The Bible, or Little by Little
Now that only a small minority reads the Bible seriously, there is a real place for an imaginative selection, whose brevity may commend it, and which may revive an interest in the whole. The average reader writes off the Old Testament as an irrelevant extra. Dr. Farrer faces this and presents the Bible as a whole. 'The Old Testament pieces . . .' in his selection 'are the back- ground to the New Testament mind.' This was how the compilers of the Bible saw it. We are given a first-century view. 'The New Testament prefixes the Old, the Old is indispensable for the understanding of the New.' In the Old we find God's questions about man, and man's about God. In the New we find both answered in Christ. This view of the Bible is true to the Bible itself, and a salutary one to present to those who think it merely 'designed to be read as literature,' or as a quarry of edifying quota- tions. The pity is that Dr. Farrer's introduction explaining this view is surely too difficult and too long for the average reader. Few such who begin it will finish, and the text will remain un- explained. To those, however, who persevere his selection is imaginative and his use of passages from Acts and Ecclesiasticus for historical continuity is original and telling. But could he not have made a wider selection from the prophets, the least known and most arresting of writers, without compromising his first- century approach with the twentieth-century historical approach which he rejects? Lacking a snappier introduction, this selection may fail to make its point.
The text of J. B. Phillips's translation of Luke is already justly popular—alive, without being offensively so. This edition is delightfully produced and printed, and has illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. These are sometimes of great charm, as with the storm on the lake or the meal in a Pharisee's house, though less so with the cheerful game of mass shuttlecock being played by the Twelve at Pentecost. It will make an admirable Christmas
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