It may be the word of God, but that hasn’t spared it from regular man-made tinkering. From 15th-century printers to 20th-century modernists, every age has sought to adapt the Bible.
So now, for the era of restless consumers and fickle attention spans, a British publication distills the original into a form you could read at one sitting. Instead of 780,000 words and 1,200 chapters, there are just 20,000 words in fewer than 60 pages.
Not surprisingly, the “100-Minute Bible” is generating robust debate in Britain….
The idea was to reproduce the 66 books into 50 400-word chunks, each taking about two minutes to read. The thin tome, shaped like an envelope and not much heavier than one, should take less than two hours to skip through.
Hilarious, and very very good. My theory is that if the zealots are arguing over stuff like this, they’ll have less time to mess with politics. It always amazes me how little it takes to get some people worked up.
Thanks for this article. It amazes me just as much at how much they get worked up over things. I myself am not a follower of the Bible, but I like the idea. Having researched a few religions, it would’ve been nice to have something like this to decide on whether or not it was a good religion for me to put faith in.
100 minute. Tea tastes good. I like water. Does Azureus support uber leet car smashing? I want fishing powerz! That’s Guild Wars right there in Leo Laporte in the quest red microphone comment or suggestion please just step up and say hello i’m Jay video of 1998 talking about the Ultimate Gaming Machine 128 megs no one needs more than 64 megs four thousand five hundred dollars that was on Digg G4 all that video is online I don’t think I saw that.
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What a terrible way to read the Bible. I guess people are too lazy these days to slow down and read a REAL book.
“Hilarious, and very very good. My theory is that if the zealots are arguing over stuff like this, they’ll have less time to mess with politics. It always amazes me how little it takes to get some people worked up.”
There’s nothing to argue about. If more so called Christians read the whole Bible they’d know they should have nothing to do with politics. As far as a 100-Minute Bible, I think a 5-Minute Bible would suffice to cover the amount that most ‘Christians’ follow.
It’s a shame that so many people don’t have time to sit down and consider the whole book since it contains so much good news.
Since Christianity began we have seen “men of faith” twist, turn, and abuse every phrase or word to further their own goals. It is logical that if you want to make more people believe what you want them to, it is easier to do it when they have no cohesive full to provide contextual references.
Besides which, the scary Christians are the same types that would read these, it is a Jim Jones level of ungood.
“If more so called Christians read the whole Bible they’d know they should have nothing to do with politics. ”
Could you please tell me where your getting this from, because I’m pretty sure your wrong on this one.
I find this hilarious. Follow me for a second: You believe in god. He created the world. He created you. He has a divine plan for you and everyone else. He gave his only son to you so you can save yourself. He writes a book. Yet, the vast majority of Christians do NOT read it?!
That makes no sense. If I believed it’d be the ONLY book I’d ever read. What up with these people?!
Ima Fish, you’re good. 🙂
You can say what you want about the Bible, but it’s still worth running copies off of the printing presses. Which is more than you can say for a lot of this stuff we all post on the Internet. Maybe somebody will start a 100-Minute Internet site and get the whole Internet down to something more readable. You could even try printing it and selling copies with some sort of AdWord gimmick or service plan. The 100 Minute Internet, ONLY $4.42 a month. Even if you can only get a few hundred people to sign up, a buck is a buck. You could try selling lists with ebay. I saw a list for $4.95 and you could resell it for $4.95 over and over again. It looked like people were buying the list. I still have my $4.95. Gasoline may be $4.95 soon, the way things are going and all. Good luck folks.
Microsoft for Windows Bible v3.3.4.5.6.7.4
The gospel of St. Geekious
And so God created man and he was good.
So man created computers and he was lonely.
So God created woman and she was love.
God then said, what have I done here.
Then the power went out and man discovered woman.
And she was better than Windows.
Thus began the mysteries of technology.
I decided to mock this article even further…
For those of you who didn’t like the Reader’s Digest version of the Bible because it was too long. Now you can have a Bible that can be read in 100 minutes. I realize that may put a strain on some of you so I’m coming out with the 100 Second Bible.
With it you can read the first three word and the last three word of every book of the Bible. After we sweep the publishing world with this one, we will release the 10 second Bible which will have the first 5 words of Genesis and the last 5 of Revelation.
All in all, most people in the world can’t read… so we will be releasing the 100 Second Audio Version and the 10 Second Audio Version later this year.
If you desire to pre-order your 100 Second Bible, the 10 Second Bible, or 100 Second Audio Bible, the 10 Second Audio Bible send us an email at imtoolazytoread@chrisvaughn.org – You can read all about in my blog at http://www.chrisvaughn.org – get your copy today!
To consider the whole book would shatter most people’s delusional false worlds. Fundamentalists are lazy thinkers. Otherwi********y smart person could point out the blatant inconsistencies in every religion’s holy books. These people think they’ve got it all together from all angles, the first clue that they really don’t get it. It’s a daily spiritual journey that never stops.
As a Christian, I don’t have a problem with a small version of the Bible. My kids have had storybook versions with pictures and even a comic book version.
Unless they changed the story, I like the idea.
None of this should surpri*****yone. Revelations has the only description of Christ – he has white hair & feet the color of bronze. Who’s the surfer/60s hippy looking guy I always see in those blasphemous pictures all over the darn place? What guy from the desert is as ghostly pale as an Icelander?
And then there’s this–the Bible converted into pig latin:
http://www.museumofconceptualart.com/ible-bay.html
I’m not sure why this is getting so much buzz since I remember both the Reader’s Digest Condensed Bible and the Cliffs Notes on the bible.
The Reader’s Digest thing created a stir among conservative Christians but I thought it was a good idea (‘m fairly conservative in my faith, BTW).
Why not? Even most conservative Christians never read the bible cover-to-cover, so why not let some pro editors at least help us find the best parts?
In reply:
“If more so called Christians read the whole Bible they’d know they should have nothing to do with politics. ”
Could you please tell me where your getting this from, because I’m pretty sure your wrong on this one.
Comment by Mr. Jonny Pantz — 9/29/2005 @ 4:42 am
Ok here’s the answer from Jesus himself shortly before his death:
John 17:16 – “They are no part of the world, just as I am no part of the world.”
Jesus did not seek to establish himself as king of the Jews or overthrow the Romans as many Jews wanted. His kingdom was not earthly, he wasn’t part of the worlds politics. His followers should be likewise. Neutral in Earth’s affairs and looking to Christ’s kingdom.
That is why I commented the way I did.
Mr. Dvorak sez: “Hilarious, and very very good. My theory is that if the zealots are arguing over stuff like this, they’ll have less time to mess with politics. It always amazes me how little it takes to get some people worked up.”
I’m not sure I understand why this is supposed to be “hilarious,” though it is clear from Dvorak’s choice of words (“stuff like this…how little it takes”) that he has “little” regard for the value of the Bible. This is his choice and his privilege, I suppose, though it is sad to see the incidence of visceral anti-Christian bigotry (“the scary Christians are the same types that would read these”…”These people think they’ve got it all together from all angles, the first clue that they really don’t get it”) that Dvorak’s comments evoked from some quarters.
Even if Dvorak finds the Bible so unworthy of being taken seriously as a book of religious truth that a 100 minute bastardization is only cause for amusement, I am surprised that he does not find it less than funny from a literary standpoint. A “100 minute Bible” is not really “THE Bible,” just as a 100 minute synopsis of Shakespeare’s plays would not really be what Shakespeare wrote. The “100 minute” idea, to my way of thinking, is like nothing so much as one of those “high-level overviews” that a corporate manager asks for when he (or she) doesn’t care to be bothered by too much reading or thinking about the real complexity of a given project. The prepared of the document has to leave out a lot of the details and hope they don’t turn out in retrospect to have been crucial. The “100 minute” idea, then, would be the kind of thing you’d prepare for someone on the level of Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss, who can’t be expected to understand anything very profound.
Not only does that approach eviscerate the message of the Bible on a spiritual level, but it fundamentally misrepresents it on the cultural-literacy level. Dvorak may not care much about the first of these effects (and perhaps for reasons that make good sense for him), but I’d think the second effect would be of some concern to him. Having watched, read, and listened to him since the old “Screen Savers”/TechTV days, I’m just not sure what his angle is on this, or indeed whether it is a fully worked-out one (as I’m sure it would be in the case of a technology-related story rather than something in which he evidently has only a tangental interest).
No, Thomas, J. C. Dvorak “sez” no such thing. This is *my* post. And thank you for proving my point, that certain zealots within Christendom will get worked up over something so trivial. If it’s a bad synopsis, just don’t read it.
Incidentally, you obviously *completely* missed the significance of the image I chose for the post. That would have saved you most of your keystrokes. When you said: “I am surprised that he does not find it less than funny from a literary standpoint. A ‘100 minute Bible’ is not really ‘THE BIBLE….'”– I knew you had COMPLETELY missed the point of the post.
KB–
My bad for on a first visit to dvorak.com not realizing that “Filed under: General— KB @ 6:17 pm” denoted your authorship. I stand corrected on that. As far as the image you chose being so significant, it still evaded me until I checked out the properties to see that it was a graphic of “cliff notes.” Ah. Humor. Hehe (I think).
It’s certainly your privilege to find this a “trivial” matter, but you might want to rethink your obvious hostility. When you say “thank you for proving my point, that certain zealots within Christendom will get worked up over something so trivial”–friend, how do you know my level of either zealotry or “worked-up”edness via an electronic posting? And how do you tell me “If it’s a bad synopsis, just don’t read it” while pouring all your keystrokes on what you obviously consider a “bad” analysis on my part? (And if it is, why read it or bother responding, since it obviously has no value in your mind?) I think that among the two of us, it’s fairly obvious that the “zealot” is you, especially when you descend toward capitalized SHOUTING at the end. Your “zealot”ry just happens to be against people whose religion you dislike. Which is fine with me.
What I did say in the post was that the approach bothers me, and not only on a religious level but on a literary one (misrepresenting a literary work). I don’t think that’s a comment without value, but that’s something you either “obviously completely missed” or didn’t care about in your zeal against my alleged “zealotry.” To each his own.
heh….interesting:) 91