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Schultz served on translation committees for both the Holman Christian Standard Bible and the New Living Translation. "[The Bible] is intended to be read slowly, studied, memorized, and meditated upon, rather than becoming the object of a slick speed-reading course," he said.

Proctor disagrees. "If you focus only on individual verses or chapters, you don't get a sense of the broad sweep and trends of the entire work," he said. "My secret goal is to see whole Bible reading increased exponentially."

Paul Gutjahr, religious studies professor at Indiana University and author of An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880, wonders how much content speed-readers can retain. "But," he said, "the upside is that at least people are reading it."

On the other hand, Peter J. Thuesen, professor of American religious history at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis and author of In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible, said speed-reading actually helps improve retention because it requires more concentration. "If speed-reading helps some people comprehend the whole Bible in a new way, I don't see a problem with it. But I see it more as a study technique than as a way to use the Bible devotionally," he said.

Then there is the British-published 100-Minute Bible. Michael Hinton, a retired Anglican priest, has condensed the Bible to approximately 20,000 words in fewer than 60 pages. The volume has made a splash in both the religious press and the broader media, according to Thomas Yap, a suburban parish priest in North Yorkshire, England.

According to Yap, the hope is that the reader will become interested in the God of the Bible and thereby begin to engage with the Bible as a whole. "For this reason, I thinkpublications like The 100-Minute Bible … areuseful," he said.

Schultz is less encouraged, however. "If people only have 100 minutes to spare for the Bible, let them spend it reading through Philippians or James several times rather than deluding themselves by thinking that the condensed Bible version that they have read is really God's word," he said.

Yap acknowledged his concern that these types of publications "are not seen as the only diet for the growing Christian."

"If we only use [a] bite-sized-chunks Bible as a growing Christian, we will never get the whole counsel of Scripture." For example, The 100-Minute Bible condenses Jesus' three-chapter Sermon on the Mount to six paragraphs and 413 words.

IUPUI professor Thuesen noted that any condensed Bible "is going to involve interpretation, so in that sense a condensation is a book about the Bible rather than the Bible itself." Edgar Goodspeed and J. M. Powis Smith published The Short Bible in 1933 and "made something of splash at the time," he said. "Many Christian churches for centuries have used a lectionary, or cycle of appointed readings, for every Sunday of the church year. The lectionary doesn't cover the whole Bible, just the passages that the church has judged the most important.

"Let's face it: Some passages of the Bible are more theologically significant than others."

Yap concedes that fast Bibles can be a "dumbing-down of Scripture" but points "significant growth"of interestin the Bible through introductory courses such as Alpha or Emmaus. "I would heartily encourage accessible Bibles for my non-Christian friends and then as they grow in discipleship, engage them with the Bible as a whole," Yap said.

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March (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50