Amongst the ever expanding plethora of stylized bibles today comes Bible Illuminated: The Book. It is the New Testament (The Good News translation) in a glossy 300 page magazine format which contains no chapter or verse numbers and is arrayed with provocative photography. Inside are photos of celebrities like Bono, Angelina Jolie and Arnold Schwarzenegger along side Mother Teresa and a veiled muslim woman holding her child.
The creator, Dag Soderberg, whom himself is "not particularly religious," is a Swedish advertising executive. He apparently set out to make "a coffee-table magazine... read by the many everyday, everywhere." Soderberg also says that "when you see this, you want to talk about it... it's a discussion bible." According to one news station interviewer "it makes the bible a little more culturally relevant." "The idea is to get the reader to move from the image to the text," says Soderberg.
While Bible Illuminated seems to be nothing more than an innocent and noble attempt to make the bible more accessible to those who would normally not pick up a bible, it will no doubt contribute to a wrong understanding of scriptural interpretation. Allow me to explain.
Reading a book and discovering the authors intent should be the goal of the reader. The author indeed intends to articulate his or her message in what they write. The writers of the bible are no exception. When reading the bible one must condenser such literary devices as genre, hyperbolic language, location, social setting, cultural issues, and the like. Our aim should be faithful, biblical exegesis, "the method by which a student seeks to uncover what an author intended his or her original audience to understand." We also want biblical hermeneutics, "the task of interpreting the Word of God" or as Hank Hanegraaff puts it "the art and science of biblical interpretation. It is a science in that certain rules apply. It is an art in that the more you apply these rules, the better you get at it." This no doubt will take some effort and practice on the part of the reader, but in order to remain true to scripture we must adopt such discipline.
When these disciplines are not put into action it becomes easy to force our own impositions upon Scripture like our experiences, or preconceptions. We then run the likelihood of subjectivising and even relativizing the text. That is to say that when we neglect to read biblical text properly we risk imposing our own ideas of what we want it to say.
For instance, Soderberg's particular selection of pictures, which he uses to tell the stories of scripture, will surely cause one to relativize the text. Social Critic Neil Postman, in his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" is quite appropriate to quote at this point. In chapter 5 he laments about the the invention of the photograph at the turn of the 19th century which began a "graphic revolution." "The new imagery, with photography at its forefront, did not merely function as a supplement to language, but bid to replace it as our dominant means for construing, understanding, and testing reality... For countless Americans, seeing, not reading, became the basis for believing." For Soderberg the image gives meaning to the text. For example, in the Gospel of Mark when it reads, "God says, 'I will send my messenger ahead of you to open the way'" (Mk.1: 2) shows photos of Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. However it should be obvious to the student of the bible that this an Old Testament reference to Is.40:3 about John the Baptist preparing the way for the coming of Christ, not Gandhi! Another example is Rev.9:8. "Their hair was like women's hair, their teeth were like lion's teeth," which shows a man at a tattoo expo in Budapest. The images that Soderberg presents are definitely something that when you see them, "you want to talk about it," however he misses the mark.
As far as the comment made by the news reporter, "it makes the bible a little more culturally relevant," this is not true. Scripture is not dictated by the ebb-and-flow of what is considered culturally relevant. The Word of the Lord is timeless and absolute! We would do much better instead to see pictures that remain true to the bible and contribute to the intentional context of the bible's text such as paintings by Rembrandt.
We really shouldn't need any pictures to read the bible. If we want to read the bible for all it's worth, well... we are going to have to do our homework.
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