My thoughts from a couple of recent conversations about Bible translation and The Passion Translation:

The Passion Translation is not a translation. It is a paraphrase. An extremely loose paraphrase made by a single author.

My recommendation is against using it. It will add nothing to your understanding of what is actually in the Bible, but will only give you insight into the thoughts and interpretations of the single ‘translator’, Brian Simmons (who does not seem to actually know either biblical languages or the late Aramaic or Syriac he claims to use as a guide for the NT but relies primarily on other English translations).

The work of translation is a very difficult thing. I understand that no translation will ever line up completely with the original language. I also understand a place for acknowledged paraphrase or the “dynamic equivalence” approach of making certain idioms in the source language work in the target language. However, The Passion Translation is a bad paraphrase made worse in that it is falsely represented as a translation.