The Composite Bible Original Order: Vol 1 (CBO: portrait aspect)
The Composite Bible Original Order: Vol 1 (CBO: portrait aspect) The Composite Bible Original Order (PORTRAIT ASPECT) is an effort to understand what God has said, in the order that it was presented in the 1st century. Jew and Christians alike would know the old testament as The Law, The Prophets and The Psalms. Also, within these three groupings, the order of the books were placed in the order of importance; those of greater importance were placed first and the lesser followed. In the New Testament, the letters written to the Jews (the general or catholic epistles) were placed first and those to the gentiles afterward. Again, this grouping signified importance. Since the book of Acts was closely associated with the Gospel accounts (and probably was distributed along with them) it has been placed within the first grouping. The Bible can be a hard book to understand and because very few of us read the original languages, error creeps in. Today, there are many easy-to-read versions, but their shortcoming is that they take great liberty with the text. The Bible versions at the opposite end of the spectrum are more accurate, but are much more difficult to read. So, my solution to this problem is to use a relatively easy-to-read version and compare it to a more difficult one and then to a still more difficult one. The three versions used in this edition of the Composite Bible (CBO) are: The Webster Bible, The American Standard Version (1901) and Young's Literal Translation of the Holy Bible. When the Bible is read in progressively more literal versions, the first one read takes on a new (a composite meaning). This is because our minds work differently if we consider one, two or three things at once. In this work, Webster is first, followed by the more literal ASV and the still more literal Young's literal.