Do You Find Children Bibles Helpful!?

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The bible is a very deep book. It takes a lifetime of studying and applying it in real life scenarios. For those on the spectrum, do you find children's bibles more digestible to your understanding? Even highly intellectual neurotypical people, struggle to understand the Holy book. Some maybe bible scholars and can understand the historic and literary nature of each text i.e simlies, metaphors, personification, hyperboles, etc.

We all vary in our comprehension skills and our spiritual walk with Christ. Have you found a children's bible helpful in understanding the overall narrative of scripture i.e God redeeming the human race through Jesus?

Children's Bible cut out the juicy bits, don't they?

I found the Good News Bible to be easy reading.

It's hard to know who to trust with simplified and interpreted scriptures. Children tend to be very credulous and impressionable, so the job of creating a bible for them would be wide open to the temptation to bias it in favour of the interpreter's personal views.

But then I'm secular, so the question arises, how can scripture help me? Well, studying it gives me insights into the mindset of the ancients who wrote it. I like to probe matters such as the real authorship of the books, what they were trying to achieve by writing them, who they were writing them to, the degree of historical accuracy, which ideas were intended to be taken literally and which were allegorical.

For example, the Adam and Eve story as literal history clashes with the academic view of the way in which human life may have come about, but as symbolic allegory it bears a striking resemblance to the change from nomadic hunter-gathering to farming and the hoarding of private property - it's very plausible that the social pressures of the latter would have eroded human morality, which scripture records as a couple eating from the tree of knowledge and bringing about the fall of man. Those writings would have likely originated from prehistoric oral history, at a time when minds may have been more poetical and less logical and precise than they are today, so it makes sense that their ancient history would have been passed on in a symbolic form. I find those kinds of ideas quite fascinating.

So I'm an interested scholar of scripture rather than a believer looking for moral guidance, though I'm not saying that every moral statement in scripture is totally out of whack with my own ideas about morality, and my idea of "helpful" may be very different from what the OP has in mind.

Very helpful, if the goal is to keep them from being exposed from the more troubling aspects of the real bible.
Very helpful, if the goal is to allow the author of the kiddie edition to impose their personal views on the children who read the kiddie edition, as TD alluded to.

Not very helpful, if the goal is to actually promote biblical literacy. Of course, one of the risks that results from people reading the bible closely is that they might notice morally repugnant parts or contradictions, so a dumbed down version might help avoid those risks.

Only that it's as fun as any form of reading of stories.

Helpful?
Not really. Words mostly gets in the way for me.



What actually makes me able to read the Bible better is to rise my consciousness while reading it.

Went from literal nonsense that might as well put several hours of research and backtracking per line/paragraph, to spotting particular concepts that I never thought of.

Gained Number Post Count (1).
Lose Time (n).

Lose more time here - Updates at least once a week.

Children's bible? never heard of this, is this an American thing?
As kids we had picture books with "sanitized" old testament stories.

Popular ones involved King David and Goliath and of course Disney ready tales of Joseph and his brothers and Moses parting the sea to flee the Pharaoh.

Yeah I wouldn't read it as a kid unless it had pretty pictures.

I like to stick to the original text as much as I can-I do not use a Children's Bible but I do like to see colour illustrations in my Bible of pictures and for some psalms I do like to read NIV version because they are easier to understand for me. There is a NIV version as well that is more suited to people with learning disabilites and my rector at church pointed this out to me. It is called the NIV accessible version if you want to look it up.
https://www.youthworks.net/articles/accessibility-bible

There is also accessible study guides for autism as well.
https://www.amazon.com/Inclusive-Faith- ... B0DHBFXK3Z
I may buy the NIV accessible version myself of the Bible.

I do own a big family Bible the same in fact that we used in my family home as a child and it full of colour illustrations and that is King James. I found it still being sold on Ebay and bought one for myself. The text is very easy for me to read as well.

There is some children's Bible that can be used by everyone and they are not aimed at very young children. I recently ordered a batch for another group-this was it.

https://iadpa.org/en/products/holy-bibl ... ustrated-1

I like to use audio Bible's as well sometimes and use Faith comes by hearing non dramatised versions of the Bible.