blog.durdle.com

I expect Richard to blog about this in more detail (or at least with more insight) but I really liked the idea of the 100 Minute Bible.

I actually bothered to read the entire Bible about 5 years ago when I realised that having dismissed it when I was about 11 with logic like “Church is well boring” I’d not really spent any time thinking about it since then. I figured that if I were to venture an opinion on organised religion in general, and Christianity in particular, I ought to have read the thing! (I read the Koran a few years later for similar reasons.)

As the Times article points out, the Bible starts well but you rapidly get bogged down in people begatting other people and it all gets frightfully dull. This 58 page version can be read in one sitting and contains all the important events written in concise contemporary English. I’m sure a good number of traditionalists will cry that it ruins the poetry of the original text but if it acts, as the author hopes, as a “gateway to the Bible” maybe that’s not such a bad thing?

That’s not why I’m interested in it though; it appeals to me just for it’s use of English. Taking stories and verses that have been rigidly defined for years and re-writing them like entries in a brevity competition:

David achieved a wider fame when he overcame the giant Goliath.

or, on the Ten Commandments:

Other more detailed laws governed diet, dress, personal relations, worship and every aspect of daily life.

Perhaps I really like it because it reminds me of Monty Python’s game show in which hapless contestents had to summarise Proust… maybe that’s next on the authors list?