Scripture Gets 'Novel' Approach

The ambitious task of writing the entire Bible in novel is would have been daunting to many authors. But Walter Wangerin Jr., whose award-winning The Book of the Dun Cow has endeared him to many readers, was equal to the task. What could have been a stale retelling of the "plot line" of Scripture is instead pleasantly surprising in this ingenious treatment of the subject matter.

Wangerin accomplishes the freshness of this book through two techniques. First, he doesn't begin where you'd expect--with the creation story--but rather with Abraham. (In fact, he doesn't pick up Adam and Eve until the very end of the Old Testament portion, where they appear as pan of Ezra's address.)

Similarly, other sections of the sacred story seem to be skipped until they appear as a flashback or in the reminiscing of a later character. To readers familiar with Bible stories, this adds a newness to the retelling.

A second device is Wangerin's use of little-known characters through whose eyes events are seen. For instance, readers view the 10 plagues through the eyes of Pharaoh and learn more about Jesus' teachings from Peter's point of view.

In keeping with the "novel" technique, Wangerin assigns physical descriptions to characters such as Elijah ("desiccated, tired, filled from his skull to his loins with pain and trouble"). Historical sections such as the wars of Chronicles are given just enough space to advance the story because this book is about people.

Through it all, Wangerin is respectful yet creative--no small task when dealing with the sacred Book. There arc myriad uses for Wangerin's work. Its lyrical qualities make it a valuable resource for the liturgical calendar, devotionals and group study.

In recent years modern communications experts appear to be "discovering" the fact that story-telling is one of the most powerful media through which to communicate a message. This should not surprise us; after all, Jesus frequently made telling use of parables and the Bible itself is full of dramatic narrative.

Walter Wangerin, an American Lutheran minister is a story-teller par excellence. Already the author of several books, 'The Book of God" to be released by Lion on March 8 (at ?20) will undoubtedly come to be regarded as his magnum opus. In a major 13-year undertaking he has turned the Bible into an 800-page epic saga, a story told on the grand scale.

This is not a translation of the Bible, nor a paraphrase, nor simply a selection of Bible stories. In fact, it is quite hard to know into what genre "The Book of God" falls; a cross per- haps between those block- busting narrative tales that move from one generation to the next and a full-bodied heroic yarn.

Even before publication, "The Book of God" has raised eyebrows, some newspapers dubbing it the "bodice-ripping" Bible. Though the power of the story-teller's art makes it replete with drama and suspense, nothing in it could be described as "bodice-ripping". There is no explicit description of sexual acts; neither is it any more violent than the original!

The writer proceeds in a more or less chronological fashion. The book opens with the story of Abraham and ends at the Day of Pentecost. Somewhat strangely the events of the Book of Acts are consigned to a four-page epilogue and regretably we may never know what Mr. Wangerin's skills might have achieved with the Revelation to John.

The early chapters of Genesis are there, but they are found in the middle of the book on the lips of Ezra on the occasion of his reading of the law to the Israelites recently returned from exile.

The Old Testament prophets are included where in the historical books we have details of how their words interacted with the rulers and people of their day. So, Elijah, Isaiah and Jeremiah are included, but not, with the exception of Malachi, the post-exilic prophets. The Wisdom literature is glimpsed here and there as the story of the kings is told. For example, parts of the Song of Solomon and Proverbs are drawn into the account of Solomon's life.

Fully 30 per cent of the book is given over to the story of Jesus. His birth is told with moody feeling -- poor Joseph - and I dare anyone to read the account of the crucifixion without wincing. This, for instance:

"Someone lifts his head by the hair, then pillows it on wood. His arms are yanked left and right as far as they will go, palms up. A cold point touches his wrist.

"Jesus hears the thump of a maul on metal: once, twice. He feels a spike probing the bones in his right arm: once, twice, three times. As the bones separate and the spike bites hard wood, a dull pain pulses up into his armpit and his neck. This is the will of the Father."

The author's biblical scholarship is evident throughout the volume. Accurate historical and geographical background is interwoven throughout the narrative and dotted here and there are innumerable little touches that illumine the meaning of the biblical text.

The story is told using every tool available to the narrator. There is graphic prose, imaginative characterisation, convincing dialogue, a well-chosen and precise use of words, variation of pace, direct quotations from the biblical text (italicised), flashback (such as in the telling of the creation story) and the occasional but disciplined use of the present tense and the first person at moments of heightened tension.

With perhaps the exception of the latter part of Section Five: "The Prophets", and the rather brief Section Six; "Letters from Exile" in which he falters a little, the author is to be congratulated for sustaining the drama and holding the reader's attention of in excess of 300,000 word; something only a small handful of writers can do.

The Christian reading this book might wish that the publishers had included cross references in the margin in order to locate the precise biblical passage undergoing the Wangerin treatment. But this is to miss the point; the intention is not that the reader should compare and contrast "The Book of God" with the Bible at every turn of the page, but rather that some thing of the epic proportion of the biblical drama - the schema of God's salvific dealings with humankind through history - should be apprehended.

For those who have little or no acquaintance with Scripture and who like a good read "The Book of God" is a wonderful introduction. And for those who have already learnt to treasure God's Word, it will drive them back to the Bible with a fresh excitement and a deepened sense of God's ways with mortals and a greater awareness of being a part of the sovereign purposes he is drawing on a canvas larger than we can imagine.

It will by no means be everybody's cup of tea, but for the kind of reader who can hardly wait to get his or her hands on the latest W. H. Smith's blockbuster, this is one not to be left on the shelves.

In the days when children could not get their hands on drugs or dirty magazines by simply popping round to the comer-shop for a skin flick and a glue sniff kit, inquisitive little boys were reduced to getting their kicks by thumbing adult literature for the dirty bits. Unless a sensation such as the Lady Chatterley trial drew attention to lurid passages from a book, by far the easiest adult literature to obtain was the Bible.

Of course there was the inconvenient fact for naughty little boys that the Good Book was written in sixteenth-century English. It was full of euphemisms about sex. People did not make love -- they "lay" with one another. Women did not get pregnant -- they were "with child". The people of those times did not nudge, nudge, wink, wink -- they "begat" and "multiplied their seed throughout the land".

Of course there were the dirty bits -- if you knew where to look. Some pretty crude stuff went on in the book of Judges. Even an untutored mind could see that there was some hot stuff going on between Samson and Delilah, and if you happened to thumb a few pages either side there was a gang rape, and a woman enticing an enemy commander into her tent and putting a tent peg through his head as he lay sleeping. There were the astonishing crude bits about men who sat on the wall "eating their own dung and drinking their own piss".

The shock of finding such passages was that the Bible was the Holy Book, sacred and supposedly untarnished by the stuff of which the soap opera of life is made. There were villains and sinners but you were safe with the Bible. Like the pantomime and children's fairy stories, the goody beat the baddies and triumphed in the end. At least that was the received wisdom which surrounded the Bible.

Anyone who had more than a passing acquaintance with the book knew otherwise. They knew that all human life was there, along with the passions and the pride to which humanity is heir, even if it was couched in archaic language or tucked between long, obscure passages of genealogy or prophetic warnings about political alliances with countries whose names no longer mean anything.

But the Bible was the Bible. It was sacred. During the last war, when the BBC made a radio drama of The Life of Christ, written by Dorothy L Sayers, there were accusations of blasphemy. One listener wrote: "No wonder Singapore has fallen. It is God's punishment upon us for the blasphemy of the BBC in broadcasting the voice of our Lord."

The actual drama was as reverential as the biblical epics of cinema and television which are now much in demand by Christian audiences. Even translations of the Bible have been simply that, translations of the ancient texts which tell the stories without any embellishment. That is how people have apparently wanted it.

Thus, while we have become used to Lady Chatterley-language on television, violence of shuddering brutality in cinema films, and soft-porn mags in nearly every newsagent, the Bible has remained a closed book for most of the population. Its more shocking stories have been clothed in piety and the tone of translations consistently reverential. Those who attend church and synagogue have preferred it that way.

Yet whether or not they do prefer it that way, the fact remains that the original Bible stories were as concerned with ugly aspects of sex, power, and money as anything the modern media can concoct. The supreme compliment of being accorded sacred status was a supreme handicap for a book which required exegesis and explanation to be properly understood. In short, the Bible is not readily accessible to modern readers in the form in which it is traditionally packaged. Enter Walter Wangerin, theologian, literary scholar, and performance storyteller. With a score of children's books, poems, and fiction behind him, Wangerin went for the big one.

He has rendered the Bible as -- well, I nearly wrote "fiction" -- but what do I call it? Drama perhaps. His book reads like Gone with the Wind (of the Holy Spirit), or Pride and Prejudice (plus prophets). Wangerin has done for the biblical kings what Shakespeare did for Macbeth and Richard III and now is the winter of discontent among those who 'want their Bible with a kingly James touch. It is a tale, his critics cry, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing.

How do they know, you ask, since Wangerin's book has yet to be published and his tour of the UK yet to begin? The answer is that Wangerin has already had the benefit of analysis by some of the tabloids' finest minds. That means they have done what they did as naughty little boys and looked up the dirty bits and read them to Barbara Cartland who was suitably (if somewhat predictably) disgusted and outraged. So were most of the Church of England's most pompous and humourless figures (eg, the Venerable George Austin, Archdeacon of York, and Rev David Holloway, a leading evangelical).

The kindest comments compared it with Mills & Boon books, with references to "bodice-ripping yarns". A senior member of the C of E General Synod denounced it as "evil, pornographic stuff".

It's all so predictable, isn't it? Frankly I find it wearisome that supposedly intelligent people allow themselves to make denunciations of books they have yet to read. It makes fools of them, and devalues anything they might have to say when they cry wolf for the hundredth time.

As well as stupid they are also hypocrites, since the best evangelical preachers have been doing a Walter Wangerin to the Bible for hundreds of years and have been lauded for it. It was a standard tactic of pulpit performers in bygone days (and many of those still preaching) to retell a biblical incident within their sermon, bringing colour and drama to it. No-one accused them of blasphemy when they added little details to the stories which they used.

While some of the language of Spurgeon and J S Stewart is inevitably dated to a modern reader, I found Walter Wangerin's work to be imaginative, stimulating, and fresh. It will not be to everyone's taste -- but it is neither blasphemous nor blundering.

It selects with sensitivity from the original, and by deploying the purple passages in fleshing out details, manages to keep the action of the original as the bone of the narrative. A typical example is one of the passages used by the Daily Mail to foment synthetic outrage, I Kings 1 vl-5 in which Abishag the virgin is popped into bed with King David to keep the did devil warm. "The young woman was very lovely and she cared for the king and served him; but the king did not know her" (AV/King James).

Wangerin renders it thus: "They had found no-one more lovely. David lay next to the naked Abishag, but even so he could not get warm. The coldness creeping through his bones was the ice of immortality." As far as I am concerned Wangerin gets much more out of the incident. He is at his best with dramatic incidents such as the jealousy and contempt which grows between Abraham's wife, Sara, and Hagar the slave girl, when both bear children to the patriarch. He has avoided the traps into which many pious paraphrasers fall, of making Jesus into an aloof figure, a holy robot who is untouched by events, or being too specific and losing the sense of awe which the Bible retains throughout.

There are bound to be weaknesses. Shakespeare's kings saw plenty of action in his plays but they revealed an inner life in soliloquies. Wangerin has omitted the bits where kings and prophets agonise and argue with God and concentrates on the action. Another difficulty lies in trying to bring a narrative thread to what were separate accounts written in different styles in different eras. What you gain in homogeneity you lose in diversity. The biggest risk is that by inserting details you plant the seeds of your own exegesis in a passage. Since most preachers do that weekly, I hardly think Wangerin is to be condemned for it.

The Book of God bubbles with creativity but above all is the work of a craftsman. It is journalistic theology -- and none the worse for that. There was a time when composers who wrote requiems were considered to be vulgarising the Mass. History has shown that they simply increased an appreciation for the original. The Bible needs Wangerised more than it needs to be bowdlerised.

Mary Magdalene wept outside the place where Jesus was buried, howling like a small child lost. The tomb was empty, and she did not know where the body of Jesus had been taken.

Then she heard a familiar voice. And she looked up and saw a man with raven black hair and a steadfast golden gaze, and gasped. It was Jesus, telling her that he was ascending to God.

She ran to the upper room where the disciples were gathered, threw her arms around Simon Peter, crying and exclaiming: "Simon, dance with me! Hug me and spin me around, because I have just seen the Lord. He is alive! Simon, Simon, he has risen from the dead!"

This is not the Bible, but an embellishment of the biblical account as imagined by one of the nation's most respected religious storytellers.

Rev. Walter Wangerin Jr., a Lutheran minister and author, has interpreted the Bible as a single narrative from Abraham to the birth of Christianity in the most ambitious work of his career, "The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel."

In the new book from Zondervan Publishing House, Wangerin gives personality and warmth to biblical figures, imagining the feeling and thoughts of many characters at the heart of the biblical stories.

In an age when many scholars minutely deconstruct the Bible, looking for historical, archeological, literary and other evidence that leaves nearly every passage open to seemingly endless challenge and analysis, Wangerin seeks to recapture the Bible as a story of relationships between an eternal God and ordinary men and women.

"My instinct, and this instinct is worked into the book, is that the power of the story is not in the analysis of the story, but in the telling of the story," he said in a telephone interview from Valparaiso University in Indiana, where he is a writer in residence.

In using his own literary imagination, Wangerin gives greater depth to many characters, particularly women, who sometimes are relegated to secondary roles in the Bible.

For example, Jephthah's daughter is barely heard from in the biblical account in Judges of her slaying at her father's hand because of a vow he had made to God. He vowed that in exchange for a military victory he would offer up as a burnt offering the first thing that greets him upon his return. Jephthah assumed it would be an animal, but it turns out his daughter was the first to greet him.

In Wangerin's book, readers hear what he imagines must have been going through the mind of Jephthah's daughter as she accepts her fate.

"How, then, can a daughter blame her father? He is as sad as she is now. Ah, he was ignorant. He did not know."

The most dramatic moments of the book occur near the end in his retelling of the biblical accounts of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Wangerin has recorded the book for audio cassettes. On the day he read up to the death of Jesus he was supposed to continue on for an additional 45 minutes, but he could not.

"I have never felt such an overwhelming wave of emotion. It just silenced me," he said.

And emotion and a sense of engagement with the action is what Wangerin hopes readers will encounter as they hear his telling of, the resurrection.

The issue in his book, Wangerin said, is not, "Did Jesus really rise or not? But look at that resurrection and, 'Wow.'"