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34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Reads like a comic book. Superb Gift, Good teaching tool., April 19, 2001
I disagree with the review written by Andrew B. Morseman on September 20, 2000, and I strongly recommend this book for teachers of higher elementary grades and summer or Vacation Bible schools. I respect his opinion, which is why I am rebutting it here, legally, in view of the public.This book is an excellent way to expose older children and young teens to the bible as religious literature, or as educational literature, because it synopsizes events, clarifies characters, and artfully omits some of the vissictudes and harsher realities of ancient times. While not fully accurate to the facts, the general events and key characters are magnified as the centers of the stories, with geneaologies of the Hebrew and Israelic ancestors telescoped or omitted. Most children do not have the attention span or interest to digest the historical record-keeping which the bible contains, and many are not ready to deal with the full goriness of bloodshed, sex, and intricate conspiracy which dominates all of human history. The Picture Bible dances around many such events which are distracting with regard to the main storyline, (i.e. the rape of Tamar does not directly affect the life or rule of David) omitting irrelevancies and euphemizing "mature" material. The illustrations cleverly indicate the characters, their moods, and the passage of time, to project a limited idea of the timeframe of the individual stories, the scope of indivdual storylines, and people interweave seamlessly as individuals from one story to another. The chapter divisions are marvelously episodic, and clearly identify the biblical texts from which they are derived. Books paraphrazed or synopsized, but not omitted from mention, are the major and minor prophets, the Psalms, the Proverbs, and the Song of Solomon. swaths of the Pentateuch are left out, and the Letters and travels of Paul, the other events in Acts and the other letters, and the Revelation of St. John are all synopsized or given prominent mention. Every book of the canonical Bible is conspicuously mentioned at some point. The meaning of the prophetic books is under much debate and is largely a conceptual or spiritual problem, not suited for younger ages. The books of Psalms, Proverbs, and Song of Solomon (a.k.a. Canticles) are mentioned but left out because they contain no story material of themselves. Leviticus and Deuteronomy contain almost nothing but the Mosaic Law, which is of little or no interest to young minds (the Ten Commandments are stated Verbatim from the King James Bible on a separate illustrated page), and other books contain material that simply can't be worked into a storybook grounded in corporeal facts and events. As to inerrancy and infallibility; only the Truth Himself is inerrant and infallible; there are many nuances of bare facts that have been lost to history and translation, and bibles as late as the King James and Douday Original Version have been shown to contain errors of translation, content, and meaning, while scripts like the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome were rejected as un-canonical although they contained neither gross nor suttle errors of meaning or doctrine. Even today books touted as Bibles contain many errors that do disservice to both Christian Doctrine and scholarly and literary accuracy. The admitted errancy of this book is not that of a knave, but of a knight. It is fallible so that it might be more authentic, and less artifical. I think it is very useful as a stepping stone, even if it isn't the Rock of Truth. I first studied Christian Literature using this bible, and when I dug into the King James version, I didn't get lost becuase I already knew the main storyline, and could identify key characters. I also did not find the omissions to be misleading or ingenuine to the stories themselves, or discredit the characters or ideas presented in the stories. All in all, this is a wonderful book for older preteen readers; it conveys the key events and ideas found in the bible, has skilled and meaningful illustration (which helps the story along as much as the dialogue) and presents religious truth without any authoritative invocation or declaration. I like the content, but I would change the title to "The Comic Book Bible." And for any comments, my real e-mail is pettarg@hotmail.com, and my real name is Gabe. Thank you for reading!!!
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by Keith Neely
by Rob Suggs
by Libby Weed
