Readers come to the text thinking they already know the stories within it. This is true for many books, but the cultural Christianity of the United States increases this kind of pre-reading more than it would for, say, a new author’s first New York Times bestseller. Whether a reader is Christian or not, his or her first time reading the Bible isn’t an isolated or “pure” event, separated from preconceptions about the book. Modern American readers rarely come to a text like the Bible without some kind of context for it. It’s tempting to try and explain why one version is better, truer, more real than another, but it’s more productive to look at how readers make that distinction – and what that tells us about religion and texts. Texts that are aimed at a younger audience or serve a teaching purpose seem to have more acceptance within a religious community than retellings like the Brick Testament, where scenes from the Bible are recreated verse by verse in LEGOs, or R. This is especially vivid in conflicts over film retellings like Noah, The Last Temptation of Christ, or The Passion of the Christ, but printed texts also raise these questions. The limits of biblical adaptation fascinate me. The limits of adaptations raise some fascinating questions for how we treat texts, both sacred and secular – especially regarding the adaptation of sacred texts for children, like the Bible.
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