A New Introduction to The Concise Bible
by Hunter Baker, J.D., Ph.D.
When 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 Peterson’s 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 Reader’s Digest condensed versions of a variety of books. One of these introduced Friedrich Hayek’s 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 Reader’s 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 Hazlitt’s* Concise Bible, now one of these strange artifacts that stand out in a high-tech age. I first came to know of Regnery because they kept in print Whittaker Chambers’s Cold War classic, Witness†—the finest modern memoir I have ever read—and I wanted to learn more about the publisher behind it. I discovered Regnery’s impressive catalogue of books from the Western canon and such landmarks of conservative thought as William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, and what I think may be Kirk’s finest book, The Roots of American Order. When I received an invitation from Regnery to write an introduction for Mrs. Hazlitt’s treatment of the Bible, it was enough to know that the company felt the book deserves the public’s attention. In the age of self-publishing, Regnery’s history is a reminder of the value of a publishing house’s 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 be—as this book is—both 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 people’s 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 bookstore—and even Walmart—offers 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 Paul’s 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 malls—New 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 Testament’s 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 22:1–14). 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 8:10–18), 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 Christ’s parable of the wicked husbandmen (Matthew 21:33–46). 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 history—from creation, to Noah, to Abraham and Israel—which 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 Hazlitt’s 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 don’t have a mental box in which to place The Concise Bible. For that reason, I will attempt to construct one.
When a child is learning how to ride a bicycle, training wheels allow him to build confidence and develop some of the necessary skills in a zone of safety. It is never the intent to use the training wheels permanently, but at a certain point they are valuable. The Concise Bible provides something analogous to training wheels. I am reluctant to use that image because of its association with childhood (though we should approach the Scriptures, and God himself, as little children). The idea I want to get across is progression. This synopsis of Scripture will provide the early victories that are necessary for a more satisfying and lasting achievement.
Recalling my first serious exposure to Christianity as a college student in the late 1980s, I realize how beneficial a book like this would have been. I have heard it said many times that the best recommendation for a seeker is to read the Gospel of John. I think that is excellent advice, but I would also suggest The Concise Bible for the person curious about the Christian faith. There is a lot here.
Apart from spiritual concerns, which are the overriding priority, there is another reason this book is valuable. The influence of the Christian faith might have waned, but in this “globalized” age, the sensibilities of the Christian West influence the whole world. Many fail to recognize that influence because Christian values are often sanitized into secular values. Most atheists and secularists are Christian atheists and secularists, whether they know it or not.
My point here is simple. The Bible is an extraordinarily influential book. It has shaped civilization in ways that are often unrecognized. If anyone hopes to be culturally and historically literate (we might even say just plain well-informed), then he must be acquainted with this central and essential text. In her preface to The Concise Bible, Frances Hazlitt lamented the prevalence of biblical illiteracy, a problem that is incomparably worse fifty years later. For some people who fancy themselves intellectuals, their biblical illiteracy is even a matter of perverse pride. I urge them to do what their fellow intellectual Augustine of Hippo did—take and read. Three hours with this book will at least give them a better understanding of what they scorn and deny.
Congratulations to Regnery Publishing for having the wisdom to make Frances Hazlitt’s splendid introduction to the King James Bible available once again. May it be well received, and may it aid and instruct many in their study of Scripture in the years to come.
* The translation of the Scriptures from the Hebrew and Greek commissioned by King James I and published in 1611 is known as the Authorized Version in Great Britain but usually called the King James Version in America.
* The name Hazlitt might be familiar to many readers. Henry Hazlitt was a prolific twentieth-century journalist and the author of Economics in One Lesson (a book that sold more than one million copies). Frances was his wife.
† The book had originally been published by Random House.