IT IS a great opening: the creation, the flood, Adam and Eve, the apple and the serpent, Cain murdering Abel. Genesis is a real page-turner.
But the plot falls away after that. You have to wade through endless pages of begetting and smiting, Israelites versus Amalekites, old men in beards prophesying everything from ruin to salvation, before you get to the nub of the Christian message in the second half.
What you need is a distillation of the 66 books of the Bible which make the story somewhat clearer than the plot of The Da Vinci Code, and which you can read in less time than it takes to watch two episodes of Holby City. It has arrived. The 100-Minute Bible was launched at Canterbury Cathedral yesterday.
Many adherents to the Christian religion find spiritual uplift in the obfuscation and poetry of the Bible’s core text, and in the musical prose of the 1611 King James version. Leonard Budd, a small-time publisher based in Canterbury, has done away with all that in his pocket-sized, 58-page edition.
Mr Budd is convinced that it will be a best-seller. He believes that there are many people who do not have time to read the original, but are nonetheless interested in the origins and message of Christianity. The 100-Minute Bible races from Creation to Revelation in what is little more than a fat pamphlet, ignoring many of the longer and more boring tracts.
With useful maps identifying the location of Sodom and Gomorrah, how the tribe of Benjamin lived next door to the tribe of Ephraim, and how far it was from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the Budd version also has useful bullet-point chapter headings such as “Jacob and his family”, “Jesus begins his ministry” and “Further resurrection appearances”.
The story is all there, but most of the embellishments beloved of traditionalists raised in a more literary age have gone. God still created Heaven and Earth “over a period of six days”, and He expelled Adam and Eve from Eden, condemning “men to arduous toil, and woman to pain in childbearing and to submission to their husbands”.
Outlining the Ten Commandments, the 100-minute version adds: “Other more detailed laws governed diet, dress, personal relations, worship and every aspect of daily life.”
To a modern audience, it probably means more than coveting thy neighbour’s ass.
Some essential Old Testament geography is well explained. When the world was repopulated after Noah’s flood, “people migrated to the fertile Plain of Shinar between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates” — the last place you would want to migrate to just now.
Some great moments are seriously downplayed. “David achieved a wider fame when he overcame the giant Goliath,” is akin to saying that the world’s greatest boxer once travelled to Zaire to beat a man who went on to sell fat-free grillpans.
Early AD events are similarly prosaic. “The shepherds went to Bethlehem, visited the family, and spread the news that this was a very special baby,” could almost be an advertising copywriter’s line for disposable nappies. And the essence of the Sermon on the Mount — “He taught that true happiness comes from having the right attitudes” — could have come from the pen of a tabloid lifestyle columnist.
Michael Hinton, a retired priest and former headmaster from Dover who wrote the new version, defended his text, saying that the aim was to provide a “gateway” to the Bible. He had anticipated criticism. “We have tried to write the whole thing in good, clear contemporary English,” he said. “That gives it a different tone to the original text, which is very often highly poetic and allusive.”
NEW AND OLD
- 100-Minute Bible on Belshazzar’s Feast: “While King Belshazzar was giving a great feast, writing mysteriously appeared on the wall of his palace.”
Authorised Version (AV): “Then from his presence the hand was sent, and this writing was inscribed: Mene, Mene, Tekel and Parsin.”
- On the killing of the firstborn: “Herod ordered a massacre of all boys under the age of two in the Bethlehem region.”
AV: “Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, was in a furious rage; and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem.”
- On Christ’s teaching: “He gave offence by forgiving sins.”
AV: “The Pharisees went out, and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.”
- On the prodigal son: “His father arranged a huge party for him on his return.”
AV: “But the father said to his servants: Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet, and bring the fatted calf and kill it. and let us eat and make merry.”
- The Lord’s Prayer: “And do not bring us to the time of testing, but rescue us from the evil one.”
AV: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
- On the Revelation of St John the Divine on the Day of Judgment: “All this was part of a cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil, which ended with the Devil being defeated and cast into an everlasting lake of fire.”
AV: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.”
- On the raising of the dead: “Lazarus, come out!”
A.V: “Lazarus, come out!”
The 100-Minute Bible, £3 plus p&p, www.the100-minutepress.co.uk
