Reorganized concise Paraphrased Bible

WHY THIS BOOK?
The Bible has been around for nearly 2,000 years, and we have excellent translations that scholars have poured their lives into creating. While we don’t have the original manuscripts, we can reconstruct them with astonishing accuracy. We can be highly confident about the Bible we have today.

When I was a young Christian, I would start reading, fly through Genesis, do okay with Exodus, before ultimately losing interest in Leviticus and Numbers. I was frustrated. The problem is that authors wrote the Bible to a specific audience who understood the authors, but we are thousands of years removed from that context. Eventually, I went to a Christian college, grew in my faith, and learned how to read the Scriptures so that I could apply them to my life.

Along the way, I’ve had the privilege of helping many new believers navigate the text, but it’s always like pulling teeth. It’s always taken a lot of background work to help them understand. I’ve also heard many objections to Scripture from critics because of our lack of context for the original texts.

While I was in my twenties, I started working on a harmonization of the Gospels for my personal benefit. I even made hand-bound copies at a local Kinkos that I gave to a few close friends. But then, this project lay dormant for a long time. I pulled it out occasionally but didn’t do much with it.

Eventually, I had children of my own, and we faithfully read Bible stories to them. They ate it up. But when they became independent readers, they faced some of the same issues I did in my early faith. I thought to myself, “why isn’t there an intermediate tool that could help them better understand?” I’ve utilized The Message in the past. Still, it didn’t fully solve the problem of what to do with some of the more obscure passages. I also struggled with some of the paraphrases.

I started making my own paraphrase for myself and my children, and they ate it up. I cleaned up some of the language to make it easier to understand, taking out passive voice and other grammatical issues that come from translation. I had a couple of people encourage me to keep going. In time, I decided to paraphrase the whole Bible with explanatory boxes so that the average person could pick up the text and make sense out of it.

This book is not a translation of the original Greek and I do not claim inspiration. I have written this book by paraphrasing English translations (primarily the ESV, NIV, NASB, and NLT) of the original text and expanding when necessary so that the reader can better understand the story. Wherever there were multiple accounts of an event, I did my best to harmonize them. I took out the genealogies and descriptions of worship implements that we no longer use. I summarized the Law so that it makes more sense for us. I put events in chronological order and organized some of it thematically. I have also taken out portions that may not be relevant to the modern reader (mainly prophecies that we don’t have context for or to nations that no longer exist).

I fully believe that all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for instruction. I would give my life for its authority and inspiration. But not all of it is as useful for us. I believe that this reorganization and paraphrase will make God’s truth more accessible for all Christians. The resulting text ends up being less than half the length of the translations we have today.

This book is not for serious bible study. This is a tool to help introduce people to the biblical narrative and aid in our understanding. It is the result of thousands of hours and hundreds of books. I know that I’ve made decisions about how to word certain parts and the explanations I’ve included. Not everyone will love what I’ve done, but my goal has always been to stay as close to orthodoxy as possible.