The Bible - and its alternatives

Type 'the bible' into Google and you'll get 38,800,000 links, and 397 sponsored (ie paid for) links. Google helpfully suggests other searches you can try, related to 'the bible', to narrow down the possibilities, such as 'facts about the bible', 'king james bible', 'the bible for children', 'history of the bible', 'bible quotes', and 'the new testament'.


Limit your search to pages from the UK, and you'll get 1,580,000 links, and, intriguingly, 402 sponsored (paid for) links. Also extra on the UK result are two further suggestions to narrow your search; 'who wrote the bible', and 'the old testament'.

If you want an image of 'the bible', you've got 162,000 to choose from, and Google also suggests you search for an image using 'the holy bible', to narrow things down.

But what hadn't occurred to me until I read a piece of the BBC News website today, by Stephen Tomkins, is that there are loads of 'alternative' bibles, aiming to serve all needs and inclinations. He described a new edition, 'The Illuminated Bible', thus:














"Most people think of the Bible as a densely printed book with no pictures, but a version of the scripture that resembles a glossy coffee table magazine aims to change that. It's part of a wave of radical presentations of the Bible, including a manga version and a Lego gospel. But how do Christians feel about these attempts to spread the word?
It's the kind of magazine you might find in a doctor's waiting room next to Cosmopolitan or Reader's Digest. On the front is a pale face heavy with mascara. A flick through throws up striking images: urban flooding, a Nigerian abattoir, a girl eating noodles, a pooch in a limo.
It's only when and if you get round to reading the text that the incongruity strikes you: "Go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor, and you will have riches in heaven." What kind of problem page is this?

BIBLE VERSION HISTORY
382: Jerome commissioned to tackle Latin Vulgate translation
1382: Wyclif's Bible, translations of Vulgate scripture into Middle English start to appear
1455: Gutenberg prints Bible using movable type
1522: Martin Luther translates New Testament into German
1526: Tyndale's English New Testament printed

Bible Illuminated is the latest attempt to bring the Bible into the modern world. In the format of a 300-page glossy magazine, it contains the whole text of the New Testament in a popular translation, with no chapter or verse numbers.
The images are by turns beautiful, violent, oblique and provocative - much like the book itself.
The text "She will have a son, and you will name him Jesus" is illustrated with a veiled Muslim.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is intrigued by the Manga Bible.
What he sees in the Bible is a profitable chance for people to look again at their world. "We are all affected by it," he says. "Morals are based on it, rightly or wrongly, government, laws. I'm saying to people: this is your history, read it.
"It's the most sold book in the world, but the least known. I want to take it off the shelves and put it on the coffee table."
It's the kind of thing that might provoke tuts and headshaking in the pews, one imagines. "Some people will feel it's dumbing down," says David Ashford of the Bible Society, an organisation that exists to "make the Bible heard". "How can it be the Bible when it's got Angelina Jolie in it?"












The Brick Testament is not exactly reverent. He, however, welcomes it with open arms. "You have to understand that what we think of as the traditional serious-looking leather-bound Bible is actually a relatively new format. In the Middle Ages, picture books - with people in contemporary dress - were the way most people read the Bible.
"At first the Bible was a collection of scrolls, then illustrated handwritten volumes. When printing was invented they were produced in Latin with pictures. Later they were published in plain closely printed text, in the common language, to get them into as many people's hands as cheaply as possible."

So, ironically, Soederberg's attempt to popularise the Bible by getting away from its traditional format is exactly what the people who created that format were doing.

If you're looking for an alternative way into the Bible, there's no shortage of versions to choose from.











In The Manga Bible, the British Christian Ajin-bayo Akinsiku, known as Siku, tells the whole story in the form of a graphic novel. Cain says to Abel, "Whassup, bro?" Noah loads animals onto the ark, saying, "That's 11,344 animals? Arggh! I've lost count again. I'm going to have to start from scratch!" Christ strides out of the desert like a Marvel superhero.
It skimps on some of the less bloodthirsty episodes like the sermon on the mount, but Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is a fan, liking the way it conveys "the shock and freshness of the Bible".

Former archbishop George Carey gave a thumbs up to the Cockney Bible
The rhyming slang version of the Bible was written by Mike Coles, an RE teacher in Stepney, and started life as stories he told to his classes. In it, Jesus feeds "five thousand geezers" with "five loaves of Uncle Fred and two Lillian Gish". The Lord's Prayer morphs from "For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory" to "You're the Boss, God, and will be for ever, innit?"

The Brick Testament online version by Brendan Powell Smith tells stories from the Bible using Lego. It started life in 2001 with stories from Genesis and today contains 391 stories with 4,214 illustrations. Though it is sometimes satirical or tongue-in-cheek, it is often used by churches and Sunday schools, and it's one of the versions that the Bible Society has welcomed as connecting people with the Bible in a new way.

And for the iPod generation, you can get the whole thing on your MP3 player, read and performed by a Hollywood cast, including Forest Whitaker as Moses, Cuba Gooding Jr as Jonah, and a possibly typecast Samuel L Jackson as God.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this new wave of Bibles is how sympathetic the church is to people messing about with its sacred scriptures, whether in wording or binding, no doubt reasoning that there can be some good in anything that gets people hearing its stories.

Read the whole article at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7750842.stm

www.bridgnorth-anglican.org