Many people today read the Bible in easy, direct language without imagining the work behind that choice. Eugene Peterson spent years converting biblical Hebrew and Greek into sentences that sound like everyday conversation, not solemn discourse.
He was born on November 6, 1932, in East Stanwood, Washington, and grew up in Kalispell, Montana. His father was a butcher; his mother, a Pentecostal lay preacher, took him to revival meetings and gave him early exposure to biblical language and the emotion of faith.
He graduated in philosophy from Seattle Pacific in 1954, studied theology in New York, and studied Semitic languages at Johns Hopkins. Ordained a Presbyterian pastor in 1958, he taught Hebrew and Greek before taking charge, in 1962, of a newly founded church in Bel Air, Maryland, where he would remain for 29 years.
There he shaped his vision of pastoral ministry: unbusy, attentive to people, resistant to hurry and to numbers. The 1981 essay “The Unbusy Pastor” and the 1989 book The Contemplative Pastor became reference points for pastors weary of running churches like businesses.
Throughout the 1990s, while teaching spiritual theology at Regent College in Canada, he worked on the translation that would become The Message, published in 2002. The paraphrase sold millions of copies, though it drew criticism from more conservative theologians for being too free in style in some passages.
In 2017, a comment about same-sex marriage sparked strong reaction; the next day, a statement reaffirmed the traditional view of marriage. His authorized biography would later reveal that the retraction had been written by his editor, and his son would doubt that it truly reflected his father’s own conviction.
In his later years, already retired in Montana, he wrote a five-volume series on spiritual theology and a memoir about parish ministry, The Pastor. He preferred to speak of the ordinary life of a small church rather than build a name of national reach.
Peterson died on October 22, 2018, in Lakeside, Montana, at the age of 85, after a period of dementia and heart failure. He left as his legacy a generation of pastors and readers shaped by his invitation to a patient faith, embodied in everyday life.
