Christianity Today August 18, 2026 15 min signal 2026-08-18

How The Passion Translation's problems hid in plain sight

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Christianity Today

August 17, 2026

- Facebook

- X

- WhatsApp

- Telegram

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash, WikiMedia Commons

On March 7, 2014, Brian Simmons spoke at Harvest Time Church, an Assemblies of God congregation in Greenwich, Connecticut. He encouraged the crowd to follow God’s will, regardless of their own human qualifications. He gave examples of biblical heroes who had been used by God: Gideon, Shamgar, and Caleb. He also offered himself as an example.

Simmons, best known as lead translator of The Passion Translation of the Bible, spoke about his work in the 1980s as a missionary-translator in remote Panama. He told the Harvest Time audience that, while he was working in Panama, “our partners left us, and we had nobody with us for a while.” He said he and his wife, Candace, were left to labor on the translation alone.

“I had a good friend that was a Greek scholar, and he just rebuked me to my face and said, ‘You have no business going to translate the Bible if you don’t have at least a doctorate in Greek,’” Simmons said.

Thanks for signing up.

Explore more newsletters—don’t forget to start your free 60-day trial of CT to get full access to all articles in every newsletter.

Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.

But Simmons persisted. In time, he said, he preached the gospel in the people’s native language, “and before my eyes, this village got converted.”

Decades later, in 2009, Simmons claimed that Jesus Christ commissioned him to write his own translation, which would become The Passion Translation (TPT). Simmons sensed God’s presence one night and slipped out of bed. “He breathed on me,” Simmons shared in a 2015 radio interview. “He promised me that he would give me help, that he would stand with me and give me secrets of the Hebrew language, secrets of the Bible, that would be for this last days’ awakening.”

He claimed in the same interview that the translation was named after an angel who aided him in the work: “Years ago, I saw an angel named Passion in our church meeting, and the lord spoke to me—not audibly but internally—and said, ‘That angel is with your ministry. It’s the angel of passion.’”

The resulting Passion Translation, eventually acquired by BroadStreet Publishing, was released in stages over the next several years and drew a fervent following. The 2020 edition, which includes an entire New Testament plus Psalms, Proverbs, and Song of Songs, has sold more than 1 million copies.

Several influential Pentecostal and charismatic leaders have promoted TPT, including Bill Johnson, the pastor of Bethel Church in Redding, California. Johnson called it “one of the greatest things to happen with Bible translation in my lifetime” and said he reads it every night before going to sleep.

Until recently, Bethel sold special edition Passion Translations (with a foreword from Johnson) in its online store. But late last month, the church announced it was suspending sales of the Bible—the latest fallout from accusations that Simmons plagiarized other translations when creating his own.

In early June, pastors David Fish and JonMark Baker, along with Mike Winger, a content creator and frequent TPT critic, recorded a four-hour YouTube video outlining detailed allegations of plagiarism in TPT.

In the video, Fish—the pastor of spiritual formation at New River Fellowship in Parker County, Texas—reviews more than 100 instances in which Simmons’s text and footnotes seem to copy specific, unique language found in other sources. These sources include popular paraphrases The Message (MSG) and The Living Bible (TLB), neither of which claim to be translations as TPT does.

In follow-up emails, Fish told CT he has since tallied over 2,400 instances of likely plagiarism, in which the text or footnotes copy unique phrases without attribution from other translations or commentaries. In rare instances when Simmons does cite sources, those attributions appear to be copied word for word—alongside additional text—from other, uncredited sources.

Fish, who provided CT with a marked-up copy of Simmons’ 2013 edition of the Psalms (titled The Psalms: Poetry on Fire), alleges the plagiarism is most evident in that volume. In it, Fish said, Simmons seems to have copied portions of verses from both TLB and MSG, sometimes stitching them together, sometimes adding filler words or making minor changes.

“Some verses contain nearly 100 percent of the words from TLB, but because Brian loves to expand things, they also add other words,” Fish told CT. “Very often Brian will use two or even three English renderings of a phrase that ostensibly corresponds to a single Hebrew phrase.”

For example, in The Living Bible, Psalm 45:16 reads: “Your sons will some day be kings like their father. They shall sit on thrones around the world!”

The same passage in The Passion Translation reads: “Your many sons will one day be kings, just like their Father. They will sit on royal thrones all around the world” (emphasis added).

Simmons’ critics say examples like this are not the standard instances where one verse reads similarly in many translations. In the case of Psalm 45:16, no other Bible translation renders the passage like Simmons does. Fish says that as much as half of the text in TPT’s Psalms fits this pattern.

Fish is the most recent and perhaps most vocal opponent of The Passion Translation, but he is far from the first to raise concerns.

In 2017, Andrew Chapman, an Oxford-based chaplain who attends an Assemblies of God church, met a fellow churchgoer who loved the translation. Chapman had never heard of it and looked it up online. He found a sermon where Bill Johnson quoted Psalm 25:12 from TPT.

In the familiar NIV, the verse reads, “Who, then, are those who fear the Lord? He will instruct them in the ways they should choose.”

Simmons’s 2017 version, however, struck Chapman as off. It read, “But still one question remains: How do I live in the holy fear of God? Show me the right path to take.”

“That’s a significant change, because that’s a different question,” Chapman told CT.

He found passages that took even stronger liberties. For example, Matthew 5:4 (NIV) reads: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” In the vast majority of English translations, the words vary little.

By contrast, Matthew 5:4 in The Passion Translation reads, “What delight comes to you when you wait upon the Lord! For you will find what you long for.”

Despite footnotes claiming the verse is “translated from the Hebrew Matthew,” Chapman pointed out to CT that Simmons’ rendering “has almost no connection” to the original Greek text.

His reaction echoes the concerns of other scholars. TPT features a distinctly emotive and flowery writing style, with long footnotes that detail insights from the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic source texts. (Simmons claims the translation’s unique qualities stem from its adherence to Aramaic sources.)

Chapman began blogging about errors in the text. He concluded that Simmons was likely unable to read biblical Greek. He wrote in 2017, “There are many mistakes which I do not think that somebody with even elementary competence in these biblical languages could make.” He reasoned that Simmons must be “working primarily from English translations, while additionally making reference to Greek and Hebrew lexicons.”

In a now-deleted podcast, Simmons admitted as much, saying he “had minimal background in biblical languages.”

Neither could Simmons read Aramaic, apparently—or what many scholars prefer to call Syriac, the standard Aramaic dialect used in New Testament translation.

In 2021, Simmons reached out for feedback from Mark Strauss, a New Testament professor at Bethel Seminary and a member of the NIV committee on Bible translation. Strauss expressed concerns and questions over the state of TPT.

“The frequent references to ‘the Aramaic’ in the footnotes are misleading at best and often inaccurate. … I have noticed, too, that you even refer to ‘the Aramaic’ in Paul’s letters, which were certainly original Greek compositions!” Strauss wrote Simmons in emails that he provided to CT. “For many of your claims about the ‘meaning’ of the Aramaic, I don’t see the linguistic evidence.”

In response to Strauss’ objections, Simmons said that while he believed in Greek primacy, he may have gone “a little overboard” with use of the Aramaic and expressed his intentions to remove “half or more” of the Aramaic notations “before we release the full Bible.” (Simmons’ version of the full Bible is scheduled to release in 2029.)

Simmons also wrote, “As for Aramaic manuscripts, I am not an Aramaic scholar.”

Strauss is not alone in his concerns. CT reached out to two Aramaic scholars—New York University professor Adam H. Becker and Tyndale House (in Cambridge, England) principal Peter J. Williams—both of whom highlighted specific inaccuracies in Simmons’ translations.

“Based on what I have seen, readers should be extremely wary of thinking The Passion Translation is a reliable guide to Aramaic or Syriac,” Williams wrote.

In fact, Chapman found that many of Simmons’ takes on the Aramaic text appeared to be taken from a single-author translation published online by Victor Alexander, a Burbank-based amateur documentary filmmaker who claimed to possess his own original and proprietary manuscripts of Scripture. (Alexander is not credited anywhere in TPT.)

Chapman brought these claims to BroadStreet Publishing in 2017. He received a polite reply; however, he received no word of corrections or updates.

### Why Christians Who Speak Jesus’ Language Can’t Agree on Their Name

Emil Anton

### Supernatural Signs Alone Cannot Save

John Coleman

The Passion Translation has changed, however, since Chapman’s email. Simmons regularly revises TPT’s online text with changes or additions, though he does this quietly and without announcement. The revisions are often extensive, far more than the minor tweaks common in mainstream translations.

In 2013, for instance, TPT translated Galatians 6:6 as “And those who are taught the Word will receive an impartation from their teacher; a transference of anointing takes place between them.” In 2020, the same verse was rendered “And those who are taught the Word must share all good things with their teacher.”

Simmons appears to be making these changes largely unilaterally. TPT’s official website says Simmons “is part of a team” that offers oversight and accountability, but Rick Wadholm Jr.—listed as one of many experts who “theologically reviewed” TPT—told The Roys Report in June that he merely consulted and had no oversight or editorial control. He was uncertain if any of his “very many comments/edits/revisions” were ever implemented.

In a statement to CT, Strauss wrote: “While there is lots of bad biblical scholarship and translation misuse in popular Christian writing today (most of which can be attributed to naivete rather than sinister motives), it seems to me the evidence for plagiarism that David [Fish], JonMark [Baker], and Michael [Winger] have uncovered is both convincing and egregious, and demands a response.”

During their video report, Baker asked Jeffrey Fish, David Fish’s uncle and an associate professor of classics at Baylor University, what would happen if a student in his class tried to submit a translation like Simmons’ for a final exam. The professor replied, “If the student got a grade, it would be an F. But the conversation that would happen after the exam would be: ‘I’m having to refer you to the campus committee on plagiarism.’”

Simmons told Baker, in screenshotted direct messages, that the problematic Aramaic references will be cleaned up in the “2028 edition” of his translation.

But the damage may already be done. The allegations have thrown other parts of Simmons’ history into question.

Simmons’ bio calls him “the co-translator for the Kuna New Testament,” a reference to the Indigenous group he worked with as a missionary for New Tribes Mission, now Ethnos 360, in Panama in the 1980s.

But in April 2025, Vicky Mixson, then-chief communications officer at Wycliffe, said Simmons had worked only as an “unofficial” checker and added “it would be inaccurate to describe [Simmons] as a ‘translator’ or ‘co-translator’ on any project supported by Wycliffe USA, as he was not involved in linguistic analysis or translation,” she said. “Based on our understanding, Mr. Simmons left Panama and Ethnos 360 six years before the Border Kuna New Testament was published in 1993, and he would have had no input on the final translation.”

Simmons has also prompted questions about his reliability in clips from promotional interviews—since deleted, but preserved here—where he directly refutes his earlier stories about TPT’s creation.

“I’ve been accused of, ‘Well, you had an angel named Passion that came to you to help you write the Bible.’ I said, ‘That’s news to me!’” Simmons says in the video. “I have not had any angel named Passion come and help me. That’s not why I named it.”

Controversy is nothing new for Simmons. Years of criticism from scholars for translational inaccuracies in TPT led Bible Gateway to delist his translation in 2022; Simmons called it “cancel culture.”

But the backlash seems more pronounced this time. David Fish’s video exposé has garnered over 163,000 views. A change.org petition asking YouVersion to remove TPT from its list of translations gathered more than 19,000 signatures.

YouVersion has not taken down TPT, but in July it did list TPT as being “in review”—a seemingly original designation not applied to any of its other 88 English language translations. YouVersion explained, “This Bible version is currently in an expanded review process. Because we take your trust in the Bible App seriously, we believe it’s important for you to know so it can inform your decision about how to engage with it.”

That same page included a statement from BroadStreet Publishing, its only known statement on the controversy to date:

Beginning in 2020, TPT implemented an expanded theological, linguistic, and editorial review process for newly translated Old Testament books, and that same process is now being applied to a comprehensive revision of previously published portions of TPT, including the New Testament, in preparation for the release of the complete Bible. Those revised New Testament books are being held until then to provide readers with a consistent text.

BroadStreet did not respond to requests for comment, and Simmons told CT he was “not ready to do an interview/statement at this time.”

### Bible Gateway Removes The Passion Translation

Kate Shellnutt

### Girl, Get Some Footnotes: Rachel Hollis, Hustle, and Plagiarism Problems

Katelyn Beaty

Harbor Light Content Group, which published TPT before BroadStreet acquired it, has disavowed the translation. In a June statement, cofounder Andy Sanders wrote that TPT is not “an accurate translation or paraphrase of Scripture.” He discouraged readers from using it and claimed that from 2011 to 2014 his team “repeatedly raised concerns” to Simmons about his work.

What perplexes some critics most about the entire controversy is that some concerns about Simmons’ work have been public for nearly a decade. Scholars had criticized TPT’s inaccuracies since its initial release. Chapman told BroadStreet in 2017 that Simmons had copied without attribution from Victor Alexander. Simmons had openly admitted to not knowing Syriac, Greek, or Hebrew.

Why has Simmons enjoyed such success in spite of it all?

The answer, according to Fish and Chapman, may come down to a Christian abundance of credulity and lack of credentialed authority.

“We’ve lost literacy in the original [biblical] languages amongst pastors,” Chapman told CT. “I don’t think this would have gone on so long if the pastors knew Greek and Hebrew—or had any scholarship—in the charismatic end of the spectrum.”

It’s unclear how many pastors are truly proficient in reading Greek or Hebrew, but their numbers are likely small. A 2017 study of British ministers suggested that even among those who had studied ancient languages, familiarity faded for a majority. Only 41 percent of evangelical lead pastors have a graduate degree. And another study found just 37 percent of Pentecostal local church leaders held any university degree at all.

David Fish told CT that, among charismatics especially, there can be a “disdain for the intellect” or scholarship and an emphasis on calling above all else. It has contributed to a culture, he said, where “knowledge of the original languages of the Bible is really not all that important in the grand scheme of things. And therefore, someone who has openly admitted on video that he doesn’t know any of the languages—we can still promote the fact that he translated the Bible, without knowing the languages of the Bible.”

One selling point of TPT was the new revelations it purported to unlock—the “secrets of the Bible” Simmons claimed Jesus had given him—courtesy of Aramaic manuscripts, written in Jesus’ native tongue. Becker, at NYU, said the fervor around TPT has a long history, noting that Western Christians have a centuries-old “fetishization” of Aramaic—even though many Aramaic source texts were themselves translations from Greek.

“Just because it’s in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, does not mean that it offers some kind of obscure, original lost meaning,” Becker said.

The desire for secret knowledge and novel insights extends all the way back to Gnosticism, which plagued the early church. Paul warned Timothy, “Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed and in so doing have departed from the faith” (1 Tim. 6:20–21).

“This thirst for secret knowledge is what leads us, as supernaturally open Christians, to occasionally believe supernatural claims that violate the actual evidence in front of us,” Fish told CT. But, “we do not have to simply embrace the supernatural claims of people when they are directly contradicted by a mountain of evidence.”

After sounding the alarm on Simmons for nearly a decade, Chapman hopes the latest round of attention will spark some sort of lasting change. Even now, when he has pointed out the translation’s problems to fellow charismatics, he’s found resistance and discomfort from them—as though he’s attacking the Bible itself.

But it’s for love of the Bible that Chapman thinks this conversation is important.

“People justify using it, because it gives them new insights,” Chapman said. “Well, these aren’t insights. These are errors.”

- More from Taylor Berglund

- Facebook

- X

- WhatsApp

- Telegram

### The Pentecostal Who Shaped Swedish Politics

Interview by Geethanjali Tupps

### Churches Continue to Sing Hillsong and Bethel Despite Controversies

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

### The Two Holy Ghostwriters Behind American Christianity’s Charismatic Turn