A Picture Book Parody

I just finished reading (if you can call a comic-book style picture book "reading") a version of the Bible that I'm not sure how to describe. I don't want to insult the book or its creators, but I don't have many good things to say about it, and I don't want to describe it enough that anyone would recognize it on a book store shelf and feel any prejudice against it because of what I write in this blog post.

I have two main problems with the Bible I just read (if it can still be called a Bible): Mistranslations and Omissions. Omissions first. I'm not going to fault them for only having so many pages to fit picture onto. If you turned the entire Bible into a picture book, with each scene getting its own picture, it'd end up being one huge book. Naturally, they had to cut things out and simplify what they kept, but the omissions they made seemed selective, and in my opinion, they kept the worse parts. Just for one example, they showed Peter cutting off a soldier's ear when Jesus was arrested, but they didn't show Jesus healing said ear afterward. And on the cross, they showed Jesus dying right after He said "Why hast Thou forsaken me?" not mentioning the phrases "Into Thy hands I commend my spirit," "It is finished," or even "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." If I could only pick one phrase that came out of Jesus' mouth when He was crucified, "Why hast Thou forsaken me?" would not have been it.

Then there were the mistranslations. I don't know if they were simply using another common version of the Bible, other than the King James Version I'm used to, or whether they put the words into (mostly) plain English for storytelling purposes, or some combination of both, but whatever they did to the text of the story, they made it way more confusing. Of course, it could be just that they don't have the footnotes that LDS Bibles do. There are plenty of places when the Bible uses a word or phase that doesn't translate quite right, and the footnotes help clear up that confusion. And they certainly didn't have access to the Joseph Smith Translations for the verses that were recorded or translated wrong.

I'm aware that the Bible is usually confusing. There are plenty of parts that are unclear to those of us that aren't very well familiar with the language and culture of the time. To make matters worse, there's also lots of symbolism that's lost on most of us. So when they made the picture book, saying "here's (part) what I think it said or meant, or might have looked like," I think they got a lot of it wrong, and I came away from that book thinking that it was the craziest book I had read in living memory, and I sure hoped that most of it wasn't true. At least, not literally. It scares me to think that that book might become someone's only, or even just first, exposure to the Bible. Those of us who have read the Bible and are familiar with it will recognize many of the places where the picture book got it wrong, and we won't be thrown off by it. But someone who has never read the Bible, but only knows that it's supposed to be the Word of God; if they read that book, I bet they'll come away from it with even more questions and confusion, and even less faith that the Bible might hold the answers to their questions.

All in all, I think that silly picture book is doing more harm than good. On the other hand, if someone sees the book, gets confused, and starts asking questions of their local clergymen, they might actually be led to some constructive, helpful answers. So, really, who am I to judge?

It was a rhetorical question, but I'll answer it anyway. I'm someone who has read the Bible, the King James Version with LDS footnotes, to be specific, and found that it held a good deal of sound doctrine as well as the spirit of truth. The book I just read had neither and is a mere parody of the Bible. You might get a good chuckle out of the silly imagery, and it certainly took a lot of creativity to put it together; I'll give them that much. But it's worth no more than that, and it's certainly not worth anywhere near as much as the true Holy Bible.