100-minute Bible

A bible you can read in one hour and forty minutes? It was featured on the Today programme this morning. Good things about it: it gives the main plot (in someone's POV!) without all the begats, food laws, etc; it may well serve as a "trailer" for the main show (each section comes with a note as to where you can find it in the full length version).  Bad things: it flattens all the literary variety - what began as 66 books in a mix of poetry, law, history, narrative, polemic, epistle, apocalyptic and so on, is now one narrative in one style. And as every student of literature knows, if you change the form, you change the meaning too.

I am constantly horrified at how many undergraduates arrive in Cambridge - even those who have come to read literature, history or theology - without ever having read the Bible. You cannot assume, even among the better-read of our youth, that they will know what you mean if you mention Cain and Abel, the fall of Jericho, the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, or what happened at Easter. How the next generation is going to understand their Shakespeare, Donne, Chaucer or Milton, I can't imagine. If the 100-minute Bible at least whets a few appetites, and persuades a few to read the real thing, that could only be good.

Comments

[Hugh A]

Of course there is always The Reduced Shakespeare Company's hilarious THE BIBLE: THE COMPLETE WORD OF GOD (abridged)! The other week our minister asked how many of us had read all the Bible and only about 6 hands went up which I found rather worrying. An overview of the whole Bible is important to put passages into context. As well as studying small sections it is necessary to get the flow of the whole Book.

[John]

Thanks for this, Maggi. Tony over at Storyteller's World has a more pessimistic view than you. Personally, I can see value as a taster but, as you said, without context it can't be any more than that.

pax et bonum

[sage]

i heard about the 100 minute Bible this morning on National Public Radio. Why not, instead of publishing a significantly abridged Bible, just publish Cliff Notes to the Scriptures?

[Eric Lee]

This seems like just the thing that Ray Bradbury was writing against in his Fahrenheith 451. In the copy I have, there's an addendum where he says he can't stand the recent influx of abridged versions of anything. He sees it as the more proof that his fantastical vision isn't so fictitious after all.

[Joanna]

I have found the same with the university students I teach. Last year in class we were looking at Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech in terms of the culturally powerful themes that MLK was drawing on - he uses the language of the Declaration of Independence, of banking, of religion etc. I was shocked at my students' inability to recognise the wonderful great riffs of biblical quotation that occur throughout the speech. I suggested to these students that they needed to be familiar with the Bible if they wanted to understand Western culture... I was greeted with profound scepticism!

[maggi]

Hugh, I love the Reduced Shakespeare Company too - but how can you even understand why what they do is funny if you don't know the original? The abridgement and comedy isn't funny if you don't know what's being abridged, punned, poked fun at...

[Mike E]

It would be interesting if they did the same with the Qur'an. Handy for a crash course in comparative religion I guess. The Mahabharata seems to have been given the treatment already (and on stage).

However, isn't a bit like Matt Lucas at Kelsey Grammar School (Little Briton) saying "shall we just watch the video?".

[sage]

for my take on this condensed version see: http://sagecoveredhills.blogspot.com/2005/09/news-you-need-to-know.html

Does a condense Bible go down about as good as condensed milk?

[maggi]

thanks, sage - I like your blogpost!

[henry]

The bible can be just as useful in condensed form, the length has no bearing whatsoever on the value of its message. There does need to be a number of pages to explain the irony of Jesus' line "Forgive them father they know not what they do" with which he reveals hiself to be an enlightened being, free of ill-will even when he is in agony caused by the cruelty of others. It is ironic here because this line encapsulates the central message of spirituality, regardless of the medium through which you approach it. This is the centre of our spiritual perspective, a truth which cannot be altered or taken from us, that we alone can redeem our souls and that we alone can be the judge of our success in doing so. It is ironic because looked at in this light, the notion of God and unexplainable, unnacountable power becomes instantly meaningless and misguided. Jesus did not die to save us but to show us how to save ourselves, but this line from the authors of the bible has allowed for the confusion seen throughout history, and still today.
At least Jesus was an enlightened person, a model for us to follow and aspire to in our lives. His Islamic equivalent was not.

[Wulf]

I love condensed milk (although you certainly couldn't live on it!). I suspect I'll quite like this new publication as well, as long as it's clear that it's an introduction rather than pretending to be sufficient nourishment in itself.

Has anyone got an official website for it beyond the BBC link that keeps popping up?

[Enoch Root]

Does it matter that people aren't familiar with the bible? Does it matter that they don't understand Shakespeare, Donne, Chaucer or Milton? It's perfectly possible to live without these things. This just sounds like intellectual snobbery to me.

[ConradGempf]

I think I much prefer the approach of Scripture Union with their *Essential 100* series I blogged through a while back. It's more than 100 minutes, but in 100 days you read some major excerpts of the real text in a way that really does whet your appetite for more rather than allow you to say "now I've done that."

Coming soon, also from Scripture Union, but in collaboration with London School of Theology, Rob "Word on the Street" Lacey will perform his 1-minute Bible on the DVD I've been working on: Christian Life & the Bible. And he's funny!

[Joanna]

In response to Enoch Root's comment (and I LOVE Neil Stephenson, by the way!), familiarity with the Bible (and the other great source texts of Western civilisation) is certainly more than snobbery for a historian. Snobbery is always a danger of course! To go back to my example of MLK Jr, you cannot possibly understand the civil rights movement unless you understand the extent to which black activists were adopting/transforming/reacting against a particular biblically-informed tradition. If you don't understand that tradition, of which the biblical text is such a crucial element, you will make all sorts of erroneous assumptions about what MLK and his fellow activists were doing. Sensitivity to language is so important for cultural historians, and the Bible is so important in the language of the cultures that grew out of Christendom.

[Matt Stone]

"You cannot assume ... that they will know what you mean if you mention ... what happened at Easter. How the next generation is going to understand their Shakespeare, Donne, Chaucer or Milton, I can't imagine."

Maggi, the two thoughts don't hold together. People still do read Shakespeare in school but the Bible is only studied at religious schools. It's not a matter of intelligence, its a matter of exposure in a post-Christian society. You may as well ask about the Bhagavad Gita or Gospel of Thomas - these get more exposure!

[Enoch Root]

Hi Joanna,

You can't love him that much, you can't spell his name right! It's Neal. :-P

Anyway, I'm sure you're right about the Bible being important to cultural historians. Personally I find it interesting but don't like the bits about burning in hell.

[maggi]

Matt, Enoch - how can anyone understand much of English Literature if they don't have at least a rudimentary grip on the Bible? Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, to name but a few, constantly assume that their readers will know the bible, and therefore will catch the allusions they make. I know people do read Shakespeare - but if they don't also read the Bible (at least as a literary tome, if not a religious one) they will miss half the sense of what they read.

[sage]

Maggie--you cite older authors but even more recent authors--some even on this side of the pond--require that you understand the Bible to fully appreciate their works. Even skeptics like Mark Twain draw upon the Scriptures and require some understanding of the Bible.

[maggi]

You're right Sage - Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Ian McEwan, Douglas Coupland - that's just 10 seconds off the top of my head. The list could go on and on.

And not just literature either - even trash fiction like the scurrulous Jeffrey Archer (not that I've ever read any) requires a bit of general Bible knowledge to get the references...

[Joanna]

Beyond literature, as well, Biblical concepts have shaped our culture in profound ways. We owe many of our basic assumptions about law, about history, about family, about the poor, about gender to particular interpretations of the Bible. You don't need to defend those interpretations to argue for the importance of a basic familiarity with the biblical text for anyone wanting to make sense of where our society is and where it's been. Thanks for the spelling lesson, Enoch! Would you believe I've read almost everything Neal's published (the trilogy out loud!) and I still can't spell his name! Shameful...

>Thanks for the spelling lesson, Enoch! Would >you believe I've read almost everything >Neal's published (the trilogy out loud!) and >I still can't spell his name! Shameful...

Sorry Joanna, I realised how pompous that sounded after I posted it...but I couldn't get on with "Quicksilver" after 300 pages I couldn't see where it was going. I'll give it another go some time. I thought Cryptonomicon one of the best books I'd ever read though.

[Enoch Root]

oops, that was me, by the way..

[Joanna]

It's kind of you to apologise, Enoch! Do try Quicksilver again!

[Enoch Root]

>It's kind of you to apologise, Enoch! Do try Quicksilver again!

It was nothing :-) I will - I'm now officially reading about twelve books at once but I'll get there. Assuming I am granted the time!