetrating an intentional, deliberate copy-paste translation with a bunch of deception and lies about what it is,” he told the two other ministers. “And he’s gotten away with it for years.”
Fish told RR he has spent dozens and dozens of hours investigating plagiarism in the Passion Bible. He didn’t intend to devote that much time to the project, he said, but he kept finding more examples, and “fell down a wormhole.”
He said that based on the evidence he has, he does not believe that the Passion Bible went through a rigorous review process. But if respected scholars are looking at Simmons’ translation choices, they missed more than 350 instances of plagiarism in four short epistles.
34 borrowed phrases in Ephesians
On his spreadsheet, Fish documented dozens of examples of apparent plagiarism in Ephesians alone.
In the Passion Bible, for example, Ephesians 1:9 says, “He unveiled his secret desires to us—the hidden mystery of his long-range plan.” The phrase “long-range plan” does not appear in the New International Version, the English Standard Version, the New Revised Standard Version, the New King James or the Christian Standard Bible.David Fish, the formation minister at New River Fellowship in Hudson Oaks, Texas claims he has found hundreds of examples of plagiarism in the Passion Bible. (Source: New River Fellowship)
But the phrase does appear in that verse in “The Message,” which the late Eugene Peterson described as a paraphrase that he wrote using his “pastoral imagination.”
In verse 14, the same thing happens with the phrase “the first installment of what’s coming.” None of the translation teams working on contemporary versions of the Bible found words to that effect in the original Greek. None of them include a footnote offering that as an alternative translation or saying the phrase occurs in some manuscripts.
Peterson came up with those six words while trying to expand on the idea of the passage. Then Simmons, a decade or so later, came up with the same six words.
In the next chapter of the epistle, the Passion Bible translates Ephesians 2:7 with the word “shower.” The text speaks of “the infinite, limitless riches of His grace and kindness which was showered upon us in Jesus Christ!”
No other contemporary translation makes that choice. The verb in the New International Version is “show.” In the New Revised Standard Version, it’s “show.” In the New King James Version, “show.”
But in The Message, Ephesians 2:7 says God will “shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus.”
Fish found 31 more apparently borrowed phrases in the Passion translation’s version of Ephesians.
The nondenominational minister took the side-by-side comparisons to his uncle, Jeffrey Fish, who teaches in the classics department at Baylor University. Professor Fish said any student who turned in a translation like the Passion Bible in Greek class would receive a failing grade.
“The times in my career when this has happened,” the elder Fish said on the podcast, “it’s resulted in a conversation, the student failing the course and sometimes even having to leave the university.”
Footnotes traced to eccentric scholar
The younger Fish said what he found in the footnotes was even stranger. Almost every reference to Aramaic, the original language spoken by Jesus and the disciples, is lifted whole cloth from other sources, he told RR.
In the 2013 Passion Bible version of Colossians, for example, readers find 15 footnotes offering insights from the Aramaic translation of the text. Colossians 3:16 says, “Let the word of Christ live in you richly.” A footnote in the Passion Bible explains that “the Aramaic literally means ‘Manifestation.’”
But that biblical text wasn’t written in Aramaic. The epistles, like the rest of the New Testament, were composed in Koine Greek, the dominant trade language of the day. And the standard Aramaic translation of the Greek text, called the Peshitta, does not use “manifestation,” either. It says “dwell.”The Passion Translation, which many theology scholars regard as a paraphrase, has been pulled from top biblical search website Bible Gateway. (Courtesy of BroadStreet Publishing)
The next verse, Colossians 3:17, tells Christians that whatever they do, they should do it in the name of Jesus. The Passion Bible translates this as “Let every activity … be drenched with the beauty of our Lord Jesus.” A footnote adds that “activity,” in Aramaic, “literally means ‘commitment.’”
And in the next chapter, a footnote adds that the word “duty,” in Aramaic, “literally means ‘sell your last crust of bread,’ which is a metaphor for making a full commitment.”
But none of this appears in the standard edition of the Aramaic Bible or in multiple English translations of the Aramaic. Fish tracked each footnote — and other comments — to a text by Victor Alexander, a filmmaker who claimed to have discovered the true Scripture, which had been, he said, suppressed by scholars.
Alexander, writing in a blog in the 1990s and 2000s, claimed that all Western Bibles and all known Aramaic Bibles were corrupt. He said they “strayed from the teachings of Eashoa the Messiah” and “distorted major concepts of the Scriptures, such as the Trinity.” He offered his own English translation. It is unclear which manuscripts, if any, he based his translation on.
Simmons borrowed Alexander’s words and ideas liberally, according to Fish.
“I’ve personally found hundreds and hundreds of examples,” Fish said on the podcast. “He copied from Victor Alexander while claiming to be translating from the Aramaic.”Fish appeared on the Minor Prophets podcast, hosted by JonMark Baker to speak about plagiarism in the Passion Bible. (Source: Screenshot)
Call to repentance
JonMark co-host of the Minor Prophets podcast, said it’s concerning that a Bible translation that purports to be “entirely new, fresh, fiery,” would involve so many instances of cut-and-paste. And it’s concerning, he added, that the Passion Bible appears to have plagiarized the work of a man almost no Christians would consider reliable.
But what really upsets him, Baker said, is the many, many theological claims that have been made for this translation
Simmons has repeatedly recounted how he was commissioned, supernaturally, to work on this translation. He’s shared the story on Christian television and in many churches, wowing audiences and moving them to thank God for the Passion translation.
“I want to press this home,” Baker said on the podcast. “The guy claimed Jesus himself appeared to him and commissioned him to write this. … I don’t think Jesus himself commissions people to lie.”
Fish told RR that accurately citing sources is important, but the problem with the Passion’s plagiarism goes deeper than that. Christians are being deceived, he said, and manipulated to accept a massive money-making deception.
“This happens over and over and over,” Fish told RR. “People should repent.”
Daniel Silliman is senior reporter/editor at The Roys Report. He began his two decades in journalism covering crime in Atlanta and has since led major investigations into abuse and misconduct in Christian contexts. Daniel and his wife live in Johnson City, Tennessee.
Comment by Truth Uncensored Africa. Please download the book, “A New Foundation?,” from this webpage. All modern Bibles are corrupted. Never buy an annotated study Bible as it can lead you astray. Not even a KJV Study Bible. Never a C.S. Scofield Study KJV. Only buy KJV Bibles with a concordance or a separate Strong’s Concordance.
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