Q: Are alternative formats for the
Bible a good tool for Christians to use?
What does one gain or lose by using a chronological or story Bible or a
paraphrase instead of a typical translation?
Probably the earliest alternative
Bible formats to be produced were intended to be used with children. Picture Bibles were produced for children who
had not yet learned to read, and illustrated Bible Story Books were produced
for children in the process of learning to read. Some of these books, particularly the older
hand-illustrated ones, are beautiful works of art which also served as
excellent teaching tools for introducing the Bible to children at a young age
and beginning their instruction in the Faith.
More recently, books have begun to
appear for adults which place excerpts from the Bible in chronological order
formatted as a story or a novel. One
thing that people often find challenging when first interacting with Scripture
is that it consists of several different genres arranged thematically rather
than chronologically. So the Old
Testament begins with all of the history books, continues with the poetic
writings, then concludes with the record of the prophets. Likewise the New Testament is divided into
the four Gospels and the Epistles (letters), with the books of Acts (history)
and Revelation (prophecy) included as the fifth and last books respectively.
The authors of chronological or story
Bibles intend to make the Bible easier to understand by smoothing these various
genres into a continuous narrative and placing them in chronological order, and
pastors may find some beneficial uses for these attempts, such as guiding a new
believer through the Bible for the first time, much like parents might use a
picture Bible or Bible story book with their children.
These Bibles do serve to remind us
something that has sometimes been overlooked in the most recent era of
Christianity—that, beyond being a source of inspirational quotes and
proof-texts for doctrine, the Bible is a record of God’s actions from creation
until the death of St. John the Evangelist to rescue humanity from the deserved
punishment for our rebellion against Him.
However, this style of Bible does
have its weaknesses. The first of these
is that it does not include the whole story.
Because an editor has chosen the highlights of the story, the reader is
at his mercy to choose which parts of the Bible are more or less important than
others. This means that bias of the
editor may result in overemphasis on certain minor themes or the omission of
important details not favored by the editor.
Additionally, since these editions of
the Bible are not translations of the Bible text but paraphrases, one is
reading the paraphraser’s impressions of a given verse or story rather than the
actual text of the Scriptures. This was
a criticism often leveled against early paraphrases of the Bible such as The Living Bible or the Good News Bible, because the biases of
the paraphraser can cloud the understanding of the reader. While this is a concern with any translation
of the Bible other than the original Greek and Hebrew, the concern is amplified
when dealing with a paraphrase.
When one considers that some of the
popular translations of the Bible have been rated at a 7th grade
reading level, and even the King James Version is evaluated to be readable for
the average high-school Senior, paraphrasing the text seems unnecessary. This is one reason that, until recently, most
seminaries required a working knowledge of at least Greek, and usually Hebrew,
for every man who desired to become a parish pastor—so that he would be able to
assist his parishioners in passages that may be difficult to understand or to
translate concisely.
Some pastors may find that
chronological or story Bibles have a limited benefit for introducing the broad
outline of the Bible for some people under their instruction, but because the
various parts of the Bible are so intricately intertwined and interdependent,
it would be difficult for a reader to gain a mature understanding of the Bible or
a full appreciation for its depth using only such resources.
