A HUNGRY HEART

Kim Shippey

WHAT on earth would persuade an aspiring young businessman with no more than a layman's grasp of the Scriptures to give up his job and spend the next 27 years of his life cutting and pasting the New Testament of the Bible into one chronologically accurate, reader-friendly narrative?

Charles Roller of Tulsa, Oklahoma ("Charlie" to his friends), tells me he just couldn't resist it. In his youth he was often puzzled by the four Gospels, the book of Acts, the letters, and the book of Revelation. He couldn't understand "the story." Now it was time to blend the many accounts of Jesus' life into one uninterrupted narrative in a language that everyone could easily read and understand. His hope was that those who had wandered from the Bible might gather fresh meaning from his rearrangement of the texts.

"But I certainly didn't do it all on my own," he explains. "Many people joined me on the way. Some came and went. Some came and stayed—like my co-compiler and editor, Carol Mersch, and Tim Disney, who provided the technical guidance and took care of data management. But all contributed their time, treasures, and talents to the final work. My role was to keep on keepin' on."

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