I love receiving Bibles to review through the Bible Gateway Blogger Grid! This time, I received a digital copy of The Gospel of Matthew: Word for Word Bible Comic: NIV.
I have mixed feelings about this work. It uses the text of the NIV, so if you like the NIV, it will be acceptable to you on that front. But the main think that makes this a very different kind of Bible from all of the others I’ve received and reviewed is, of course, the illustrations that it contains. Some people would call it a comic book; others would call it a graphic novel. I don’t know which it is, or if there’s a difference. I guess I’m not really the target audience.
Personally, I didn’t gain much from the illustrations. I tended to not even look at them because I was focused on simply reading the dialogue. When I did happen to look at the pictures, I thought that some of them didn’t seem to match how I would have pictured the scene, so I found them a little distracting rather than helpful.
But once again, I don’t really seem to be the target audience.
But to those are into this type of format, I think this could be a really interesting way to read the Bible. The illustrations are high quality. They seem to match the quality of the comic books—er…graphic novels—that I’ve here and there.
Even more than the illustrations, I actually came to enjoy the dialogue-centered approach. Like any graphic novel I’ve seen, the dialogue is prominent in the illustrations, while the rest of the text kind of fades into the background. So it was kind of interesting reading the Gospel of Matthew in terms of the conversations that take place in it.
To be clear, not all of the Bible is complete in this format yet, but I believe that is the publisher’s ultimate goal. As of now, it appears that there are 6 books of the Bible available on their website (Matthew, Mark, Esther, Joshua, Judges, and Ruth).
All in all, I can’t say that I recommend it, but I can’t say that I don’t either. If you’ve always wished you could read the Bible like a comic book, this might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.