Baker Hunter - The Concise Bible

The Concise Bible

Original edition 1962 Henry Regnery Company. This edition 2015 Regnery Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website, or broadcast.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bible. English. Selections. Authorized. 2015.

The concise Bible: synopses of all sixty-six books with the full text of the most famous quotations from the King James version / condensation by Frances Hazlitt.

pages cm

Previous edition: Chicago : H. Regnery, 1962.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

I. Hazlitt, Frances Kanes. II. Title.

BS391.3H39 2015

220.52036--dc23

2015022713

Published in the United States by

Regnery Faith

An imprint of Regnery Publishing

A Division of Salem Media Group

300 New Jersey Ave NW

Washington, DC 20001

www.Regnery.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Contents

by Hunter Baker, J.D., Ph.D.

W hen I was asked to write an introduction for a condensed version of the King James Bible, I had never heard of such a thing. I knew there were many different translations of the Bible intended as a faithful word-for-word, or at least thought-for-thought, rendition of the text in English. I had seen paraphrases of the Bible, such as Eugene Petersons The Message or the older Living Bible. But I had never seen something like The Concise Bible, which combines a synopsis of the Old and New Testaments with selected quotations from the Authorized Version of the biblical text.

As a child, I had seen the old Readers Digest condensed versions of a variety of books. One of these introduced Friedrich Hayeks masterpiece of political economy, The Road to Serfdom, to an enormous audience. Novels also underwent the process of condensation. The goal of pruning and shortening was to make books more accessible. While many authors may recoil at the thought, I think the effort was a noble one. Condensed versions encouraged people to read works they might otherwise have determined to be out of their reach.

The democratization of media continues, albeit in new forms. When we want to make books accessible today, we are more likely to turn to film and television. There appears to be a shift taking place in our reading habits. We are drawn to material that we encounter on social networks, which offer a steady diet of clickbait, more and more of which takes us to images and video rather than to the written word. In this environment, the condensed book has become something of an artifact. The old Readers Digest hard covers have been shredded, turned into furniture, and stacked into stylized Christmas trees. I am not aware of anyone today publishing condensations like those that were once so welcome and so profitable (financially and otherwise).

And yet Regnery (the once and present publisher of this volume) has brought back Frances Hazlittsvalue of a publishing houses discernment and the stewardship of important texts.

Having read The Concise Bible, I am convinced that Regnery is correct to bring it back into print. It is one thing to be unique, which can be just another word for odd or eccentric. It is another to beas this book isboth unique and edifying.

The old copy of The Concise Bible that I have been carrying about with me to restaurants and other public places where I have found time to read has a way of catching peoples attention. What exactly, they wonder, is a concise Bible? I explain. The initial reaction from those who are Christians (fairly common in my Tennessee town) is a bit of befuddlement. Why would one wish to reduce the size of the Bible through summary and selective quotation? Why not simply pick up one of the many customized translations of the whole Bible and read that? After all, the local Christian bookstoreand even Walmartoffers Bibles for duck hunters, veterans, and seven-to-ten-year-old girls. The best answer to that question, I think, is that this book offers something that none of those Bibles offers. The Concise Bible provides a brilliant on-ramp to the Old Testament.

The Bible study of many Christians, seekers, and others has foundered on the shores of the Old Testament. The less hardy or more tentative readers simply give up on the Bible altogether, while others return to the more familiar waters of the New Testament. They know the Gospels and Pauls letters, which are more accessible. The Bible as they know it is the little one that earnest men distribute on college campuses or perhaps shopping mallsNew Testament plus Psalms and Proverbs.

That was my own experience, in fact. Though I became a Christian in college about twenty-five years ago, I encountered the Old Testament in bite-size pieces through sermons or devotional reading material. While I found it easy to read through the New Testament, the Old seemed foreign. I settled for knowing about the Old Testament rather than really knowing it.

After several years, I decided that I simply had to do the hard work of pressing through the Old Testament. It was indeed hard work, but the reward was great. I gained a much stronger sense of the Old Testaments continuity with the New Testament. No longer was it merely a long, perplexing, and perhaps expendable foreword. I could detect an echo of the Gospel in the way God provided a sacrificial ram so that Abraham did not have to suffer the loss of his son Isaac (Genesis 22:114). As a political thinker, I benefitted tremendously from learning the sorry history of the kings of Israel and Judah. Though God warned the Israelites of the oppression and folly of human kings (1 Samuel 8:1018), they had to learn through experience that the only king worthy of the name is Jesus Christ. Anyone who has read the Old Testament prophets will more deeply appreciate Christs parable of the wicked husbandmen (Matthew 21:3346). But too many readers of the Old Testament lose heart before they enjoy the fruits of their study. The Concise Bible, which conveys the essence of the Old Testament story in about a hundred pages, is just what they need.

The Jesus Storybook Bible for children is enormously popular because it intentionally connects the Old Testament to the New. The Concise Bible does that as well, though it is far closer to the text of the Bible. It really is, in essence, a shortened Bible. When you move unimpeded through the Old Testament, the arc of salvation historyfrom creation, to Noah, to Abraham and Israelwhich culminates in Jesus the Christ, stands out more clearly. This synopsis of the Old Testament makes the New Testament more vivid, and it provides a foundation that should greatly improve the experience of reading the full Old Testament, as I urge you to do.

The effect of Hazlitts treatment of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament is similarly impressive.

I want to address some of the concerns readers might have about a book like this. There might be an impulse, I think, to dismiss it because it is unfamiliar. I do not think I have seen anything like it before. Readers probably dont have a mental box in which to place