{"id":101,"date":"2008-12-16T11:12:59","date_gmt":"2008-12-16T11:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/textmessages\/2008\/12\/the-bible-retold-by-jonathan-g.html"},"modified":"2008-12-16T11:12:59","modified_gmt":"2008-12-16T11:12:59","slug":"the-bible-retold-by-jonathan-g","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/textmessages\/2008\/12\/the-bible-retold-by-jonathan-g.html","title":{"rendered":"The Bible retold by Jonathan Goldstein and James Frey(!)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As a fan of Bible retellings&#8211;songs, novels, poems, films, etc that reimagine Bible stories in some way&#8211;I was heartened by something I heard on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thisamericanlife.org\/\">This American Life<\/a> this weekend: Jonathan Goldstein, a tAL producer and contributor and the author of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Lenny-Bruce-Dead-Jonathan-Goldstein\/dp\/158243347X\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1229445034&amp;sr=1-1\">Lenny Bruce is Dead<\/a>, is about to release a Bible rewrite called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Ladies-Gentlemen-Bible-Jonathan-Goldstein\/dp\/1594483671\/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1229440683&amp;sr=8-2\">Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible!<\/a> No word on whether Goldstein&#8217;s purview includes the New Testament as well as the Old, but Goldstein is a real wit, and I hope he&#8217;s up to something good.\u00a0<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I can&#8217;t find any more information about it online, but while searching for it, I did learn that James Frey&#8211;he of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Million-Little-Pieces-James-Frey\/dp\/0307276902\/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1229445063&amp;sr=1-3\">A Million Little Pieces<\/a>&#8211;is writing what he calls <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/books\/2008\/dec\/16\/james-frey-bible\">&#8220;the third book [sic] of the Bible.&#8221;<\/a> I&#8217;m less heartened by this one. By some accounts, Frey&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Bright-Shiny-Morning-James-Frey\/dp\/0061573132\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1229445130&amp;sr=1-1\">last novel<\/a> acquitted him nicely, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/books\/2008\/dec\/16\/james-frey-bible\">this interview in The Guardian<\/a> doesn&#8217;t inspire much confidence in his ability to handle the Bible. First of all, he says he&#8217;s writing the third &#8220;book&#8221; of the Bible, which, by my count, means he&#8217;s writing Leviticus. He&#8217;s also not describing it very imaginatively: Frey&#8217;s Judas is &#8220;a selfish man&#8221; who values &#8220;money more than love,&#8221; and his Jesus is apparently a man of ill repute who lives with a prostitute.\u00a0<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Maybe James Frey is a literalist.\u00a0<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a fan of Bible retellings&#8211;songs, novels, poems, films, etc that reimagine Bible stories in some way&#8211;I was heartened by something I heard on This American Life this weekend: Jonathan Goldstein, a tAL producer and contributor and the author of Lenny Bruce is Dead, is about to release a Bible rewrite called Ladies and Gentlemen,&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - 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