Published: October 2, 2026 | thefinalconvergence.com
Every dangerous text we have examined so far, the Mirror, Dake’s notes, The Message, shares one thing: each is a human work, and its author would say so. Today we reach a text whose translator claims something no major Bible translator has claimed since the close of the apostolic age: that Jesus personally appeared to him, breathed on him, and supernaturally opened the biblical languages to him, commissioning a translation to recover meanings hidden from every other translator for two thousand years.
That claim changes everything about how the work must be weighed. And it is the doorway through which this series will eventually walk from the question of which words to the question of which teachers, because the man behind this translation belongs to a movement whose whole architecture we will map in the next campaign.
“the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3).
Jude wrote urging believers to contend earnestly for a faith that was, note the word, once delivered. Not repeatedly delivered. Not progressively delivered. Not awaiting fresh delivery in the twenty-first century. Once. The Greek hapax means once for all, delivered a single decisive time to the saints and never to be supplemented. This single word is one of the pillars of the closed canon, the church’s two-thousand-year confession that the apostolic deposit is complete, and that no new revelation carrying the authority of Scripture will be given until Christ returns. The Passion Translation runs headlong into that word. And so today’s anchor is not incidental. It is the exact ground on which this translation stands or falls.
A Claim That Changes the Category
Brian Simmons, the translator of The Passion Translation, has stated in interviews and public presentations that Jesus appeared to him, breathed on him, and gave him supernatural access to Hebrew and Greek, commissioning him to produce a translation recovering dimensions of meaning inaccessible to every translator across church history.
Think carefully about what that claim does. If it is true, The Passion Translation is not a human rendering of a divine original, it is itself a product of direct divine revelation, which would place Simmons’s every rendering beyond ordinary evaluation. To challenge a translation choice would be to challenge not a scholar’s judgment but the commission of Jesus Himself. If it is not true, if the vision was not what he believes, or if its source was not the Jesus of Scripture, then The Passion Translation is a work of extraordinary presumption: a text elevated to quasi-apostolic authority on an unverifiable private experience, while its actual contents show systematic departure from the very Greek and Hebrew it claims to translate. There is no neutral third option. Either it carries divine authorization, or it is a human work wearing borrowed divine credentials. And the doctrine of the closed canon exists precisely to guard the church against the first claim being accepted without testing.
Why the NAR Connection Is Central
Simmons’s connection to the New Apostolic Reformation is not a biographical footnote. It is the key to understanding the translation itself. The NAR is a loose but real network of churches, ministries, and leaders, associated with figures such as C. Peter Wagner, Che Ahn, and Bill Johnson of Bethel Church in Redding, California, who teach that the offices of apostle and prophet have been restored to the contemporary church, and that these modern apostles and prophets carry authority comparable to the biblical apostles.
Follow what that framework implies for a Bible. First, if modern apostles carry apostolic authority, then a translation “commissioned by Jesus” through a prophetic vision, produced by someone operating in the apostolic stream, carries an authority ordinary scholarship cannot reach, and, conveniently, one that ordinary scholarship cannot challenge, since the challenge would be coming from a “lower level” of spiritual authority. Second, the NAR has specific, identifiable theological emphases, the imminence of a worldwide apostolic awakening, the dominion mandate for the church to govern the spheres of society, the centrality of ongoing prophetic revelation, that would naturally migrate into a translation produced by someone deeply formed within it.
And that is exactly what scholars find. The translation choices align consistently with NAR priorities in ways ordinary translation method cannot explain: passages about apostolic authority rendered to emphasize the ongoing office, passages about prophecy rendered to emphasize its contemporary continuation, passages about the church’s role rendered to support the dominion mandate. These are not scattered errors. They are the theological fingerprints of a specific movement pressed into the text, which is why, when this series turns next to NAR Connections, The Passion Translation will reappear as one of the movement’s most effective instruments.
What a Credentialed Scholar Found
This is not merely a matter of one tradition’s suspicion of another. Dr. Andrew Naselli, professor of New Testament and biblical theology at Bethlehem College and Seminary, conducted a systematic analysis of The Passion Translation in 2017 that remains the most thorough scholarly evaluation available. He examined Simmons’s rendering of Hebrews in detail, comparing it against the Greek with standard lexical resources and against the consensus of other translators.
His findings were unambiguous. Simmons consistently adds words, phrases, and concepts with no basis in the Greek. He assigns Greek words meanings they do not carry in the standard lexicons. He inserts NAR theological concepts into passages the Greek does not support, and not occasionally, as any translator may err, but systematically, in a pattern that reflects agenda rather than mistake. Naselli’s conclusion was blunt: The Passion Translation is not a reliable translation, and not even close. It functions more like a commentary that tells readers what Simmons thinks the text means, but unlike a commentary, it presents that opinion as the words of Scripture themselves.
The Additions on the Page
The pattern is visible in specific passages. In Ephesians 3:9, Paul writes of the mystery which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God. The Passion Translation expands the verse with additions about the church’s role in making God’s wisdom known to spiritual rulers and authorities, content with no basis in the Greek of that verse, but a precise expression of an NAR theology of the church’s cosmic governmental role.
In the Song of Solomon, Simmons’s highly allegorical rendering departs from the Hebrew so extensively that multiple scholars question whether it can be called a translation at all. Whole phrases are expanded with content from no manuscript source; allegorical applications are inserted into the text as though original. Readers are told what Simmons believes the Song means mystically, not what the Hebrew says.
And in 1 Corinthians 14, Paul’s regulation of spiritual gifts in corporate worship, a genuinely demanding call to order and restraint, Simmons consistently resolves every ambiguity toward the unrestricted exercise of charismatic gifts, softening the corrective force of Paul’s instructions to near invisibility. The one chapter in the New Testament that most restrains charismatic excess is rendered so that it restrains almost nothing. That is not translation. That is the removal of a text’s ability to correct the very movement producing the translation.
The Closed Canon, and Why Sola Scriptura Is at Stake
Step back and see the size of the issue. The claim of prophetic authorization is not an eccentric personal testimony that can be politely set aside. It strikes at the foundational Protestant doctrine of Scripture’s sufficiency and finality. If Jesus can appear to a translator in the twenty-first century and commission a new revelation of His Word’s meaning, one inaccessible to every translator for two thousand years, then the canon is not effectively closed. Every prophetically-claimed interpretation carries, in principle, authority equal to the apostolic original. And a church that cannot test doctrine against a fixed, accessible standard, because the standard can always be supplemented or overridden by the latest prophetic word, has lost the ground beneath its feet.
This is precisely the danger the Reformation confronted. Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone as the supreme authority for faith and practice, means that no tradition, no council, no prophetic utterance, and no “inspired” translation can add to or override the apostolic text. The Passion Translation’s implicit claim to prophetic authorization is, in principle, as serious a challenge to Sola Scriptura as Rome’s claim that tradition stands equal with Scripture. It is the old danger in new, charismatic dress.
So the verdict is plain. The Passion Translation is not a translation. It is Brian Simmons’s theological vision of Scripture, cast in the grammatical form of a Bible, elevated to quasi-apostolic authority by the claim of prophetic commission, and systematically aligned with the agenda of the New Apostolic Reformation. Christians who use it as their primary Bible are not reading the Word God breathed out through the apostles; they are reading the word Simmons believes God is revealing through him, a very different thing, and one that every doctrine of Scripture the church has confessed for two thousand years declares insufficient, unverifiable, and dangerous. The faith was once delivered. Do not build your spiritual life on a prophetic vision. Build it on the apostolic Word, tested, preserved, and available to every generation that seeks it.
Tomorrow, the last of the dangerous translations, and the most openly doctrinal of them all: the New World Translation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” — Jude 3 KJV
📖 This post is adapted from Which Bible Can You Trust? Scripture, Manuscripts, and the Quest for the Most Trustworthy Text. If it helped you, the full book is available on Amazon — or you can support this ministry directly.
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