An original audio version of John’s gospel for Severn Church, Bristol

This was one of those things that started very simply, built up a bit of momentum as the practical issues presented themselves, and now, looking back, I’m sort of amazed that it managed to get done. Deep breath as I try to explain.

I’ve had a passion for sharing things through reading and hearing for ages. It’s probably what got me into radio over 30 years ago, but way before that, as a child in church, I used to love hearing stories, then being asked to read them. Most of all, I think I loved seeing what happened when these stories lifted off the page and into life. We’ve all heard things read out that sound flat and dull, and Bible readings can sound like that. But I’ve never believed they have to. In fact, I think they can – and should – sound like life itself, as that’s how they are intended to be shared, and it’s how most people through history have heard them.

There are some nice audio versions of the Bible. I particularly like David Suchet’s reading of the NIV which sounds crisp, lively, and acceptably non-American to my British ears. (Sorry, nothing against Americans, but US audio Bibles all sound to me like they’re made for someone else, which is quite offputting.)

But when thinking about how to encourage people to listen to the Bible and reflect on it every day during Lent, I wanted to add a bit of audio background to help set the scene and continue it after the reading had finished. That way, a listener could stay in the scene, thinking, imagining, praying, placing themselves there with Jesus and linking up what they had heard with their everyday lives.

That was the idea. Pretty simple in theory, hard in practice, not least because it didn’t already exist in the form we wanted, and copyright issues rightly prevented shortcuts in making it exist.

Bible translations are difficult and valuable. Just because the NIV is widely distributed, this doesn’t make it free for us to use like this.

That’s OK, I reasoned. There has to be a public domain translation that’s at least half decent.

There was – the World English Bible (WEB), British edition – and it’s about half as good as I was hoping it should be. I tried reading it out, and found it clunky. I also know enough about some of the original texts (and the Greek they were written in) to be able to critique how good the translation actually was, and it was mostly OK, but often not great. There are well known issues with really high quality translations like the NIV (such as the lack of different English words to distinguish kinds of “love” Jesus talks about with Peter), so it was probably too much to expect a quick public domain win here.

What followed was several months of a combo job:

• Checking the WEB against the best Greek sources I could find
• Proposing better wording, optimised for speaking and listening
• Checking this against other translations and commentaries for faithfulness, revising where needed
• Reading out the finished version as audio
• Writing music to underscore this, and extending each piece from story to reflective versions
• Wrapping it all up with the minimum of notes into a daily podcast and a downloadable text

Now that it’s done, it’s all available on podcast apps (search for “time, space, Jesus”), and in the player below, and with more notes if you need them on Severn’s site here.