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I've been carrying John in my coat pocket all week, ever since it came in the mail from Grove Press, along with the three remaining gospels, Genesis, Exodus and six more installments from the Bible, each individually bound in slick trade paperback. There was a press release, too. "The most radical approach to the Bible since Gutenberg," it said. And in that terminally hip bar, listening to Lauren read John 20:11, I begin to believe the hype.

They're called "Pocket Canons," and they're priced at $2.95 apiece. Each one has a celebrity introduction (by E.L. Doctorow, Charles Frazier, Doris Lessing, Kathleen Norris and Bono, among others), followed by the King James text, from which not a single thy, thou or thine has been omitted. They're slimmer than a Palm Pilot, and not much bigger all around. In England, where nearly a million copies have sold, the fundamentalist Christian set is already screaming bloody sacrilege. One can only imagine how their New World brethren will react as the American edition hits bookstores -- 24 shopping days shy of Christmas -- on Dec. 1, 1999.

Probably it won't make much difference what they say: Even the planned first printing of 600,000 should be enough to put a Canon in the pocket of every post-ironic street cynic from Manhattan to San Francisco. Lauren has me thinking -- now she says she wants to trade me my Gospel for a drink, which she points out is twice as expensive -- that the fundamentalists should be nothing short of terrified. The most radical approach since Gutenberg: If infidels like Lauren start reading the Bible, if this Jesus character catches on the way that, say, Harry Potter has, mankind's greatest work of literature -- the cornerstone of Western culture and of Judeo-Christian morality -- may just be freed from the hands of bigotry before Patrick Buchanan manages to shut the library doors for good.

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The Bible has a serious image problem. In the 28 years I've been alive, its never quite been respectable reading. The Christian right has done its share to give the Bible dirty political connotations, and the Mormons have made it socially suspect, but I think no group has made the Good Book look worse to more people than the otherwise innocuous Gideons.

Because I was raised Jewish, in a secular big city way, the first Bible I ever encountered was in a motel room. My family must have been on some sort of vacation, taking New England by Pontiac. I don't recall any of the sights, not a single battlefield or riverbed, but I do remember one night opening drawers in an artificial woodgrain cabinet by my bed and finding a book -- left behind by some previous motel guest, I assumed, for me. A fat red book, hardcover and packed tight with words. When my mother saw what I was holding, she snatched it from my hands as if it were a roach trap. "That's not for you," she said, or maybe, "That's not for us," and then she proceeded to tell the not-quite-literate me about the kind of things that "we" didn't read.

As a lesson, it stayed with me, but less because of what my mother said than because the distinction she drew so perfectly fit my nascent snobbery. It wasn't a Jewish thing, per se, not reading the Gideon Bible in motel rooms. (I've never met a Catholic, Protestant or atheist, who's condescended to do so either, or at least not one who's willing to admit it.) Rather it was a class thing, a socioeconomic thing, most fundamentally a cultural thing.

Next page | Making Jesus sound like my mom