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The Street BibleFading excitementTHE STREET BIBLE When this book arrived for reviewing, I was quite excited. After all, paraphrase Bibles are often exciting to read - old truth put in new ways. The blurb says, 'It's creative. It's colourful. It's the Bible as you're never read it. In this engaging new paraphrase, author and actor Rob Lacey renders the Bible in the language of the modern urban reader.' Sounds great! However, as I opened the pages and read on I became increasingly disappointed. Because . . . The Street Bible is not, in fact, a Bible A fact the author himself recognises (p.11). It's only a paraphrase of selected parts of the Bible. True, every Bible book is covered but sometimes with only a few verses. 12 verses for the whole of Deuteronomy. Seven chapters for Exodus, but most parts of those chapters are missing. And so on. The author explains: 'I fast forwarded through the bits we generally ignore. So you could argue that it's not so different from most complete Bibles...' (p.2). The trouble is that often when I wanted to see how a passage was put, it wasn't there! Nothing. Including Psalm 2, a psalm that is pretty important in the New Testament. Even stories like the Tower of Babel were missing. The author includes little summaries of some of the text between his paraphrases but these are sometimes bigger than the actual paraphrases. And still misses most of the Bible. It would have been better to have stuck to part of the Bible and done the whole thing. Instead, what we have is fairly useless. You may want to have an alternative reading in church, only to find the passage is not there or only partially paraphrased. ConfusingI feel that rather than trying to communicate, which is absolutely commendable, the attempt to be trendy is only confusing. Often I only understood it because I already knew the passage. The paraphrase itself didn't make the understanding clearer. I even tried reading it to modern TV/film-loving MTV students and they had less understanding than me. Some of the phrases and expressions I liked, but a glossary is needed. For example, reading in Acts 2 about Pentecost, (one of the few parts of Acts included - nothing beyond Acts 9) he writes: 'Seven weeks on from the Flyby festival comes the Jewish Thanksgiving Holiday. The whole squad's hanging out together.' 'Flyby festival' is Passover. What a great name to give it. But 'Flyby' makes no more sense than Passover without some kind of explanation. Throughout The Street Bible there are web addresses to try and make it feel modern. But when you look up these sites they either do not exist, or worse, some of them produce real websites that have nothing to do with The Street Bible or anything Christian at all. The writer often abbreviates, so believers, the people of God, are JLM (Jesus Liberation Movement). So 1 Thessalonians 4.9 says: 'Love the other JLMers.' Why is that more understandable than 'Love the believers.'? If you hadn't read earlier paraphrases you would know what 'JLMers' stands for. I found that I couldn't read too much without getting bored with the language. It's all right in very short reads, and may be good for an alternative reading every now and then. But I think it will date very quickly. Theologically unclear'Most rural images are replaced with urban ones'(p.11). The trouble is that he has replaced concepts like 'the Lamb' with 'Innocent One'. 'Sin' is diluted to just a 'messed up life', instead of rebellion against God. If you want a resource for some alternative reading then this could be of help. If you want a much better and understandable paraphrase that doesn't miss out most of the Bible buy The Message. Pete Woodcock,
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