THE BIBLE REMIXED:

Chronological Study Bible stirs interest, skepticism

By BOB SMIETANA • Staff Writer (The Tennessean) • August 24, 2008

Like most versions of the Good Book, the new Chronological Study Bible from Thomas Nelson starts with "In the beginning," and ends with "Amen."

Everything else is up for grabs.

Entire books, like the Psalms, have been chopped up and mixed in with other sections of the Scripture, while others have been combined into nine story arcs, known as epochs.

Editors at the Nashville-based Christian publisher say their remix of the Protestant Bible's 66 books will give readers new insights to the Scriptures. But some scholars believe the project will lead to confusion, not enlightenment.

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The concerns that at once occurred to me are laid out later in the article:

The new Bible's chronology is based on the setting of each text — when the events in it occurred — rather than when it was written.

That's a problem, says Doug Knight, Buffington professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Many books of the Bible, he said, were written long after the fact. For example, Knight says, the book of Joshua is set in the late Bronze Age, but was probably composed several hundred years later. Inserting notes about the historical context of a Bible passage won't help if that text was written hundreds of years later, he said.

"Why would that be relevant, if the author is not living in the Bronze Age?," he said. "What's happening in the author's own time is relevant."

That's especially true of a book like Daniel, Knight said.

That Old Testament account is set in the 6th century B.C., at the time when the Jews had been conquered by the Babylonians. But it was probably written in the 2nd century B.C., when Israel was ruled by a tyrant named Antiochus Epiphanes, and was written to encourage the Jews to keep their faith, despite being persecuted.

"It's a powerful account if you put it in the time period of Antiochus Epiphanes," Knight said.