In the beginning, there were 850,000 words. Three years later, John E. Walsh and his team of editors had condensed The Bible by 40 percent, to 510,000. In all its incarnations, the Bible may well have been the world’s best-selling book, but not necessarily the best read. The original Revised Standard Version was 1,400 pages; the abbreviated one, about 800.
Mr. Walsh went on to write more than two dozen books on diverse subjects. He also left nine completed manuscripts when he died. But his most widely read book was undoubtedly the Reader’s Digest Bible. Mr. Walsh was the project editor on the condensation.
It took seven editors three years to condense The Bible. The abridged Reader’s Digest version boiled down the Old Testament by 50 percent and the New Testament by 25 percent. None of Jesus’ words were changed, but about 10 percent were deleted.
In the Revised Standard Version, Genesis reads: “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation." The Reader’s Digest version condensed that 66-word passage to 37 words: “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished. And on the seventh day God rested from all his work. God blessed and hallowed the seventh day, because on it he rested from all his work of creation.”
John Evangelist Walsh was born 1927, the son of Irish immigrants. He was hired as a reporter. It was the start of a career that took him to Prentice-Hall, Simon & Schuster and Reader’s Digest. While Mr. Walsh was never trained as an academic, his prolific book-writing was based on prodigious research.
His son said his father never elaborated on how he had condensed books. “He maintained,” he said, “that it was reducing a manuscript by one-third without a careful reader ever being able to notice.
Mr. Walsh remained industrious to the end. The day he died, he was completing a book on Ralph Waldo Emerson and had composed a letter to an editor to accompany it.
[Condensed by Mahendra Meghani from The New York Times April 9, 2015]
[After reading the above I became curious to see how Mr. Walsh and his team have condensed The Bible. Our library did not have the Readers' Digest Bible so, as is the custom here, they procured it for me from one of the neighboring libraries. Some extracts from it follow. M. M. ]
