It is. Mike Coles is head of RE at a secondary school in Stepney, London. When he moved there 15 years ago, he fell in love with rhyming slang and spiced up his lessons by rewriting parts of the Bible, like a missionary of yore, in the native lingo. The saucepans (saucepan lids--kids) apparently loved it.

Here, he retells nine stories from the Old Testament, and translates Mark's Gospel verse by verse. He ends with the Lord's Prayer-"the prayer that Jesus taught 'is chinas"--which could leave traditionalists writhing in their pews: "You're the Boss, God, and will be for ever, innit?"

As the Archbishop of Canterbury suggests in his foreword, Coles takes the Bible "out of the formal church setting and puts it back into the marketplace, into the streets, where it originally took place." And he is right: beyond being fun, this book recaptures the colloquial nature of the exchanges between Jesus and his disciples, and unleashes some of the power of the oral tradition through which many Old Testament passages were originally passed on.

Readers will either love it or hate it--it takes lemon and lime even to adjust to the headings (such as "Jesus heals some geezer" and "Jesus ain't dead no more")--but this is much more than a novelty project. Go on, I dare you--take a butcher's hook. --Brian Draper

Synopsis
Would you Adam and Eve it? This was the headline of many of the national newspapers. The Holy Bible (well, bits of it anyway) has been translated into cockney rhyming slang. Read how Jesus feeds five thousand geezers with just five loaves of Uncle Fred and two Lilian Gish. Or how Noah built a bloomin' massive nanny. Then there's always the story of David and that massive geezer Goliath, or the time when Simon and Andrew's finger and thumb in law was Tom and Dick in Uncle Ned and Jesus healed her...This text is aimed at people who wouldn't normally call themselves "Bible readers", as well as youth workers and ministers wanting a new approach to familiar stories, and secondary school teachers for use in RE lessons and assemblies. It contains an introduction explaining the aims and background of the book, including an explanation of cockney slang, plus seven Old Testament episodes and the stories of Mark's Gospel, "translated" into cockney slang. The book concludes with the Lord's Prayer and a full glossary of Cockney slang terms and phrases.