Cotton Patch Version of Luke and Acts: Jesus' Doings and the Happenings

Sometimes I feel like I've read the stories too many times. I already know what's going to happen, I already know what the characters do. Yes, God can give new insights every time, but sometimes it can seem like that movie you've watched 100 times and it isn't as exciting as a new movie.Jordan takes the stories, and makes the live again. Just tweaking location and culture, they are different, they reveal far more of what the original authors wanted us to know, they throw excitement back into the mix. Rather than simply reading these as devotion, I found myself engrossed, staying up late at night again, as if I was reading a simple novel, to find out what would happen next, what new twist would occur. So a man is waylaid on his waylaid on the way from Atlanta to Albany, and a white minister and a white Gospel song leader passed him by. A black man stopped and helped him, giving his last two dollars to make sure the hospital cared for him. Then Jesus asks the (white) Sunday School teacher, who would you consider to be your neighbor? He replies, "Why, of course, the nig- I mean, er...well, er...the one who treated him kindly." Jesus replies, "Well, then, *you* get going and start living like that!"With such vinnettes Jordan moves us into the American South in the 50's, where a movement rises up lead by this one white guy Jesus, calling people to love each other, whether they are black or white. And then one of his followers in the second book of The Happenings goes bout and preaches desegregation, for the Gospel came to all, whether white or black. This is the application of life that Christ talked about. But remember to read these with the right accent! Jesus did come to America- but in 1950, not 33 AD.

It took a New Testament scholar and Georgia peanut farmer named Clarence Jordan to make familiar Bible stories new and fresh. Joseph and Mary, from old-line Georgia families, travel from Valdosta to Gainesville, GA, where Mary gives birth and puts the baby to rest in an apple box. Paul and Barney travel to New Orleans and beyond telling the story of Jesus in all the White churches. These spatial and temporal transformations of the Gospel According to Luke ("Jesus' Doings") and the Acts of the Apostles ("The Happenings") rescue the Bible from the dustbin of history and re-instill it with the newness and excitement that the first hearers of these stories experienced. This volume, as well as Jordan's other "versions" of New Testament texts, provide a powerful new understanding of the roots of the Christian faith.