Word: digestable
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...Reader's Digest condenses Scripture...
Were God and his inspired scriptural writers unforgivably long-winded? Could they have benefited, like other authors, from a dose of tough-minded, un-worshipful editing? Verily, saith the Reader's Digest, and last week it brought forth the Reader's Digest Bible. Priced at $16.95, it is 320,000 words (or 40%) shorter than the Protestant text of the Revised Standard Version on which it is based; the Old Testament has been cut down by half and the New by onefourth. Alas, less in this instance is not more...
...project began in 1976 when the Digest won the approval of the National Council of Churches, which holds copyright to the Revised Standard Version. As general editor, the Digest recruited the Rev. Bruce M. Metzger of Princeton Theological Seminary, a distinguished Bible expert, to supervise the work of nine staff condensers. Despite the inevitable jokes to come about the Six Commandments or the 4.2 Days of Creation, the team wisely left unshrunk the best-known passages, like the 23rd Psalm. Instead they applied the scissors to parallel accounts, such as the dozens of stories concerning Jesus Christ that appear...
Also omitted are the chapter and verse numbers. Ostensibly this is to aid readability, though other modern editions avoid clutter by including unobtrusive numbers in the lines or at the margins. The Digest's Bible leaves the reader with no idea what is missing...
What justifies such a venture? Metzger hopes that once people have been lured into his 60% rendition, "a sizable proportion who have never cracked the cover of a Bible will go on to read the whole thing." The Digest contends that the Bible is all too little read, because many sections are rough going for the typical reader. Undoubtedly so, but such people could use one of the readable modern translations of the real thing (such as the Good News Bible or New International Version) and skip the slow parts...