Spectator competition winners: Bridget Jones’s Bible

In Competition No. 3216, you were invited to retell a well-known biblical story in a secular style that would enhance its appeal to a contemporary audience.

You might have drawn inspiration from ‘A Brief Statement of our Case’, a rendering of the Sermon of the Mount by the writer and critic Dwight Macdonald in the style of the New English Bible using only phrases that appear in that translation. (You can find it in the excellent Oxford Book of Parodies edited by John Gross.) Macdonald took a dim view of attempts to bring the Good Book as close as possible to ‘the life and language of the common man in our day’. ‘To make the Bible readable in the modern sense,’ he wrote, ‘means to flatten out, tone down, and convert into tepid expository prose what in [the King James Version] is wild, full of awe, poetic, and passionate…’.

In an uneven entry, Peter Mullen, who also turned his attentions to the Beatitudes, caught my eye: ‘Chirpy are them that mourn, for they shall receive bereavement counselling.