For at least the past 10 or 15 years, we have used The Passion Translation alongside several other versions of the Bible. Whilst we have never regarded it as a fully-fledged ‘translation’ despite Brian Simmons’ claims to the contrary, we have used it as a paraphrase and have enjoyed some of the ways Brian has re-framed the Scriptures. We have been personally enriched by several fresh expressions, and we loved the idea of a more heart-centered expression of biblical language. Both of us have quoted it in many of our books and in public preaching, where we have found that Brian’s passionate and heartfelt language has been enriching and edifying. Many others in the Pentecostal/Charismatic world have had the same experience, prompting prominent leaders to give strong endorsements for this project. I believe there are some genuine Spirit-inspired phrases in this version of the Bible, and I share this conviction with many others. Brian is a ministry colleague, and we have spent time together as brothers.
However, as we have listened carefully to the critiques that have emerged amongst academics and biblical scholars in this recent season, we have felt compelled to reconsider our promotion of The Passion Translation. As this project has been brought under closer academic scrutiny, the clear evidence that has surfaced surrounding this ‘translation’ has demonstrated beyond a doubt that Brian’s translation abilities and his methodology have been fatally flawed from the beginning, to the extent that we can no longer recommend this version of the Bible.
Brian Simmons has claimed that his Passion Translation is “Translated from Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic texts.” In other editions, the claim is that it has been “Translated directly from the original Greek and Aramaic texts.” These claims appear in the attributions page at the front of all editions of his ‘translation.’ Brian Simmons self-identifies as Dr. Brian Simmons. The inference is that this doctorate has given him training as a translator. Dr. Simmons earned a Doctorate in Practical Ministry (D.Min.) from the Wagner Institute between 2003 and 2007, but the degree did not provide him with training in the original languages. In light of the overwhelming evidence, we have come to the conviction that the church needs to be warned about this Bible version’s lack of trustworthiness. Why have we had such a dramatic backflip?
First, an extensive investigation has established that Brian Simmons’ credibility as an experienced Bible translator has been comprehensively destroyed. Despite his claims, he was not engaged in translating the Bible among the Paya Kuna people group in Panama, Central America. In Brian’s own words, “While there, I was involved as a linguist in the translation project of the New Testament into the Paya-Kuna language.”[1]That turns out to be a bit of a stretch. No one on the Wycliffe Bible translation team, tasked with translating the Bible into Paya Kuna, recognized Brian as either a trained linguist or a qualified Bible translator. As someone who was learning the Paya Kuna language, Brian was merely involved in checking the translators’ work. It was the translation team that did the heavy lifting. Whilst Brian has a doctorate, it is definitely not in Hebrew or Greek, let alone Aramaic, which he claims to translate into English from the original manuscripts. Mike Winger, one of Brian’s chief investigators and lead antagonist, writes on X,
Wycliffe has finally come out with a public statement about how Brian Simmons, author of The Passion Translation, was NOT a translator for the Paya Kuna translation in Panama. This is a HUGE issue because claiming to be a translator for the Paya Kuna is how Brian Simmons got credibility to launch his own distorted translation of the Bible in English, which is still being used today by many Christians. This statement from Wycliffe is in direct contradiction to multiple claims Brian has made.[2]
The Passion Translation website claims that Brian “has leveraged this linguistic and biblical-languages background to translate the entire New Testament and a growing number of books of the Old Testament into modern English.”[3] Here is Wycliffe’s account.
It would be inaccurate to describe him as a ‘translator’ or ‘co-translator’ on any project supported by Wycliffe USA, as he was not involved in linguistic analysis or translation. His unofficial role as a comprehension checker required familiarity with the local language but no formal training. 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.[4]
This revelation is enough to call Brian’s claim to be an experienced linguist and Bible translator into question. Add to this his lack of experience with the original languages of the Bible; his claim to have previously translated the Bible from those original languages is patently false. It has now come to light that Brian has cobbled together his ‘translation’ from his own Spirit-inspired insights, combined with hundreds of plagiarisms from existing translations, or, more specifically, paraphrases of the Bible. These include The Message Bible, the 1971 edition of The Living Bible, and more recent editions of the New Living Translation. But worst of all, Brian has also used The Mirror Bible as a source and copied certain renderings from this widely debunked ‘translation’ written by Francois du Toit, who is a Universalist and has audaciously inserted his Universalist interpretations into God’s Word. We are still reeling from the shock of this revelation!
A genuine new translation from the original languages would exercise no reliance whatsoever upon other paraphrases or translations. However, the biggest flaw in Brian’s entire ‘translation’ is his significant reliance on an extremely questionable English ‘translation’ of the ‘Aramaic New Testament’ by a man named Victor Alexander. This source document has baffled everyone. Brian’s repeated claim throughout the extensive footnotes in The Passion Translation is ‘As translated from the Aramaic.’ This strongly implies that Brian has translated from the original Aramaic. Instead, it has been uncovered that Brian has merely copied hundreds of phrases from an English translation of the Aramaic, just as he has done with several English paraphrases. David Fish, who has brought Simmons’ direct quotes to light from Alexander’s mysterious translation, says, “I’ve personally found hundreds and hundreds of examples. He copied from Victor Alexander while claiming to be translating from the Aramaic!”[5] In all these instances, Brian never once provided academic citations for any of these quotes, nor did he indicate which versions of the Aramaic documents he used. All he ever says is, ‘As translated from the Aramaic.’ Academic critics and experienced translators have accused him of plagiarism on a grand scale.
One British academic, Andrew Chapman, who was the first to alert the church to Simmons’ fraudulent use of the ‘Aramaic,’ concluded back in 2017 that these original first-century manuscripts simply do not exist, and that Alexander’s bizarre translation is a complete fraud and “a product of his imagination.”[6] Alexander has refused to produce the original Aramaic manuscripts of the entire New Testament, which he claims preceded the Greek manuscripts. Alexander is deeply committed to the primacy of Aramaic, a position that has been comprehensively debunked by the academic community. Nevertheless, Simmons began his ‘translation’ under the conviction that all the New Testament manuscripts were originally written in Aramaic. He has since walked this back, but not before he began his translation under this conviction.
David Fish notes that “Frequently, Simmons will point to ‘Aramaic’ readings in the footnotes that match Victor Alexander in opposition to every other existing translation of the Peshitta.”[7] According to The Roys Report we read,
Simmons borrowed Alexander’s words and ideas liberally, according to Fish. “I’ve personally found hundreds and hundreds of examples,” Fish said on the podcast. “He copied from Victor Alexander while claiming to be translating from the Aramaic.”[8]
Fish comments that, because the Peshitta was translated into Aramaic from Greek manuscripts in the fifth century, it adhered extremely closely to the original Greek and affords no real surprises or fresh insights. In contrast, Alexander’s translation differs significantly in thousands of locations. These peculiarities of Alexander’s English ‘translation’ appear throughout the entire Passion Translation of the New Testament, either in the main body of Scripture or in the hundreds of footnotes. Because The Passion Translation is so extensively riddled with the unique phraseology of this so-called ‘translation’ of Aramaic, coupled with plagiarism from contemporary paraphrases, it is too onerous a task to try to salvage The Passion Translation. David Fish has substantiated his claims by creating side-by-side charts that document only a sample of these erroneous inclusions. A full list of Simmons’ reliance on Victor Alexander would likely number in the thousands.
Because of the overwhelming extent of the textual problems with The Passion Translation, it ought to be blacklisted because the average reader would have no ability to know whether the texts they are reading are trustworthy. This is why we cannot recommend this version of the Bible. We want to use this statement as an opportunity to publicly repent of promoting this version of the Bible. If I had any idea of the seriously questionable sources Brian Simmons has used to create this ‘translation,’ I would never have embraced it, recommended it, or quoted from it. This is such a shame because we were excited by the promises of this project and were blessed by some of the fresh language Brian brought. Among the many textual problems were some great insights and fresh language, much like Eugene Peterson’s Message Bible and, more recently, The Voice Bible. We are genuinely sorry and remorseful to realize that some readers may have adopted certain terms or phrases as a consequence of Simmons’ improper and undisciplined use of a seemingly fraudulent ‘Aramaic’ text that literally doesn’t exist. That words from an imagined and historically unsubstantiated document should find their way into an edition of the Bible is a complete disaster.
At the heart of Brian Simmons’ error was his receptivity to the falsehood of the primacy of Aramaic that represented the foundation of his project. Second, Simmons claims that “Greek speaks to the mind while Aramaic and Hebrew speak powerfully to the heart.”[9] This might be a good marketing strategy to promote the project, but it is simply not true. Third, Simmons failed to do due diligence in his use of Victor Alexander’s alleged translation of non-existent Aramaic documents. Those places where we read in the footnotes, ‘As translated from the Aramaic,’ effectively become code for ‘as borrowed from Victor Alexander’s fraudulent translation.’ Simmons’ claim to have recovered the ‘lost’ translations of the original language of Scripture was another key marketing strategy. In the ‘Frequently Asked Questions,’ on The Passion Translation website, we read,
This translation reclaims lost Aramaic texts, bringing the full texture of God’s Word to the surface, and helping you recapture the original essence of the teachings of Jesus and His disciples. It’s time to bring this forgotten, neglected language [Aramaic] into the translation equation because of how influential the language was during the first and second centuries on the biblical world and the Bible itself.[10]
The claim is that the use of Aramaic “acts as an alternative perspective to the typical Greek-centric one.”[11]Alexander used the same marketing tactic in his erroneous claim to have used the ancient Galilean Aramaic documents in his version. Simmons appears to have embraced his wild claims without subjecting them to academic scrutiny.
We believe using the ancient Aramaic sources in addition to the original Greek ones adds an important lens through which to read God’s Word and understand his revelation of truth and love. We trust you will find the nuance added by the Aramaic to bring a greater clarity to the inspired text.[12]
Alex D. Hewitson did an academic assessment on the book of Colossians in The Passion Translation and made this observation:
The use of “forgotten,” “neglected,” and “lost” as adjectives of the Aramaic texts is surprising, since almost all modern translations make comparisons with, and draw insights from all relevant ancient texts when translating the New Testament from the Greek manuscripts. This indicates an ignorance of the process of translation in general at best, or a deliberate misrepresentation at worst. Further, whilst the idea of recapturing the “original essence of the teachings of Jesus and His disciples” might seem like an intriguing proposition, in addition to being thoroughly misleading, the use of these terms strongly resembles the language of Gnostic texts, which regularly claim to provide secret, lost, or hidden information.[13]
Brian Simmons began his Passion Translation with a sense of promise from the Lord that he would discover ‘hidden secrets’ in His Word. I think this made Brian overly susceptible to Victor Alexander’s outlandish claim that he had uncovered the original Aramaic texts upon which the Greek New Testament is allegedly based. Alexander’s claim now appears to be equivalent to a Gnostic deception. If this is true, then The Passion Translation potentially contains a Gnostic element with an enticement to hidden knowledge embedded in the fabric of this spurious Aramaic ‘translation.’ For this and other reasons, we urge people to turn away from trusting this version of the Bible. There are plenty of Bible versions that are reliable and trustworthy because they rely exclusively on widely authenticated sources. The Passion Translationsimply does not! We take this opportunity to reiterate our public apology for promoting The Passion Translation. Had we known what we now know, we would never have used it in public ministry. Where this has caused offense or confusion, we sincerely ask your forgiveness.
Sincerely,
Phil and Maria Mason
July 2026
If you would like to know more about Victor Alexander and his Aramaic New Testament, please click here.
[1] www.passionandfire.com/our-history/
[2] x.com/MikeWingerii/status/1915521990745833551
[3] FAQS www.thepassiontranslation.com/faqs/
[4] Mike Winger op. cit.
[5] truthuncesoredafrika.org/2026/06/21/passion-bible-accused-of-plagiarism/
[6] ibid
[7] This quote is the last and concluding comment by David Fish in his Word document title TPT FOOTNOTE COPYING. This document can be accessed via the notes below the following YouTube podcast: www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9–owgBjtA&t=4s
[8] roysreport.com/passion-bible-accused-of-plagiarism/
[9] FAQS www.thepassiontranslation.com/faqs/
[10] ibid
[11] ibid
[12] ibid
[13] Alex D. Hewitson: Review of Colossians in Brian Simmons’ The Passion Translation biblethinker.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Colossians_-_Alex_Hewitson.pdf
