The Story Audio Bible—New International Version, NIV: The Bible as One Continuing Story of God and His People

Brazenly, and inexcusably self-hyped, as "the grandest, most compelling story of all time", this re-writing of the Christian Canon is an exercise in the use of a Grand Narrative as a whip. It crackles with fear and snaps with false hopes.

The Bible serves as a collection plate. This moistening of the "story" will add heft to many a call to "give to the Lord". Even this book does not claim that God has ever received a dime of all the tithing.

While far from an accurate "translation" of received text, this work translates ancient translations into a meaningful Story. Reading the Bible is, after all, almost never done any more if it ever was. Today, at least we have this Story reduced to a text which can be read in a few sittings. The show more "books" of the Christian Bible are artfully spun (dropping the perplexities) and linked together with "short transitions"--which are additions made to the sanctus. See TheStory.com.

The volume features selections of the NIV Bible in chronological (and artificial) arrangement unrelated to any archeological evidence or actual chronology. Includes very helpful "Time lines" of the stated events, and a Cast of Characters. For example, "Adam: The first man, husband of Eve"--although they never married or swore vows. And "Adam sinned when he ate fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil." Never a hint as to why eating a fruit is a sin, or how fruit imparts knowledge, or why knowing about good and evil creates a burden upon descendants. Clearly this "Story" consists entirely of myth and metaphor. How good a story is it?

Is there a single "Character" in it worthy of emulation?

I use this volume to help me understand the perplex riddles of Christian Holy Scripture--which this edition simply skips. Millenia of literary traditions are traduced into "the truth"--come down to this message: "Jesus, God's son, came, lived, died and rose again." [471] The text assumes that you have a choice--to be somehow made at no known place or time--to step down "the narrow path that leads to unimaginable glory". The conceit of this vision is awesome. "Discussion Questions" are provided for each of the 31 Chapters.

The Publisher chose to print on self-destructing acidic paper. Surprised? show less

God goes to great lengths to rescue lost and hurting people. That is what The Story is all about: the story of the Bible, God's great love affair with humanity. Condensed into 31 accessible chapters, The Story sweeps you into the unfolding progression of Bible characters and events from Genesis to Revelation. Using the world’s most popular modern-English Bible, the New International Version, it allows the stories, poems, and teachings of the Bible to read like a novel. Like any good story, The Story is filled with intrigue, drama, conflict, romance, and redemption - and this story’s true!
The Story features a foreword by Max Lucado and Randy Frazee. This book tells the grandest, most compelling story of all time: the story of a true show more God who loves his children, who established for them a way of salvation and provided a route to eternity. Each story in these 31 chapters reveals the God of grace - the God who speaks; the God who acts; the God who listens; the God whose love for his people culminated in his sacrifice of Jesus, his only Son, to atone for the sins of humanity. show less

The Story is not, as I initially thought, a novelization of the Bible (which would have been neat, though how you could actually write such a book is beyond me.) Rather, it is the Bible, but abridged and reorganized in chronological order to present a (mostly) continuous story. It's a great idea, even if I found the execution to be wanting.

By far, the best part about The Story is being able to read the Old Testament in chronological order. The individual stories one grows up hearing in Sunday School are often hard to relate to one another, and the disjointed nature of the OT makes piecing together an actual timeline of events difficult. The Story does that for you. Thus, you can read about the history of the kingdom of Israel as one show more continuous narrative, and really get a sense of the sequence of historical events.

The New Testament works in the same fashion, merging the four Gospels into a single narrative, and continuing through the book of Acts and various letters. I honestly found the New Testament to be less interesting than the Old, mostly because, like much of this book's target audience, I'm much more familiar with the NT events. But aside from that, there's nowhere near as much actual story in the NT, which covers only a few decades compared to the OT's thousands of years.

Most of the problems I had with The Story are editorial. Often the choices of what to cut seemed odd: for example, the prophetic dreams from the stories of Joesph and Daniel are omitted, and only referred to. And speaking of Joesph, the chapter featuring his story was mostly concerned with what happened after he was reuinted with his brothers (usually seen as the end of the story); previous events were summed up on just a few short pages. Another thing that The Story did was insert transitional text, either to tie one story to the next, or to summarize material that had been skipped over for one reason or another. This transitional text was clearly marked (so as not to be confused with actual scripture) but was written in an awkwardly informal and occasionally preachy tone that irritated me more often than not.

That said, I'm glad I read it, and would actually recommend it to someone interested in reading the Bible story. It's certainly not a substitute for a real Bible, but it is a useful tool toward understanding one. show less

The purpose of this book of selections from the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible is disclosed in the last page of the volume, to hear “the truth. You’ve come face to face with the most important message you will ever hear: Jesus, God’s Son, came, lived died and rose again.” The author tells readers that they must “take a step down the narrow path that leads to unimaginable glory.”

The editors of the book present 31 chapters, 21 from the Hebrew Bible and 10 from the New Testament, each focuses on a different event from the many that occur in the Bible. They include a “Timeline” giving what the editors consider the years of the episodes; short comments in the middle or end of some of these quotations from the show more NIV that connect one selection with the next when the editors delete some of the biblical narratives; and definitions of terms at the bottom of certain pages. Scholars will have some problems with the editors’ information and comments.

• Many will disagree with the dates offered by the editors. For example, the consensus among scholars is that we cannot know the exact year of the Israelite exodus from Egyptian bondage, but it most likely occurred around 1200 BCE; they have the precise year 1446. The Bible has Abraham born 1948 years after creation, which is 3823 BCE; they have 2091. The Bible does not give the year of Moses’ brother Aaron’s death; they have 1406. There are many other similar differences.

• Some of the definitions are designed to suggest that the books of the Hebrew Bible teach about Christianity and Jesus. For example, the “holy spirit” in the Hebrew Bible is defined as “The manifestation of God who dwells within those who believe in Jesus Christ and empowers them to follow God’s way. God is one God but acts in three ‘persons’ of God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.” One may, of course, interpret the Bible as one chooses, but in fairness, one should say that this is an interpretation and it is not explicit in the text. They translate “messiah” as “A name of Jesus that emphasizes his role as God’s chosen deliverer.” Actually, messiah means anointed, a king or high priest who had oil pored upon his head when he became king or high priest. Jews looked forward to the coming of a Jewish king, which is synonymous with messiah, to rule over them. Christians felt that Jesus was this king.

In short, people need to beware as they read this book because scholars disagree with many of the supposed facts. show less

My home church committed to working through this book in the year 2015. So, in January, our Pastor started following the outline of stories for most of his sermons over the course of the year, and our small-groups followed up and discussed the corresponding chapters (and his sermons) during the week that followed. The book was a great introduction to the core stories of the bible -- and for a church like ours, and a small group like mine, where many people are new to engaging with their faith (either cause they are so new to it, or they grew up in traditions where scripture knowledge was not prioritized), it was incredibly helpful. The book hit the core stories that many know in odd incomplete ways from pop culture and pop religion, but show more exposed them to the real, complete story as in scripture. Then followed up with good discussion questions. In our group we also used a companion video that was very helpful for kicking the discussion off.

(2015 Review #5) show less

I appreciate what Frazee was trying to do, but I don't think he really succeeded here. He needed to either use all 4 gospels in their entirety, but organized chronologically (and labelled by book, chapter and verses), or he need to paraphrase the same content. Furthermore, I don't think it was necessary to go on to look at the book of Acts when the focus of this book is supposed to be Jesus' life and ministry on Earth.

I really enjoyed "The Story" as it brought a unique perspective to the Bible. Being told in chronological order made the stories so captivating that it was hard to put the book down.