Publishers Try to Make the Good Book an Easier Read

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) A few years ago, on the theory that many readers of the Bible don’t have any idea what a manger is, the American Bible Society replaced the word in a new edition with the phrase “feed box.” The change never caught on. All you have to do is sing […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) A few years ago, on the theory that many readers of the Bible don’t have any idea what a manger is, the American Bible Society replaced the word in a new edition with the phrase “feed box.”

The change never caught on. All you have to do is sing a few bars of “Away in a Feed Box” to understand why the Virgin Mary still places baby Jesus in a manger in most versions of the Bible sold in the U.S. today.


But the broader effort by the American Bible Society to find language meaningful to 21st-century readers certainly has caught on. It is part of a trend in Bible publishing to make the book accessible to people intimidated by the “thees” and “thous” and other antiquated language of the 17th-century King James Version.

“We’re always looking for better ways to engage people in the Bible,” said Paul Caminiti, a vice president for Zondervan, a Bible-publishing giant in Michigan. “Plain-text Bibles are well over 1,000 pages. We’re talking about 66 different books of the Bible, and a book that was written to a culture that is 2,000 to 4,000 years old. It can be challenging for people to jump into.”

The Bible is the bestselling book in history, and 40 percent of annual sales occur during the Christmas season. Those making a gift of the Gospels this year could choose from a handful of print and audio efforts intended to make the book more meaningful for a contemporary audience.

The options include:

_ “The Bible Experience,” an audio version available as a CD or MP3, which first went on sale this fall featuring 250 African-American entertainers, including actor Blair Underwood reading as Jesus.

_ “The Story,” a 464-page book first sold last year, which shuns standard chapter-and-verse breakdowns for a narrative form.

_ The “New Living Translation,” first published in 1996. It is the fourth-bestselling Bible translation at Protestant bookstores in the United States, and it is written at a sixth-grade level, according to CBA (formerly the Christian Booksellers Association).

_ The New International Version, first published in 1978, is the most popular Bible sold at Protestant book stores in the United States and is written at an eighth-grade level.


At bookstores, the translations have led to an alphabet soup of options widely known by their initials: KJV, NLT, NIV, RSV (Revised Standard Version), and NAB and NJB (New American Bible and New Jerusalem Bible, two approved Catholic versions), to name just a few.

The King James Version, renowned for centuries for its majestic, rhythmic prose and poetry that can entrance those it doesn’t befuddle, was long the bestselling English version. It’s still the second-bestselling Bible in the country, according to CBA.

The New King James Version, considered slightly easier to read, was published in 1982 and sells third-best in the country at Protestant bookstores.

Bible translations usually involve dozens of scholars who know their quest for readability will fail if English readers think a translation strays too far from the King James Version. Some scholars translate every word literally from ancient sources, while others go “thought for thought,” concerned more that broader passages are understood.

Robert Hodgson, an American Bible Society scholar, said even the broadly done translations are valuable.

“Christianity is a translated religion,” he said. “From the times of Jesus onward, Christians have depended on translation to spread the word around the world. Jesus spoke in Aramaic, but the Gospel writers wrote those words down in Greek and within (100 years) that was translated into Latin.”


“The thing to remember is, the original Bible authors and writers were writing to be understood. They were not trying to write in obscure or archaic or even difficult language,” Hodgson said.

Like many at her Assemblies of God church, Jean Douma of Bedminster, N.J., takes her Bible to Sunday services. It’s a New Living Translation, the version she began using when she started going to the church a decade ago.

“That’s the one I use every day, with my notes in it,” she said while shopping recently at a Christian bookstore. “It’s very easy to understand. … The old King James version, the way the sentences were structured made it hard to understand. It’s not the way we speak now.”

A landmark event for American translations came in 1971, when a man named Kenneth Taylor published what was called The Living Bible, an unashamed paraphrasing of the King James Version stemming from his failed attempts to explain that Bible to his 10 children.

“He literally went through and paraphrased the Scriptures and made it in easy-to-understand language,” said Jeffrey Smith, of Tyndale House Publishers. “(The evangelist) Billy Graham got a hold of it and thought it would be perfect for his crusades, so they started giving them away at crusades all over the world.”

The Living Bible caught on and has sold 40 million copies. It was the forerunner to the New Living Translation, published by Tyndale, a more direct translation that now accounts for about 10 percent of Bible sales at Protestant bookstores.


Similar instincts were behind “The Bible Experience,” 21 hours of famous African-Americans reading the Bible on 18 CDs.

It was put together by black Hollywood producers who realized “this is a sight-and-sound generation with people listening to their iPods, playing video games. There’s a good chance they’re not going to pick up a 1,000-page book,” Caminiti said.

“The Bible Experience” already has become the bestselling audio Bible in the world, with an estimated 200,000 sales, he said.

Angela Bassett reads the Nativity story, Cuba Gooding Jr. reads Judas, and Samuel L. Jackson reads God (He does not read Ezekiel 25:17, the line he famously riffed on in “Pulp Fiction,” because Ezekiel is in the Hebrew Bible, which won’t be released as part of “The Bible Experience” until next year).

KRE/JL END DIAMANT

(Jeff Diamant writes for The Star Ledger in Newark, N.J.)

Editors: To obtain photos of “The Bible Experience,” go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!