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Taylor does not expect his Bible to be a substitute for the translations currently available. He argues that Christian homes need both a "reading Bible" and a "study Bible," for which he recommends one of the standard translations. His personal "study" Bible is the New American Standard, a fundamentalist favorite, though he used the older American Standard of 1901 as the basis for much of his paraphrase.
Taylor's version may disturb some ears, but its thought-for-thought rendition is not very likely to distress believers with any newfangled doctrinal notions. "The theological lodestar in this book," says Taylor in an anonymous preface to The Living Bible, "has been a rigid evangelical position." Mysteriously, halfway through the paraphrase, Taylor lost his voice, and still speaks only in a hoarse whisper. A psychiatrist who examined him suggested that the voice failure was Taylor's psychological self-punishment for tampering with what he believed to be the word of God.
Kenneth Taylor has not grown rich from The Living Bible, though he could have. Profits have enabled him to start and maintain a prosperous publishing firm, Tyndale House, which now produces some 40 titles a year. His salary as Tyndale's head has allowed him to move his family out of the old farmhouse and into a new home. But all author's royalties from the Bible—$1,500,000 last year—go into the Tyndale House Foundation to be dispensed to various causes, including some 60 foreign paraphrases currently under way or completed. Taylor, now 55, says his mission is simply that of 16th century Translator William Tyndale, who wanted to bring the Bible to "every plowboy." Says Taylor: "I'd like to emulate Tyndale in everything but his death." Tyndale, for his efforts, was strangled and then burned at the stake.