THE STREET BIBLE
By Rob Lacey
Zondervan. 528 pages. £8.99
ISBN 0 007 10790 0
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.
