Religion: Blue-Penciled Bible

Two years ago many a preacher and layman was pleased when Professors Edgar Johnson Goodspeed and John Merlin Powis Smith of the University of Chicago produced a briskly, unpedantically modernized “American Bible” (TIME. Nov. 30, 1931). Soon afterwards they began work on a condensation of this which Professor Goodspeed finished alone. Professor Smith dying in 1932. Last week The Short Bible was published as Book-of-the-Fall ($2) of the University of Chicago Press. Edited down to 545 pp. from the 2,000 pp. of a standard Bible, it is a book for reading, gaily bound in red cloth to emphasize its unchurchliness. Short Bibles, revised Bibles and vulgate Bibles are by no means new—the King James version (1611) was undoubtedly strikingly modern in its time

—but Editors Goodspeed & Smith invented a new historical-literary-religious approach. Instead of beginning with Genesis and ending with Revelation. The Short Bible begins with the oldest book of the Bible, Amos, which dates from about 750 B. C. Genesis was written about 350 B. C. and comes 17th in the Smith-Goodspeed arrangement. Last are the Letters to Timothy and Titus, written by some Greek follower of St. Paul. Whole books omitted in The Short Bible are Chronicles. Song of Solomon (because non-religious). Lamentations, Obadiah, Malachi. II Peter. II and III John, Jude. Other books are severely edited. Professor Goodspeed found Isaiah hardest to blue-pencil because of its dignity and swift, smooth literary flow. Every book in The Short Bible is prefaced with brief, graphic notes by Professor Goodspeed.