It’s happening, it’s really happening: This Sunday, on May 29, 2016, “The Emoji Bible” drops in Apple iBooks. According to RELEVANT magazine, they predicted this would happen. According to Charisma News, it may bring all Millennials back to church. According to the Huffington Post, the Emoji Bible was translated from the King James Version of the Bible, and 15 percent of its character count contains modern “slang,” including approx. 80 emojis interspersed throughout the 66 books and 3,282 pages of biblical text.
But beyond all the media hype, and being a Millennial myself, I have a few questions about all of this: First, Why is the Emoji for God a yellow face with a halo instead of the wind emoji to represent the time he blew past Moses hiding in the cleft of the rock in Exodus 33 (did God not say no one would see His face and live? :-|) or the bush with a fire next to it to represent the burning bush appearance in Exodus 3? Which brings me to a second, more important question: Why doesn’t Jesus have his own Emoji? Third, do we call this the Word of God or the Emojis of God? And the list goes on…I guess I’ll just have to wait until May 29 to find all of the answers out. If I want to spend $2.99 to buy it, that is…but my husband just said it’s too expensive. So I’ll start digging for pennies in the couch now. 🙂
From a marketing perspective, they’re doing a great job pushing out samples on their Facebook and Twitter channels, and their website gives you an opportunity to translate whichever Bible verse your heart desires in realtime. Here’s a sample of their Facebook posts:
And a sample of their Tweets:
All this to say, the bright side of this “translation” is that it may get a lot more Millennials interested in the traditional King James Version translation of the Bible than they would have been otherwise! At least, I’m intrigued. #emojis #ftw
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