God and g'day? Only in the "Aussie Bible"

SYDNEY, Australia — "Out of the blue God knocked up the whole bang lot. ... God said, 'Let's have some light' and bingo — light appeared."

So opens the new second volume in the popular "Aussie Bible" series. The initial installment of the Bible told in Australian slang has sold more than 100,000 copies since 2003 in a country where sales of 18,000 or more qualify a book as a best-seller.

The 90-page phenomenon was promoted as a "ripping yarn about Jesus of Nazareth" in which Mary was "a pretty special sheila," Jesus was "God's toddler" and the Three Wise Men were "eggheads from out east."

Not everyone is happy with the sometimes irreverent, always entertaining, rendering of the Gospel into the vernacular known as Strine, supposedly the sound Aussies make when they say "Australian." The Bible Society of New South Wales, which publishes the series, has received about 30 letters of complaint, including some hate mail.

Undeterred, author Kel Richards, a Christian, released his second volume, "More Aussie Bible" at a sausage sizzle (barbecue) outside a Sydney cathedral this month. For Richards and his publisher, the two vernacular volumes are an attempt at swelling the ranks of the faithful in a country where 9 percent of people attend church regularly.

In "More Aussie Bible," Psalm 23 is reconfigured as "a bush ballad" that begins: "God is the station (ranch) owner, and I am just one of the sheep. He musters me down to the lucerne flats, and feeds me there all week."

It also retells the story of Joseph, of Technicolor Dreamcoat fame, whose jealous brothers sold him into slavery and told their father he had been killed by a wild beast. In Genesis 37:1-36, Joseph's father Jacob tears his clothes and weeps, but in Richards' version he cries out: "He's been killed! Maybe a dingo got my boy!"

Inspiration for the second book came from the large number of people who told Richards the first volume had prompted them to delve into the full-length Bible.

"I'm jaw-droppingly staggered by how well it did," says Richards, a radio presenter with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Translating the rather stiff and sometimes obtuse language of the King James Bible, with its thees, thous and verilys, into language familiar to ordinary Australians, made it more accessible.

"People make the mistake of thinking that Australian English is just slang. It's much richer than that," Richards says.

The second volume focuses on the Book of Genesis, Proverbs, the Gospel of John and John's first letter.

This is not the first time the Bible has been subjected to an unusual adaptation. Richards was inspired after reading a Cockney rhyming slang version of the Bible.