Desert Island Bible Books
Imagine you can only keep three books from the Old Testament and three books from the New Testament. Which ones would you keep?
The survey form to enter your choices may be found here. The survey will remain open until Sunday 2 June and, as with previous surveys, I’ll write about the results afterwards.
The survey allows you to submit multiple entries. If you have children, and would like to ask them what their answers would be, feel free to do this (it is quite a fun question to ask them, and can prompt - interesting - conversations!).
If you’re happy to proceed to answer the survey now, please do so. Feel free to select on whatever grounds seem right to you: theological merit, literary virtue, historical importance - whatever you wish. However, if you have still have questions, a note for pedants follows1.
Also: please do share this or send it to others so we can get as many respondents as possible.
Note for pedants and other strange creatures
A few people I’ve discussed this with have rightly observed that the answer to this question might be different depending on the circumstances. Are you selecting books for your own devotional purposes in prison?2 Are you selecting two sets of books for missionary purposes, perhaps because you have a highly limited flight allowance or need to smuggle them past border guards who have been trained to search for Bible contraband, but whose training has failed to teach the names of the component books?3 Are you selecting which ones were preserved in the historical record?
I am happy for you to answer in whichever way seems best for you, but in terms of what was in my head when I wrote this, I was - despite the title - thinking more of the second or third (only books in a strange village/foreign country/new planet; or only ones surviving in the historical record) than the first. If you want a canonical answer, then please take this as the definitive answer (though, as said, you are perfectly free to ignore this):
“Assume your choice means that the world is changed such that from henceforth these are the only books of the Bible that will be available to you and everyone else in the world. The world is aware that the other books once existed and broadly what they are about - in the way we know of lost works of Aristotle, Pliny or other writers of antiquity - but not the details of the text.”
Who will sing for the pedant?
Or, indeed, upon a desert island?
Any Bibles here? No, let me see. OK, just a book called Malachi and another called Jude; never heard of them, on your way.