Version, Part 3

Here's another version to bookmark: The Cotton Patch Gospel.

This version has been around for decades and you can still buy it from Koinonia Partners if you want it in print.  Clarence Jordan, who started the Koinonia Movement in Americus, Georgia during the Civil Rights Era was a New Testament Scholar (a farmer with a PhD) who also wrote a paraphrase of the New Testament, but in South Georgia language.  Koinonia Farm and Clarence Jordan are also the influences that led to Habitat for Humanity and many other great mission movements.

This is a fun version to read.  City names have been changed and the language is very much adapted to a specific audience.  For instance, when Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem, here's how it reads:

It happened in those days that a proclamation went out from President Augustus that every citizen must register. This was the first registration while Quirinius was Secretary of War. So everybody went to register, each going to his own home town. Joseph too went up from south Georgia from the city of Valdosta, to his home in north Georgia, a place named Gainesville, to register with his bride Mary, who by now was heavily pregnant.

When Jesus went to John to be baptized, it says that Jesus went from Albany up to the Chattahoochee.  For a South Georgian (I grew up just outside of Valdosta), I love this version, though it holds no historical or academic authority.  For a native of the South, it will cause you to read a text you thought was familiar and say, "Oh, I never saw it that way before!"  Just wanted to share.