Now now! Don’t help perpetuate that rumor (his regrettably provocative title notwithstanding).
He only wants people to realize that our faith doesn’t rest on that, and that we can start with other places for evangelism. He continues (and will continue) to use the O.T. to learn and know our religious history. We just don’t have to put it on a pedestal like it’s the crown jewel of our Christian testimony.
That is quite the departure from the good, clean, wholesome violence and murder elsewhere in the Bible. Get into stuff like this (not to mention the entire book of Song of Solomon), and you get into stuff that we parents just can’t abide!
Absolutely. We don’t hand new converts a Bible and say, “Start with Genesis and read all the way through.” As Christians, we should start with the Gospels. We cannot follow Jesus until we know his story backwards and forwards.
I would highly suggest an illustrated version of Aesop’s Fables for children over any children’s bible. This is how the enlightened Greeks taught their children morals and ethics. There are no hard to explain actions like you find in any bible. Remember, it was the enlightened Greeks who Paul taught Christianity to. When they grow up, they can study the Bible with fresh eyes.
Agreed. After a few stories about Elisha (none involving bears or eating children) my son and I moved the bookmark to a Gospel. I let him choose, and he picked the one he got his name from. So the full-text Bible is working out, but it’s for us rather than him on his own.
Maybe the medieval church was on to something with restricting the Bible to being heard in community.
The text was adapted from the NIrV (slightly simplified NIV) instead of being an author’s retelling of the stories, which usually introduces some kind of interpretive slant. It did not include the more graphic parts of the OT, but it included far more content than most collections of “Bible stories” for kids. I felt it helped them develop biblical literacy and familiarity with actual passages in the Bible without having to explain Lot and his daughters or the Levite’s concubine getting raped to death and then chopped up, or the famines that had mothers eating their babies, or other such things.
It wasn’t the kind of thing that they could take to church and follow along during sermons or look up verses. Everything is arranged in historical order, and passages that appear in the Synoptics or in both Kings and Chronicles are collapsed into a single telling. But it worked well for just “reading the Bible.”