Since the 1960s, Douthat argues, institutional Christianity has suffered a slow-motion collapse, leaving the country without the moral core that carried it through foreign wars, economic depressions and roiling internal debates.

Meanwhile, myriad heresies have bloomed — from the “God-within” theology of Oprah to the Mammon-obsessed missionaries of the prosperity gospel, says Douthat, a Roman Catholic.

In an interview with Religion News Service, Douthat explains his definition of heresy, why he thinks Mitt Romney and President Obama are both heretics, and why more Americans should argue about religion.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Why did you write this book?

A: The idea for the book came to me late in the Bush presidency, when the debate over religion in America was generally dominated by the clash between the New Atheists — Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett — and conservative Christians. In many ways, the debate over the existence of God is the most important debate there is, but I thought it would be useful to step back and consider what kind of shape American religion is taking.

Q: And what did you see? 

A: In some ways, depending on what kinds of measurements you use — such as belief in God or spiritual experiences — the country might be more religious than ever. But that doesn’t mean that there are more traditional, orthodox Christians. Instead you have heresy: religions that draw on Christianity and yet are still miles away from the historic core of the Christian faith.

Q: How do you define heresy?

A: Looking at Catholics, Protestants and Eastern Orthodox Christians, there is an intellectual core in the Christian faith. Sometimes that core gets blurry in various places, but you have the Nicene Creed, the belief that the Bible is the inspired word of God, that the four Gospels are the best sources of information about Jesus of Nazareth. There are a lot of religious movements and ideas that diverge from that core enough to be heretical but not to be a different religion entirely.

All of this is totally debatable, and people can look at the same landscape and disagree about who a heretic is. But the term is still quite useful in describing the reality of a country that is neither traditionally Christian nor post-Christian in any meaningful way. We are in a zone between those two things.

Q: You’re not going to start another Inquisition are you?

A: (Laughs) Well, controversy is good for book sales. Obviously the hunt for heretics has a long and horrible history. An orthodoxy that doesn’t leave any room for heresy is dangerous and destructive; and a world that is all heresy and leaves no room for orthodoxy is dangerous as well. But I don’t see any particular danger in using the term to describe America today.

Q: I’ve read that you think both Mitt Romney and President Obama are heretics.

A: A lot of evangelicals and conservative Catholics will say straight out that they don’t think Mormons are Christians. If you flip that around, you find that Mormons themselves think that all evangelicals and Catholics are in a state of apostasy, that Mormons have the true Christianity. It can be an endless and pointless argument. They both claim ownership of the same religious tradition.

Q: What makes Obama a heretic in your view?

A: Obama’s personal religious beliefs are a little more opaque than Romney’s. He’s not part of a church or specific denomination. But the church (Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago) where he basically converted, or reconverted, back from agnosticism, is a church whose theology diverges and stands in judgment over the traditional Christian churches. The theology of Jeremiah Wright’s sermons is radical — and that’s the whole point. Black liberation theology is much more explicitly political and revolutionary than traditional Christianity.

Q: But is it heretical?

A: I think using the word just clarifies the distance — the very real theological distinctions — between Jeremiah Wright’s vision of Christianity and what a lot of traditional churches consider Christianity.

Q: Even if heretics are no longer burned at the stake, it seems that many Americans have an aversion to labeling others heretical, no?

A: And I would disagree with that very strongly. The promise of a liberal society is that we agree to a kind of truce where nobody will impose their religion on anyone else and the government will not set up an established church, or the Spanish Inquisition. But part of religious freedom is the freedom to have arguments about religious beliefs. People who take religion seriously should have serious public arguments.

Q: You quote Philip Rieff’s idea of a modern prophet who denounces the rise of a therapeutic, ego-driven faith. Do you see yourself in that role?

A: (Laughs) I don’t think I’m comfortable calling myself a prophet. I’m more comfortable calling myself a critic. Even though I use pretty strong language to criticize trends in contemporary theology, I also want to get at what it is about “Eat Pray Love,” for example, that so many people respond to. It’s very easy to be mocking and dismissive from a more highbrow perspective. But there is a coherent theological core at the heart of the prosperity gospel and the “God-within” schools, and I take them seriously.

Q: Why do you say this book was written in a spirit of pessimism?

A: As a practicing Catholic, I have an obvious bias in favor of institutional religion. But if you look at Christian history, the belief that everyone can follow Jesus on their own is not a particularly realistic approach to religious faith. It is a faith best practiced in community with doctrine passed down through generations. What makes me pessimistic is that all the trends in contemporary American life are toward deinstitutionalization, not just in religion but across the board.

“This is such great news on this Good Friday and goes to show what men and women of faith can accomplish when they work together toward a common goal. We congratulate CEC for Life, which worked long and hard to bring an end to the abortion abuses at that notoriously dangerous abortion clinic,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue and Pro-Life Nation.

“This victory represents a major defeat for the abortion cartel. We know lives of women and their babies will be saved because of this.”

The ADPH stated that the agency “performed a comprehensive investigation of New Woman All Women Health Care in Birmingham in response to a complaint received in January 2012. This investigation revealed significant failures in maintaining compliance with the Rules of the Alabama State Board of Health for the safe and effective provision of care.”

The complaint was filed by a pro-life activist in response to an incident on January 21, 2012, where two women were photographed being hand-carried from NWAW past a broken safety rail to awaiting ambulances parked in a trash-strewn alley.

Recordings of two 911 calls were obtained through open record requests that showed the emergency calls were placed by clinic owner Diane Derzis, who indicated that two women had been overdosed on the drug Vasopressin.

The ADPH inspected the clinic and discovered 76 pages of deficiencies in nine categories, then took action to revoke NWAW’s operating license. Under threat of revocation and fines, the clinic reached an agreement to surrender their license next month.

But in his latest offering, the University of North Carolina historian and author of such provocative titles as “Misquoting Jesus,” “Forged,” and “Jesus Interrupted,” targets the very crowd that formed the bulk of his audience.

In “Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth,” Ehrman soundly refutes the arguments — sometimes made by atheists, agnostics and humanists — that early storytellers invented Jesus.

As Christians prepare to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, Ehrman, an agnostic, convincingly demonstrates in clear, forceful prose that there was a historical Jesus, a Jewish teacher of the first century who was crucified by Pontius Pilate. As for the so-called “mythicists” who argue otherwise, Ehrman has some choice words: “sensationalist,” “wrongheaded,” and “amateurish.”

“They’re driven by an ideological agenda, which is, they find organized religion to be dangerous and harmful and the chief organized religion in their environment is Christianity,” Ehrman said in an interview.

The fact that Ehrman is siding with Christians on the historical truth of Jesus does not indicate a change of heart, much less a conversion. Instead, he said, it’s an attempt to say, “history matters.”

But for fellow nonbelievers, who cheered Ehrman’s previous books as proof that evangelicals are wrong about many biblical claims, the latest publication seems like the beginnings of family feud, if not an outright betrayal.

Some have already suggested Ehrman is painting atheists with too broad a brush.

“I don’t personally know a single atheist who would deny that Jesus existed,” said Louise Antony, professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It would be really unfair to suggest that it’s part of being an atheist to deny the existence of Jesus as a historical person.”

Yet Ehrman who said he spent a summer boning up on mythicist books, such as “The Greatest Story Ever Sold,” and “The Jesus Mysteries,” sees a growing embrace of the position that Jesus was a fictional figure.

Ehrman said he had long received occasional emails from atheists and others asking him if he thought Jesus actually lived. Then last year, he accepted an award at a meeting of the American Humanist Association in Cambridge, Mass. While there, he was dismayed to find many humanists, who describe themselves as “good without God,” adhered to widely discredited notions that Jesus never lived.

It eventually dawned on him that the Jesus deniers were the flip side of the Christian fundamentalists he had long ago foresworn. Both were using Jesus to justify their relationship to Christianity.

“I keep telling Christians, they don’t have to be afraid of the truth,” said Ehrman.  “The same thing applies to atheists and humanists. It’s not going to kill them to think Jesus really existed.”

Largely missing from the quarrel is an acknowledgement of how far atheists and agnostics have come.

“They’re squabbling over the existence of a man, not a messiah or a god,” said Ryan Cragun, a sociologist at the University of Tampa. “No one is saying Jesus was God. If you step back it’s not that cataclysmic.”

If anything, said Cragun, who studies atheists, the sparring may be a sign the atheist movement is maturing. Meanwhile, evangelical Christians, watching from the sidelines, are enjoying a breather.

“I wrote Bart a note and said, ‘Thank you for doing our dirty work for us,’” said Ben Witherington, professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky., and an evangelical blogger. “This saves us some time.”

What do mythicists argue?
If Jesus really existed, mythicists ask why so few first-century writers mention him. These mythicists dismiss the Gospel accounts as biased and therefore non-historical. To many mythicists, the Jesus story is based on pagan myths about dying and rising gods.

What does Ehrman argue?
Ehrman points out that only about 3 percent of Jews in Jesus’ time were literate, and Romans never kept detailed records. (Decades after Jesus’ crucifixion, three Roman writers mention Jesus in passing, as does the Jewish historian Josephus.) Though the Gospel accounts are biased, they cannot be discounted as non-historical.  As for Jesus being a Jewish version of the pagan dying and rising god, Ehrman shows that there is no evidence the Jews of Jesus’ day worshipped pagan gods. If anything, Jesus was deeply rooted in Jewish, rather than Roman, traditions.

Israel media reported Tuesday (March 6) that dozens of religious and secular Jewish mail deliverers jointly informed their supervisors that disseminating the materials goes against their religious beliefs.

The workers, who deliver mail in Ramat Gan, assert that delivering the items would be tantamount to proselytizing and therefore a violation of Jewish law.

It was not immediately clear who is mailing the materials.

Proselytizing is a sensitive issue among Jewish Israelis, who feel the Jewish people have already lost too many adherents to the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust and other times of Jewish persecution.

Israel’s anti-missionary law prohibits offering people monetary incentives in order to convince them to adopt another faith. It also bans proselytizing to minors. It does not prevent the dissemination of written material.

The Israel Postal Company told Ynet News that it is “a governmental company operating in accordance to the Postal Law, which obligates us to distribute any mail it receives. The Israel Postal Company has no right or ability to choose what it can or cannot distribute. Therefore, the mail will be distributed according to the law.”

Hamilton said he’d been haunted by questions about God since he was a teenager. Years later, when his conclusion was published in the April 8, 1966, edition of Time Magazine, he found himself at the center of a theological storm.

Time christened the new movement “radical theology,” and Hamilton, one of its key figures, received death threats and inspired angry letters to the editor. He lost his endowed chair as a professor of theology at what was then Colgate Rochester Divinity School in 1967.

Hamilton moved on to teach religion at New College in Sarasota, Fla., and then joined the faculty at Portland State University in 1970. He taught classes in religion, literary criticism and death and dying for the next 14 years.

“He was a gifted and inspiring teacher, a person of vibrant and wide-ranging intellect,” says Ronald Carson, who met Hamilton in 1962 and has been his friend for 50 years.

Carson recalled hearing Hamilton speak for about 10 minutes and being “mesmerized.”

“I have no idea what he said,” he said, “but I remember going away from that session and thinking, ‘I would love to be like him.’”

Hamilton was Carson’s teacher at Colgate and recruited the younger man to teach at New College.

“He was curious, questioning, skeptical and sort of caused his students to take up that attitude toward what they were learning,” said Carson, who now teaches in the honors college at the University of Texas at Austin. “I am missing him today.”

In addition to teaching, Hamilton often spoke at churches, where Christians were struggling with the same questions that had spurred his studies. The image of God as all-knowing and all-powerful couldn’t be reconciled with human suffering, especially after the Holocaust, Hamilton said in a 2007 profile in The Oregonian.

“I wrote out my two choices: ‘God is not behind such radical evil, therefore he cannot be what we have traditionally meant by God’ or ‘God is behind everything, including the death camps -and therefore he is a killer.’”

He discovered that he no longer believed in an active God.

“The death of God is a metaphor,” he said. “We needed to redefine Christianity as a possibility without the presence of God.”

While Hamilton may have paved the way for the most recent wave of strident atheism, he wasn’t a fan of best-selling writers who attacked religion in general or Christianity in particular.

“There is a self-righteousness, a glibness in their writing,” he said. “They are too sure of themselves. They’ve backed themselves into a fundamentalist mode.”

For his part, Hamilton saw himself as a Christian who no longer went to church.

“The death of God enabled me to understand the world. Looking back, I wouldn’t have gone any other direction. I faced all my worries and questions about death long ago.”

Hamilton is survived by his wife of 62 years and five children, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. No funeral services are planned.

(Nancy Haught writes for The Oregonian.)

Answer: The Bible is a progressive revelation. If you skip the first half of any good book and try to finish it; you will have a hard time understanding the characters, the plot, and the ending. In the same way, the New Testament is only completely understood when it is seen as being built upon the foundation of the events, characters, laws, sacrificial system, covenants, and promises of the Old Testament. If we only had the New Testament, we would come to the gospels and not know why the Jews were looking for a Messiah (a Savior King). Without the Old Testament, we would not understand why this Messiah was coming (see Isaiah 53); we would not have been able to identify Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah through the many detailed prophecies that were given concerning Him (e.g., His birth place (Micah 5:2); His manner of death (Psalm 22, especially vv. 1,7-8, 14-18; Psalm 69:21, etc.), His resurrection (Psalm 16:10), and many more details of His ministry (Isaiah 52:13.; 9:2, etc.).

Without the Old Testament, we would not understand the Jewish customs that are mentioned in passing in the New Testament. We would not understand the perversions the Pharisees had made to God’s law as they added their traditions to it. We would not understand why Jesus was so upset as He cleansed the temple courtyard. We would not understand that we can make use of the same wisdom that Christ used in His many replies to His adversaries (both human and demonic).

Without the Old Testament we would miss out on numerous detailed prophecies that could only have come true if the Bible is God’s word, not man’s (see the major and minor prophets) (e.g., Daniel 7 and following chapters). These prophecies give specific details about the rise and fall of nations, how they will fall, if they will rise again, which powers would be next to emerge, who the major players would be (Cyrus, Alexander the Great, etc.), and what would happen to their kingdoms when those players died. These detailed prophecies are so accurate that skeptics charge they had to have been written after the fact.

The Old Testament also contains numerous lessons for us through the lives of its many fallible characters. By observing their lives we can be encouraged to trust God no matter what (Daniel 3), and to not compromise in the little things (Daniel 1) so that we will be faithful later in the big things (Daniel 6). We can learn that it is best to confess sin early and sincerely instead of blame-shifting (1 Samuel 15). We can learn not to play with sin, because it will find us out and its bite is deadly (See Judges 13-16). We can learn that we need to trust (and obey) God if we expect to experience His promised-land living in this life and His paradise in the next (Numbers 13). We learn that if we contemplate sin, we are only setting ourselves up for committing it (Genesis 3; Joshua 6-7). We learn that our sin has consequences not only for ourselves but for our loved ones around us and conversely that our good behavior has rewards not only for us but for those who are around us as well (Genesis 3; Exodus 20:5-6).

The Old Testament also contains vast quantities of wisdom that the New Testament does not share. Many of these are contained in the Psalms and Proverbs. These bits of wisdom reveal how I can be wiser than my teachers, what various sins will lead to (it helps us to see the hook that the bait is hiding), and what accomplishments in this world hold for us (nothing!). How can I recognize whether I am a fool (moral fool, that is)? How can I inadvertently turn people off without trying? How can I open doors to lasting success? How can I find meaning in life? Again, there is so much there that is just waiting to be found by one who truly wants to learn.

Without the Old Testament, we would not have a basis for standing against the error of the politically correct perversions of our society in which evolution is seen to be the creator of all of the species over millions of years (instead of them being the result of special creation by God in a literal six days). We would buy the lie that marriages and the family unit are an evolving structure that should continue to change as society changes, instead of being seen as a design by God for the purpose of raising up godly children and for the protection of those who would otherwise be used and abused (most often women and children).

Without the Old Testament, we would not understand the promises God will yet fulfill to the Jewish nation. As a result, we would not properly see that the Tribulation period is a seven-year period in which He will specifically be working with the Jewish nation who rejected His first coming but who will receive Him at His second coming. We would not understand how Christ’s future 1,000-year reign fits in with His promises to the Jews, nor how the Gentiles will fit in. Nor would we see how the end of the Bible ties up the loose ends that were unraveled in the beginning of the Bible, how God will restore the paradise He originally created this world to be, and how we will enjoy close companionship with Him on a personal basis as in the Garden of Eden.

In summary, the Old Testament is a mirror that allows us to see ourselves in the lives of Old Testament characters and helps us learn vicariously from their lives. It sheds so much light on who God is and the wonders He has made and the salvation He has wrought. It shares so much comfort to those in persecution or trouble (see Psalms especially). It reveals through repeatedly fulfilled prophecy why the Bible is unique among holy books—it alone is able to demonstrate that it is what it claims to be: the inspired Word of God. It reveals volumes about Christ in page after page of its writings. It contains so much wisdom that goes beyond what is alluded to or quoted in the New Testament. In short, if you have not yet ventured in depth into its pages, you are missing much that God has available for you. As you read it, there will be much you do not understand right away, but there will be much you will understand and learn from. And as you continue to study it, asking God to teach you further, your mining will pay off in brighter treasures still.

Recommended Resource: Name Your Link

Hundreds of people are still missing, and the destruction included the bombing of at least 10 church buildings.

More than 200 members of the Islamic extremist Boko Haram sect stormed the Yobe state capital, Damaturu, at 5 p.m. on Nov. 4, and soon the terrorists had blocked all four major highways leading into town. Some of them charged the police headquarters, commando style, killing all officers on duty, while the rest broke into two banks – First Bank Nigeria PLC and United Bank for Africa, stealing millions of naira. Boko Haram also bombed police stations and an army base in and around Damaturu.

Having successfully dislodged security agencies after a series of gun battles and the detonation of explosives, the terrorists then led other area Muslims to the only Christian ward in town, New Jerusalem in Damaturu, home to more than 15,000 Christians, church leaders said.

The Christian leaders in Damaturu told Compass that out of the 150 casualties reported in the Yobe attacks, more than 130 were Christians. When the Muslim extremists went to New Jerusalem, they said, any Christian they met who could not recite the Islamic creed was instantly shot and killed or slaughtered like a lamb.

The Rev. Idris Garba, the 41-year-old chairman of the Yobe state chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), told Compass the attack “is a Jihad against the church.”

“When Boko Haram members and other Muslims here attacked us on that 4^th of November, it was like the end had come for Christians in this settlement,” Garba said. “Bullets were fired indiscriminately into our houses. I and my family locked ourselves in my house. Bullets were dropping on rooftops like ice blocks from a rainstorm. The trauma my 10-year-old son had as a result of sounds from guns and explosions has not left him, as he has refused to eat ever since the attack.”

Garba, who also pastors the ECWA Good News Church in the New Jerusalem area of Damaturu, said his 500-member church has dwindled.

“We could not have had more than 100 worshipers on the Sunday after the attack,” he said. “Most Christians are either missing or have left the town.”

Garba, who has been in pastoral ministry since 1993 and has served as a pastor of the New Jerusalem fellowship church for two years, said two Christians were slaughtered in front of his church building the day before it was bombed.

“You can see the blood is still at the spot where these two Christians were killed,” Garba said.

Another Christian, he said, was slaughtered in front of the worship auditorium of the African Mission Centre.

Garba said the casualty figure in this attack could be more than 200, as many Christians are still unaccounted for.

“The fact that hundreds of Christians have left town, and some are still leaving even as I am talking to you now, has made it difficult for us to account for the actual figure of our members that have been killed,” he told Compass. “The proof that many more than the figure being peddled by the government must have been killed is that we were at the morgue and we found that corpses filled up every available space, so much so that we could not count the corpses. In fact, corpses had to be left outside the morgue for lack of space inside.”

Boko Haram bombed and destroyed 10 church buildings: those of St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Church of the Brethren, Cherubim and Seraphim Church, All Saints Cathedral (Anglican Communion), and Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA), African Mission Centre, Assemblies of God Church, ECWA Good News Church, Living Faith Church, and Charismatic Renewal Ministries.

They burned 11 cars and stole two others after killing the Christian owners. In addition, seven motorcycles and one bicycle were destroyed.

Bomb blasts the previous day (Nov. 3) in Maiduguri, Borno state about 80 miles (130 kilometers) east killed four people, with one of the explosions coming from a triple suicide bombing of a military base.

Asked about Muslims who were killed, Garba said they died in gunfire exchange between Boko Haram militants and security agencies.

“These Muslims were visitors who were passing through Damaturu at the time of the attack and were caught in the crossfire,” he said.

Pastor Emmanuel Ekigho, resident pastor of the Living Faith Church also in the New Jerusalem area, told Compass that the Boko Haram bombing left his worship auditorium completely charred.

“We lost our church auditorium and assets in the church worth over 70 million naira [US$43,742],” Ekigho said.

The Sunday after the attack, only 214 of the 700 members showed up for worship, he said.

“As I talk to you now, many more out of the 200 members have left the town,” Ekigho said. “This may be bringing our ministry here to an end.”

Since the Damarutu attack, no state or federal government official has visited the area to see the level of destruction done to Christians and their churches, church leaders said. Their attempts to enter into dialogue with the emir of Damaturu, Alhaji Shehu Ibn El-kanemi Hashimi II, proved abortive as he refused to meet with them, they said.

“We sought audience with him on Nov. 7 in order to present our plight to him and seek support and protection from him, but he declined to see us,” Garba said. “So, we left his palace without meeting him.”

An al Qaeda affiliate that seeks to impose a stricter form of sharia (Islamic law) on northern Nigeria, where sharia is already in force, as well as on the predominantly Christian south, Boko Haram has threatened to launch more attacks.

“We will continue attacking federal government formations until security forces stop their excesses on our members and vulnerable civilians,” a Boko Haram spokesman said.

In August, Boko Haram claimed responsibility for a suicide car bombing at the United Nations headquarters in Nigeria’s capital, which killed 24 people and left another 116 wounded.

Nigeria’s population of more than 158.2 million is divided between Christians, who make up 51.3 percent of the population and live mainly in the south, and Muslims, who account for 45 percent of the population and live mainly in the north. The percentages may be less, however, as those practicing indigenous religions may be as high as 10 percent of the total population, according to Operation World.

Of those surveyed those younger than 40 were most concerned about global poverty.

The study, commissioned by Compassion International was conducted in September. Barna surveyed 1,429 American adults.

Major findings of the study included:
•Ninety-three percent of Christians surveyed are concerned about global poverty and a third are “extremely concerned.”
• Four out of 5 Christians believe they have a special responsibility to help solve global poverty.
• Twenty percent of practicing Protestants and 16 percent of practicing Catholics have traveled outside the U.S. for the purpose of serving the global poor.Christians under 40 years old were more than twice as likely to have taken such a trip.
• Younger Christians give 50 percent more than older Christians toward the cause of global poverty.
• Forty-five percent of younger Christians believe their churches should be more involved in helping the poor.

Scott Todd, the author of Fast Living: How the Church Will End Extreme Poverty, thinks the results of the study signify a growing awareness of poverty in Christian communities.

“What would happen if these millions of Christians began to live out the fundamental teachings of their faith in a new way,” he said.

“What if they began to take seriously the Biblical teachings about the poor and oppressed? What if they formed a new relationship with the global poor? I believe these changes are underway on a massive scale. We are witnessing an awakening.”

Electricity, the Internet, and instant global communication have allowed immense strides in communicating across languages, including new Bible translations like the Common English Bible, (http://CommonEnglishBible.com), in which 120 academic scholars and editors, 77 reading group leaders, and more than 500 average readers from around the world joined together to clearly translate, in record time, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek languages from thousands of centuries ago into the English of today. See an interactive Google Map showing the locations of the translators (http://j.mp/p5aiO0).

“Even the usual Bible translation schedule is not for the timid,” says Paul Franklyn, PhD, associate publisher for the Common English Bible. “Accomplishing it in less than four years requires extra stamina—and modern technology.” Less than four years is phenomenal when compared with other recent modern English Bible translations that took 10–17 years to complete.

Already in its third printing after only one month in stores, the popular new Common English Bible (Twitter @CommonEngBible - http://twitter.com/CommonEngBible) is known for being “built on common ground.”

“When we say ‘built on common ground,’ we mean that the Common English Bible is the result of collaboration between opposites: scholars working with average readers; conservatives working with liberals; teens working with retirees; men working with women; many denominations and many ethnicities coming together around the common goal of creating a vibrant and clear translation for 21st century readers, with the ultimate objective of mutually accomplishing God’s overall work in the world,” says Franklyn.

Translation efficiency was possible by using an online project management database that permitted more than 200 collaborators (translators, editors, and field testers) to communicate immediately. The project was constructed in a workflow matrix with more than 400 overlapping parts.

“Translators and editors of previous Bible translations typically met face-to-face twice a year to debate and vote on challenging passages,” says Franklyn. “By contrast, Common English Bible editors worked by consensus in real-time and deferred any difficult decision to the senior editor for a particular testament.”

The online project management database that was used was first constructed to handle the development of the New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, which contains 8400 articles from more than 1000 contributors in 40 countries. “The system is relatively easy to understand as an online document management application with archiving, version control, scheduling, reports, and workflow. If such a login system is not used, the project can quickly collapse into confusion by trying to manage by email,” says Franklyn.

The translation tool used by Common English Bible editors is the BibleWorks software. Franklyn says that platform was chosen “because we could add the emerging Common English Bible translation into the Bibleworks translation database. This allowed for rapid searching and contributed significantly to a more consistent vocabulary across the translation. It also helped identify traditional vocabulary in older translations that we no longer use in common English.”

Franklyn says BibleWorks is being used to also generate a Bible concordance. “A programmer is working with us to develop a new cross-reference system for the reference edition of the Common English Bible, as well as a ‘phrase concordance’ that’s required for a more functional translation,” says Franklyn. These tools will also become enhancements for future BibleWorks releases.

Another technical tool used by the Common English Bible editors is the Dale Chall readability software. According to Franklyn, Edgar Dale and Jeanne Chall are two reading scholars who developed the most accurate reading measurement formula based on a math computation as well as a comparison to vocabulary word lists that are sorted by grade level in standardized testing.

“Previously the Dale Chall method for measuring readability would work on samples of no more than 400 words. We asked that the program be modified so it could process a readability score and vocabulary assessment for entire books of the Bible,” explains Franklyn. “Each document was measured on the first draft and last draft. Bear in mind that readability is a measurement of the clarity of the translator. It does not reflect on the intelligence of the reader.”

The Common English Bible is written in contemporary idiom at the same reading level as the newspaper USA TODAY—using language that’s comfortable and accessible for today’s English readers.

Also facilitating the rapid translation process was attention given to tagging. “Because our text was well tagged from the beginning in Microsoft Word documents (each text was tagged as soon as the first draft arrived), we were able to complete the XML tagging in the OSIS schema for of the whole Bible in about 4 weeks after we exported from Adobe InDesign typesetting,” says Franklyn.

“Our use of technology was very practical. We used a software tool if it helped us get the job done efficiently. We did not try to chase impulsive or esoteric possibilities that computer tools sometimes inspire for translators,” says Franklyn. “It’s possible to tag a Bible text too extensively, with expectations that someday a scholar could do interesting computerized data mining. That sort of data mining would be fun someday, but not when the real job is to complete a Bible translation containing 930,000 words.”
Visit CommonEnglishBible.com to see comparison translations, learn about the translators, get free downloads, and more.

The new CEB is available in 20 digital platforms, namely iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Olivetree, Logos, Sony, Nook, BibleWorks, Kobo, ChristianBook, Accordance Software, YouVersion, Lightning Source, Copia, Blio and OverDrive.

Also available online is a search widget that can be downloaded by users to their websites and blogs. It can also be accessed through Bible Study Tools and Bible Gateway.

The digital version of the complete CEB is available at a special introductory price of $5.95 until September 1, when the price will be raised to $9.95.

This is the first time that a complete version, including the Old Testament, New Testament and Apocrypha will be available in the CEB, which released a New Testament in August last year.

“The Common English Bible is a brand-new, bold translation designed to meet the needs of people in all stages of their spiritual journey and study,” Paul Franklyn, associate publisher, said, adding, “We’re excited to make this translation available as soon as possible through the Internet and other digital resources.”

21^st century English

The CEB is distinctive because it uses the daily language of 21^st century readers, making it relevant without compromising authenticity. Some examples are the use of “reconcile,” or “reconciliation” in place of “atonement,” “chest containing the covenant” in place of “ark of the covenant,” and “temple equipment” in place of “vessels of the temple,” according to its website.

Over 120 scholars from 22 faith traditions worked on the CEB, including men and women from American, Asian, African, Latino and European communities. They hailed from leading academic institutions including Yale University, Princeton Theological Seminary, Asbury Theological Seminary, Bethel Seminary, Azusa Pacific University, Seattle Pacific University, Denver Seminary and Wheaton College, among others.

The CEB was also previewed by some 500 readers, who listened as the translation was read aloud, and pointed out passages that were potentially confusing. Their input was considered in its final reworking.

The CEB was approved last May by the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA for scholarly use. (See http://theundergroundsite.com/index.php/2011/05/fuller-theological-seminary-adopts-gender-friendly-more-readable-common-english-bible-15895/).

“The Common English Bible is the result of collaboration between opposites: men working with women; scholars working with average readers; conservatives working with liberals, many denominations and many ethnicities coming together around the common goal of creating a translation that unites rather than divides, with the ultimate goal of mutually accomplishing God’s overall work in the world,” Franklyn said.

It has special relevance amid the digital revolution which has hastened daily language changes, making the bible more understandable and compelling whether privately used by individuals or for church worship.