Bringing Down the Bible

The Reader's Digest condenses Scripture by 40%

Were God and his inspired scriptural writers unforgivably long-winded? Could they have benefited, like other authors, from a dose of tough-minded, un-worshipful editing? Verily, saith the Reader's Digest, and last week it brought forth the Reader's Digest Bible. Priced at $16.95, it is 320,000 words (or 40%) shorter than the Protestant text of the Revised Standard Version on which it is based; the Old Testament has been cut down by half and the New by onefourth. Alas, less in this instance is not more.

The project began in 1976 when the Digest won the approval of the National Council of Churches, which holds copyright to the Revised Standard Version. As general editor, the Digest recruited the Rev. Bruce M. Metzger of Princeton Theological Seminary, a distinguished Bible expert, to supervise the work of nine staff condensers. Despite the inevitable jokes to come about the Six Commandments or the 4.2 Days of Creation, the team wisely left unshrunk the best-known passages, like the 23rd Psalm. Instead they applied the scissors to parallel accounts, such as the dozens of stories concerning Jesus Christ that appear in more than one of the four Gospels. Whole narrative passages are squeezed to a minimum. God's words to Moses out of the burning bush are boiled down by two-fifths.

The editors also eliminated entire sentences, like Matthew 4: 25: "And great crowds followed [Jesus] from Galilee and the Decapolis and Jerusalem and Judea and from beyond the Jordan." This moves the action along briskly, but at the sacrifice of historical detail. Many complicated sections are cut altogether, such as those Old Testament family trees and lists of kings and much of the ritual law in Leviticus.

In the poetic books, chapter after chapter is hacked away. Gone is fully half of the book of Psalms, which might now be better retitled David's Greatest Hits. The prophets are especially victimized. Besides large chunks, telling phrases are lost. Consider the felicitous line from Jeremiah: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt." Snip out the last three words. Or this passage from Isaiah, immortalized in Handel's Messiah: "He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities." Away with the second phrase, on grounds of redundancy. So much for poetry.

Also omitted are the chapter and verse numbers. Ostensibly this is to aid readability, though other modern editions avoid clutter by including unobtrusive numbers in the lines or at the margins. The Digest's Bible leaves the reader with no idea what is missing.

What justifies such a venture? Metzger hopes that once people have been lured into his 60% rendition, "a sizable proportion who have never cracked the cover of a Bible will go on to read the whole thing." The Digest contends that the Bible is all too little read, because many sections are rough going for the typical reader. Undoubtedly so, but such people could use one of the readable modern translations of the real thing (such as the Good News Bible or New International Version) and skip the slow parts.

The Digest Bible comes with ringing publicity hosannas from the likes of Norman Vincent Peale, Oral Roberts, Pat Boone (an "authentic Bible feast!"), Executive Director John Mostert of the conservative American Association of Bible Colleges, and President Donald Shriver of New York City's liberal Union Theological Seminary ("an important new addition to the life of Christians, the churches and the world . . ."). So far, only cranky Fundamentalists seem to be offended. They argue that Christians must take the Bible straight, the way God gave it. Warns the Christian Beacon: "The Reader's Digest has done a good job for Satan."

A bit much, to be sure, but even the Digesters must have entertained the thought that not everybody was going to be pleased. Why else would they have dropped some of the climactic words from the last book in the Bible, Revelation? The passage threatens eternal damnation "if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy."

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