The Man Who Made the New Testament Speak Afresh
John Bertram Phillips, better known simply as J. B. Phillips, was an English Anglican clergyman, author, Bible translator and Christian communicator whose work helped to change the course of English Bible translation in the twentieth century. He is remembered chiefly for The New Testament in Modern English, a translation born not in the quiet surroundings of an academic institution, but amid the bombs, air-raid sirens and shelters of wartime London.
Phillips did not originally set out to become a famous translator. His purpose was considerably simpler: he wanted ordinary people, particularly young people, to understand what the New Testament actually said. That pastoral concern became his life’s great work.
Early Life and Education
John Bertram Phillips was born on 16 September 1906 in Barnes, then in Surrey and now part of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. He was the second of three children, having an elder sister, Dorothy Maud, known as Dot, and a younger brother, Kenneth Charles. His father, Philip William Phillips, had risen from modest circumstances to become a respected civil servant, while his mother, Emily Maud, had worked as a post-office assistant before her marriage.
Phillips possessed unusual intellectual ability from childhood. English, Greek and Latin came naturally to him, and he possessed what was described as an almost photographic memory. Yet his abilities were accompanied by considerable pressure. His father was ambitious for him and demanded a high standard of achievement. Phillips consequently developed a powerful perfectionist streak and an intense desire to produce work beyond criticism.
His intelligence was not confined to books. He had a mechanical curiosity and enjoyed discovering how things worked. New inventions fascinated him; he would obtain gadgets, dismantle them and study their construction. As a boy he even succeeded in building an early radio for himself. This combination of intellectual curiosity and practical investigation would remain characteristic of him: Phillips wanted not merely to know that something worked, but to understand how and why.
For seven years he attended Emanuel School in south London, where he excelled academically. He subsequently won a place at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, studying English and Classics and completing his bachelor’s degree at the remarkably young age of twenty.
Yet beneath these academic successes lay considerable personal sorrow.
The Loss of His Mother
Phillips’s relationship with his father was difficult, but his relationship with his mother was altogether different. Emily was not merely his mother but one of his closest companions.
In 1921, when Phillips was only fifteen, she died of cancer.
Her death profoundly affected him. According to the biographical account preserved by his grandson Peter Croft, Phillips felt that in losing his mother he had lost both his dearest friend and his sense of home. His father remarried only months later, and Phillips’s relationship with his stepmother was deeply unhappy.
The experience also affected his view of God. Phillips later said that there had always been within him some belief in God, but the religion of his childhood seemed remote from actual life. His mother’s suffering intensified the problem. He could not understand how God could permit someone whom he loved so dearly to suffer and die. By the time he arrived at Cambridge, Phillips regarded himself as an atheist. Yet Cambridge, which might have confirmed his unbelief, instead became the place where his Christianity began.
From Atheism to Christian Faith
Soon after arriving at university, Phillips encountered students associated with the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU). He did not immediately accept everything about their evangelical Christianity. Indeed, some of their practices continued to strike him as peculiar even years afterwards.
What he found harder to dismiss was their character. Through friendships with these Christians, Phillips gradually encountered a form of Christianity very different from the lifeless religion he thought he knew. Eventually he came to understand the Christian Gospel personally and committed himself to following Christ.
After Cambridge he spent a year teaching at a school in Sherborne, Dorset. Although there were aspects of teaching that he enjoyed, he returned to Cambridge to prepare for Anglican ministry at Ridley Hall. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1930, as both deacon and priest that year.
Something important also became clear to Phillips during his theological training. Despite his considerable academic gifts, he did not believe his vocation was primarily that of the professional scholar. He wanted to communicate Christian truth to ordinary people. That conviction would eventually make him far more influential than he could then have imagined.
A Bible Translation Born in the Blitz
The decisive circumstances came during the Second World War. Phillips ministered in south-east London, eventually taking responsibility for the Church of the Good Shepherd in Lee. His ministry unfolded amid the extraordinary dangers of wartime London. His parish endured heavy bombing, and Phillips himself experienced several remarkably close encounters with bombs and other weapons during the war.
Amid these conditions he regularly met with a church youth group known as the King’s Own. Phillips would read Scripture to them, often choosing the Epistles of Paul. There was an obvious connection between the persecuted and endangered Christians of the first century and young Londoners living under the threat of German bombing.
There was only one problem. The young people could barely understand the Bible Phillips was reading. The Authorised Version, for all the grandeur and historical importance of its English, contained language that was increasingly difficult for twentieth-century teenagers. Phillips could see the incomprehension on their faces. He later explained that his translation had originally been undertaken because the Authorised Version was simply not intelligible to many of the young people in his youth club.
So Phillips began translating the New Testament himself. He started with Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians. There was no grand publishing scheme. No committee had commissioned him. He was a parish clergyman attempting to make Scripture understandable to the young people under his care. But something happened when he translated the ancient Greek into contemporary English. The young people understood it. More than that, the New Testament seemed suddenly immediate.
Letters to Young Churches
Encouraged by their response, Phillips continued translating Paul’s letters and other New Testament Epistles. Eventually he approached C. S. Lewis for advice. Lewis strongly encouraged the project, and his support helped Phillips’s work reach a much wider audience.
In 1947 the translations appeared as Letters to Young Churches. Further publications followed: The Gospels appeared in 1952; Acts was published in 1955 as The Young Church in Action; and The Book of Revelation appeared in 1957. The complete work was brought together in 1958 as The New Testament in Modern English. Revised editions followed.
Phillips had become one of the pioneers of modern English Bible translation. What distinguished his translation was not merely the replacement of archaic words with contemporary ones. Phillips wanted to communicate the force of the original. He wanted Paul, Peter, John and the other New Testament writers to sound like living men communicating urgent truths rather than distant historical figures imprisoned behind antiquated English.
That accounts for much of the translation’s continuing appeal. Phillips could make passages startlingly direct and vigorous. His work was not intended to replace careful study of the original languages, nor was it produced according to the committee-based methods employed in many later Bible versions. It bears the distinctive literary voice and interpretative decisions of a single translator. Yet that individuality was also one of its strengths. Phillips had an exceptional command of English and a pastor’s instinct for communication. His translation helped demonstrate that the New Testament could be expressed in contemporary English without losing its seriousness.
The Translator Changed by the Translation
Perhaps the most fascinating part of Phillips’s story is what happened to Phillips himself. Translating the New Testament became far more than a literary undertaking. He became increasingly impressed by what he regarded as the extraordinary vitality of the documents before him. This was a man trained in Classics. Ancient literature was not unfamiliar territory. Yet the New Testament affected him differently. Phillips famously came to regard the documents as extraordinarily alive.
That experience eventually contributed to another important book, Ring of Truth (1967), in which he reflected upon his experience as a translator. His conviction concerning the authenticity and spiritual power of the New Testament was not merely inherited ecclesiastical opinion; it had been strengthened through years of intimate engagement with the Greek text.
His grandson, Peter Croft, has emphasised this dimension of Phillips’s life. For Phillips, Croft explains, translating Scripture had an effect upon his own soul. He wanted other people not simply to read Scripture as an historical document, but to encounter it as something living. Croft himself has written of his desire that readers should experience Scripture as relevant, challenging and exciting rather than as a religious museum-piece. That helps explain Phillips’s achievement. He was not simply modernising vocabulary. He was attempting to recover the sense of immediacy he himself encountered in the New Testament.
Your God Is Too Small
Phillips’s literary influence extended well beyond Bible translation. He wrote extensively on Christian faith and discipleship. His bibliography includes Plain Christianity, Appointment with God, New Testament Christianity, The Church Under the Cross, Ring of Truth, Peter’s Portrait of Jesus and numerous other works.
Perhaps his best-known non-translation work is Your God Is Too Small. Its memorable title summarises Phillips’s argument. He believed that many people rejected or neglected Christianity not necessarily because they had seriously encountered the God revealed in Christ, but because they possessed inadequate conceptions of God. He examined distorted ideas of God represented by such memorable descriptions as the “Resident Policeman”, the “Grand Old Man”, the “Meek-and-Mild” figure and the “Managing Director”. His purpose was to expose the inadequacy of these mental constructions and direct readers towards a conception of God adequate to Christian revelation.
The book begins with one of Phillips’s most enduring observations: “The trouble with many of us today is that we have not found a God big enough for our modern needs.” It captured something fundamental about his ministry. Phillips spent much of his life trying to remove unnecessary barriers between modern people and historic Christianity.
The Old Testament Experiment
Phillips eventually attempted the same treatment with portions of the Old Testament. In 1963 he published Four Prophets: Amos, Hosea, First Isaiah, Micah, translating Amos, Hosea, Isaiah 1–39 and Micah from Hebrew into modern English. He did not proceed to translate the entire Old Testament.
The Church Times, reviewing Four Prophets, captured Phillips’s unusual position as a pioneer by observing that it seemed to be his vocation to blaze trails upon which others subsequently travelled. That description applies particularly well to his New Testament.
Today English-speaking Christians have access to a remarkable range of translations. The situation was very different when Phillips began his work. His translation belongs to an important transitional period in which publishers, translators and churchmen increasingly recognised that Scripture needed to be communicated in the English people actually spoke. Phillips was ahead of that movement.
Fame, Illness and the Final Years
Success brought difficulties of its own. Phillips eventually became internationally known as an author, broadcaster and translator. His work circulated particularly widely in Britain and the United States, and correspondence enabled him to exercise a ministry far beyond the boundaries of a parish.
His influence reached some of the most prominent Christians of the twentieth century. On one occasion Billy Graham visited Phillips and thanked him for his translation. Phillips characteristically redirected the compliment with humour, asking whether Graham really meant that he wanted to thank Paul, John, James and Peter.
It was an appropriate response from a translator whose greatest achievement had been making the voices of those men audible to another generation. Phillips nevertheless suffered considerable ill health, particularly during the later years of his life. His writing and broadcasting consequently diminished, although correspondence allowed him to continue ministering to people throughout the world.
He also began preparing his autobiography. It was eventually published posthumously as The Price of Success in 1984. His bibliography records it as his autobiography and final major posthumous publication. J. B. Phillips died at Swanage, Dorset, on 21 July 1982, aged seventy-five.
The Legacy of J. B. Phillips
Phillips’s importance is greater than the production of one successful Bible version. He helped establish a principle that later generations of translators would increasingly take for granted: the Bible should communicate to contemporary readers with something approaching the intelligibility and force with which its writers communicated to their original audiences.
His translation was inevitably followed by others, produced according to different principles and with the benefit of later scholarship. Yet The New Testament in Modern English retains a distinctive character precisely because it is so recognisably Phillips’s work.
It is energetic, literary and sometimes strikingly interpretative. Phillips wanted the reader to feel the force of the argument rather than merely decipher the words. The Christian Classics Ethereal Library still describes the Phillips New Testament as a much-loved translation in which the Gospels, Acts, Epistles and Revelation are particularly accessible to readers.
Yet perhaps the best explanation of his enduring significance comes from his grandson. Peter Croft writes that he eventually discovered how profoundly his grandfather’s writings had affected people around the world. Some told him that the Phillips New Testament had been the first version of Scripture they could genuinely understand; others had encountered Phillips through his books and consequently reconsidered their understanding of God.
Phillips’s achievement therefore began and ended with communication. The gifted schoolboy who mastered English, Greek and Latin; the young atheist who rediscovered Christianity at Cambridge; the Anglican clergyman attempting to hold the attention of teenagers during the Blitz; the translator astonished by the vitality of the documents before him, all these strands came together in his life’s work.
He had begun with a practical problem: his young people could not understand their Bible. He responded by translating it. That translation reached far beyond his youth club, far beyond his parish and eventually far beyond Britain. What began among young Londoners during one of the darkest periods of the twentieth century became one of the most influential experiments in modern English Bible translation.
More than forty years after his death, J. B. Phillips deserves to be remembered not merely as the author of a once-popular version of the New Testament, but as a pioneering Christian communicator who helped English-speaking readers hear familiar words with unfamiliar freshness. His great conviction was remarkably simple: the New Testament was not dead literature. It was alive. And he wanted people to hear it that way.
Read the J. B. Phillips New Testament online at CCEL
Peter Croft’s account of the life and faith of J. B. Phillips
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