Headline AFP: Speedy but spiritual: British cleric unveils ’100-Minute Bible’

LONDON (AFP) – Business folk are used to reading executive summaries of important documents, and now would-be Christians are to have the same privilege, in the form of a chopped-down Bible that can be read in under two hours.

A Church of England vicar was on Wednesday unveiling his self-styled “100-Minute Bible”, an ultra-condensed edition of the Christian holy book which claims to neatly summarise every teaching from the Creation to the Revelation.

Considered in its best light, this is an attempt to make the Bible more accessible to people who would otherwise not have read it.

There are many difficult parts of the Bible. If someone sat down intending to read from start to finish without much knowledge of what they were going to encounter, the would probable make it easily halfway through Exodus (the second book of 66 in the Bible) before they start to bog down, and most people would probably quit in Leviticus (the third book) or Numbers (the fourth). Cutting out the difficult parts makes it much easier to read through.

But I have a problem with removing parts of the Scriptures just because they require a bit of work to get through them. Not everything is going to be easy, and just because something is hard doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.