# Why This Bethel Alumni Is Calling Out the Passion Translation **Summary.** A BSSM graduate (Dusty May Taylor, Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry 2012–2015) describes on the *Pastor and Wife* podcast how she came to reject [[The Passion Translation]] after trusting it and [[Bill Johnson]] completely. The source is valuable for three things the wiki did not have: a **first-person account of TPT's reception inside Bethel**, an **independent corroboration** of the Candace Simmons editor problem, and a **documented account of TPT-specific suppression in the official BSSM alumni group**. Taylor is not an outside critic — she says plainly, "we actually love the Lord." (Source: `Readwise/Full Document Contents/Articles/Why This Bethel Alumni Is Calling Out the Passion Translation.md`) Hosted by Pastor Hansel and Natalie; published 2026-07-13, saved 2026-07-16. **URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu4mxmGrHvo --- ## How TPT was received inside Bethel Taylor's account of BSSM 2012–2015, while TPT was still incomplete and releasing book by book: > "There being kind of this like, you know, this hopeful trusting buzz in the air. Like, oh, Brian Simmons is working on the Passion Translation and, you know, it is going to remove these partisan errors that religious institutions have imposed on the word of God, and it's going to be more faithful to the original Aramaic." She names the framing that made it persuasive — "there's been all these legalistic, partisan translators who have been imposing like a box on the Holy Spirit and just really concealing the true meaning of the scriptures from us" — and flags her own paraphrase honestly: "That is I'm expounding, but I'm telling you this this was the vibe." The reception mechanism is the point. TPT arrived not as a scholarly proposal to be assessed but as a **restoration** promise, positioned against the existing translations as *compromised*. That is the [[Apostolic Authority]] structure applied to a text: the new thing authenticates itself by casting the received thing as corrupted. She is candid about how much trust was involved: "a lot of us who now are not completely confident um in Bill's suitability for leadership… are very surprised to find ourselves in that position. I can't tell you how much we trusted Bill." --- ## The contradiction with Johnson's own account > [!contradiction] **Did Bill Johnson preach from TPT?** In [[2026-07-16-bill-johnson-defends-passion-translation|Bill Johnson Defends The Passion Translation (Rediscover Bethel)]] (2021), Johnson says: "I only teach uh or write out of New American Standard or the New King James… I don't use it as a proof text for something." Asked directly whether BSSM taught from TPT, Taylor answers: "Um yes, it was it was preached from at that time," and specifically: "as soon as they started coming out, **Bill for sure would preach from them**." She also reports Johnson's public line — "the Passion Translation is the best thing to happen to Bible translations" — and that "Bill never retracted that statement." > > **Hold this carefully; it is not a clean catch.** The accounts are separated by ~6–9 years, and Johnson's 2021 "I only teach out of" may describe his practice *then*, or may distinguish formal teaching and published writing from platform preaching. Taylor is recalling a decade-old classroom impression, not citing a transcript. Both can be partly right. What survives the caveats is narrower and still substantive: **Johnson's devotional-only framing does not describe how TPT functioned at Bethel while it was being released, and his endorsement was never qualified in public the way his private practice is qualified in the interview.** The gap between the two is the wiki's finding — not a lie, but an endorsement whose limits stayed off the record while the endorsement itself traveled. --- ## The epistemic-privilege inversion This is the sharpest exchange in the source, and it answers Johnson's central defense directly. Johnson's argument: critics "are usually very well educated… but they can read the harder translations easier," while the "brand new believer" cannot — so criticism is the complaint of the advantaged against a text serving beginners. Taylor, describing the moment she heard Johnson's endorsement while knowing the Aramaic claim was hollow: > "There's some things that just don't make sense but you have to be educated to know that. All of us who were not like um you know, seminary trained and hadn't don't have friends who are theologians warning us and like we we had no idea until people like Minor Prophets like started digging into it." > [!contradiction] **Same fact, inverted valence.** Both agree the critics are the educated ones. Johnson treats that education as what *disqualifies* the critique — elite readers judging a text meant for beginners. Taylor treats the *absence* of that education as exactly what left her defenseless: not being seminary-trained is why "we had no idea," and educated critics are what rescued the readers Johnson says he is protecting. Johnson's argument requires that the beginner be safe in TPT's hands. Taylor's testimony is a beginner reporting that she was not. The host corroborates the culture that made this work: "we used to kind of like make fun of like people who went to, you know, the normal seminary." He is now "going back and actually doing studies that a normal seminary student would be doing because of all the charismatic excess." The anti-seminary reflex Johnson's "critical spirit" framing licenses is described from the inside as a harm, by people who held it. Taylor's technical objection is the standard one and she states it accurately: "there is no Aramaic one Aramaic thing and you know, we have the the Peshitta but that was later on. It wasn't like a first or second century uh document in Aramaic that he translated from… and the Peshitta reads almost exactly the same as our modern translations." That is the **Peshitta leapfrog** already documented on [[The Passion Translation]], reported here by a layperson who learned it secondhand. --- ## Textual specimen — the glory reversal A new example for the concept page's specimen set: > "One of the things that got changed is um when it said like uh everyone was giving Jesus glory, and then Brian Simmons was like, 'No, it really said uh like, he gave glory to everyone.'… There it's like repeated. There's this repeat thing of like amplifying the glory of man and like the glory of self and like self-will." She names the deflection that meets it: "people will be like, 'Oh, you're so legalistic. Like, there's nothing wrong with him saying this.'" — the [[DARVO]] attack move in miniature, at congregation level rather than platform level. The direction of the alteration matters. It is not random looseness; Taylor's claim is that the changes run consistently toward **the glory of the human reader** — which is the same theological vector the wiki tracks in the Hebrews 12 case on [[The Passion Translation]], where a fabricated note converts divine chastisement into "it proves you are his delightful child." --- ## Candace Simmons — independent corroboration [[The Passion Translation]] documents Candace Simmons as an undisclosed, uncredentialed editor, sourced to [[2026-06-29-minor-prophets-pastors-quoting-word-of-god|Minor Prophets — 'And Pastors Are Quoting It as The Word of God' (TPT)]]. Taylor's episode reaches the same finding through the same clip, and the hosts draw the conclusion explicitly: > "There are many times where I was reading it and then I said, 'No, say it this way, it's better. You'll see it's better.' And she's like, 'Eventually, he saw that it's better.' And that's how I became his co-translator." The hosts' gloss — that "better" is "a strange word to use when you're writing a translation" — is the argument in one line: *better* is an editorial standard, not a translational one. A translator asks what the text says; an editor asks what reads well. To their credit the hosts pre-empt the obvious bad-faith reading: "This is not an attack on Candace. This is not like this is not a complementarian thing." The objection is to an undisclosed editorial hand on a text sold as a translation, not to a woman having one. --- ## The alumni-group suppression The most concrete new claim, and the one that connects to [[2026-07-07-bethel-layoffs-ndas-tpt-censorship|Bethel Layoffs, Non-Disparagement Agreements, and TPT Censorship — Wake Up and Win Podcast]]: - **The official BSSM alumni group rejects TPT discussion.** "We're trying to post in that group… 'Hey, can we discuss Passion Translation?' **Post rejected.**" A link to the Minor Prophets video — made by fellow alumni — "**Post rejected.**" Taylor: "I've got three pending posts. I'm probably just banned." - **The group was shut down once already.** "At one point they shut it down completely um because we were having conversations that they did not approve of um which were not sinful. They were about accountability and correction." She volunteers the mitigating fact herself: "Well, and there was legal reasons. I should be fair." - **An unofficial group exists because of it.** Taylor admins the unofficial BSSM alumni group; the official one is "run by Bethel." - **The bookstore reversal.** TPT was pulled from the Bethel online bookstore — "a bunch of us and there was much rejoicing" — and "two days later, they put it back up." > [!question] **What is established and what is inferred.** The *events* are first-person: posts rejected, group shut down and restarted, TPT pulled and restored within two days. The *motive* narrative — that someone senior reversed the bookstore decision on seeing charismatics read it as a statement — Taylor explicitly labels as her own speculation ("This is Destiny's imagination… did not tell me this"; the ASR garbles the phrase, but the disclaimer is unmistakable). Her broader read that Bethel leadership is internally split ("I have a hard time believing that out of all of the leaders at Bethel there aren't a significant number of them who are like, 'Guys, please, we have to issue a statement'") is inference from silence, and she frames it as such. Cite the events; attribute the motives to her. The suppression pattern is the same object [[2026-07-07-bethel-layoffs-ndas-tpt-censorship|Bethel Layoffs, Non-Disparagement Agreements, and TPT Censorship — Wake Up and Win Podcast]] documents through layoffs and NDAs, reached here by a different route: a graduate who cannot get a question about a Bible translation past a moderator in her own alumni group. She names the asymmetry precisely — the host asks why King-James-only debates would be permitted but this one is not: "Why can't we discuss the Passion Translation? Like is how is that against Bethel's values?" --- ## The deconstruction cost Taylor connects the text to the aftermath, which is where this source touches [[Religious Trauma]] and [[Faith and Doubt]]: > "It creates immaturity in Christians and deception." And the recursive doubt that follows finding out: "Did I not actually hear accurate prophetic words? Was I wrong? Or is it all nonsense?" — but she declines the total collapse: she still thinks genuine prophetic words "exist. It's just I think we are so self-absorbed that it must look a certain way." That is a person doing exactly what [[Deconstruction]] describes at its healthiest — discarding a specific false claim without discarding the tradition — and it is worth noting that she is doing it while locked out of her own alumni forum. --- ## Source caution - **One person's recollection, a decade later.** BSSM 2012–2015 is recalled, not documented. The "Bill for sure would preach from them" claim is an impression, not a citation of a specific sermon. It is a strong claim about a public figure and should be labeled as testimony. - **Friendly venue, no Bethel response.** The podcast is sympathetic; nobody from Bethel is present to contest the alumni-group or bookstore accounts. All institutional claims are one-sided. - **She is downstream of the Minor Prophets research**, which she credits openly. Her technical points (Peshitta, Candace's role) are not independently derived — they are correctly relayed. Treat them as corroboration of *reception*, not of the underlying scholarship. - **"Fraud" is her word.** The hosts reach for it and hedge ("whatever his struggles, it is still fraudulent"). The wiki does not adopt the legal term; the documented findings are plagiarism and misrepresentation. See [[The Passion Translation]]. - **Heavy ASR garbling.** Names and phrases are mangled in places (the speculation disclaimer especially). Quotations preserve the source text. --- ## Why this matters for the wiki - Completes a **same-day contradiction pair** with [[2026-07-16-bill-johnson-defends-passion-translation|Bill Johnson Defends The Passion Translation (Rediscover Bethel)]]: the defense and the eyewitness, ingested together. - Independently corroborates two existing claims — the Candace Simmons editor problem and the TPT censorship pattern — from a source with no connection to the ones already filed. - Supplies the wiki's first **TPT reception testimony from inside Bethel**, closing part of the gap [[The Passion Translation]] names under Source gaps.