I have been reading the bible for most of my life. I grew up on the King James Version, the NIV, and the NASB. I could read it and understand what I was reading, but somehow it was all rather technical. I would read and semi-consciously annotate, categorize, and analyze the text in my head—this speaks to this doctrine, that to this, I wonder if this could mean… And so when I came to a point at which I was starting to realize that I couldn't simply read the Bible I started thinking about how I could rediscover it—to somehow start over again, to read it as if I'd never seen it. It was right about that time that the New Testament portion of Eugene Peterson's The Message came on the scene. I picked up a friend's copy and started to read it. To some degree it worked for me. It was… fresh. Whether it was fresh as in, "ahhhh, the fresh country air," and "oh, my, what fresh tomatoes these are," or a little more like, "don't get fresh with me, young man," I really couldn't make up my mind. I eventually decided that The Message needed a subtitle:The Message: According to the Beat Poets. Ok, so maybe I'm being unfair—I respect what Peterson was attempting to do. But I simply couldn't get away from the sense that it was just a wee bit (ever heard of "English understatement?") too idiosyncratic for my tastes. No, the gospel writers were not Homer, but were they really hip? Ok, so maybe "hip" is the wrong word…"chatty"?

At any rate, I gave up on trying to find a highly readable, literary Bible and just tried to deal with my tendency to read by doctrine. Until recently.

I was reading Henri Nouwen's Genesee Diary and was really impressed with the translation he used there. So I looked it up: The Jerusalem Bible. I'd heard of it—J.R.R. Tolkien was one of the editors and it had always been highly spoken of as an excellent English translation. So, straightaway I ordered a copy.

I find it's just what I needed. I can sit down and read it as a book instead of some kind of catechism. Not only that, but the text isn't wooden—it has character, the writers have a texture to their voices that always seemed muddily homogenized in other translations. It has rejuvenated my reading—for once I truly enjoy reading the Bible.

Here's an excerpt—Romans 8:18–27:

I think that what we suffer in this life can never be compared to the glory, as yet unrevealed, which is waiting for us. The whole creation is eagerly waiting for God to reveal his sons. It was not for any fault on the part of creation that it was made unable to attain its purpose, it was made so by God; but creation still retains the hope of being freed, like us, from its slavery to decadence, to enjoy the same freedom and glory as the children of God. From the beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth; and not only creation, but all of us who possess the first-fruits of the Spirit, we too groan inwardly as we wait for our bodies to be set free. For we must be content to hope that we shall be saved—our salvation is not in sight, we should not have to be hoping for it if it were—but, as I say, we must hope to be saved since we are not saved yet—it is something we must wait for with patience.

The Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness. For when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit himself expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words, and God who knows everything in our hearts knows perfectly well what he means, and that the pleas of the saints expressed by the Spirit are according to the mind of God.

A couple more notes: the text—in the Readers Edition, at any rate—is in single column, with none of that "Jesus' words in red print" nonsense, the verse numbers are in the margin, with a simple black dot indicating the change of verse. If the chapter changes mid-paragraph, the chapter number takes the place of the black dot. The footnotes—and in the Readers Editionthey are mercifully few—are relegated to the bottom of the right hand page. In other words, there is nothing that gets in the way of the text, itself.

Don't get me wrong—there are times when I want to do serious study of a more scholastic nature, and at those times heavy annotation and cross-referencing is very useful. But for the way I read and study, it's something rarely needed. Most often, I'll read, and after finishing a section, if there is anything difficult I'll ponder it, and then make use of commentary—Johanna Manley's Bible and the Holy Fathers for Orthodox, and St. Chrysostom's homilies, for example. If I need to do cross-referencing I can always use a concordance, or the search feature of any Bible software.

Here's the details:

• Manley, Johanna, comp.,ed. The Bible and the Holy Fathers for Orthodox. Crestwood, NY: Monastery Books, 1989.
• The Early Church Fathers. Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library. <http://ccel.org/fathers2/info.html>.
• The Jerusalem Bible: Reader's Edition. New York, NY: Doubleday, 2000.