Peter Costello
The Heavens and the Earth: Colour your way through the Bible’s most beautiful Verses
Created by Stu McLellan
(Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99)
Over the last year or so colouring books for grown-ups – I nearly said adults – have become all the rage, as even the most casual visit to a bookshop will reveal. They are said to be very relaxing and a great aid to mindfulness. So it was inevitable that one along religious lines should also be published.
This title is the creation of Stu McLellan, using a selection of beautiful or inspiring passages from the whole course of the Bible, the Old and the New Testament.
What he provides are ink sketches with lots of white space, which will enable colourists to work as they please.
This is not painting by numbers by any means. It calls for selection and attention to the image in hand, and the words it is illustrating.
Passage
There is about some of the images a slight New Age, ecologist look – for instance the passage from Luke 13: 20-21, “What shall I compare the Kingdom of God to? It is like yeast that women took and mixed into about 30 kilograms of flour until it was worked all through the dough.”
The image suggests one of those health-conscious households where the family eat spelt bread and drink nettle soup.
That 30 kg mentioned in the modern Bible translation, by the way, equates to 66 lbs of flour – quite a lot. Like so much in the Bible, the passage is not to be taken literally. Actually it is a phrase that seems to have been a common expression for enough food to entertain an unexpected visitor. It is connected in my mind with the three loaves for the unexpected guest in Luke 11:5, rather than the initial reference to three measures in Genesis 18: 6.
So even a Biblical colouring book seems to present problems in interpretation. Who would have thought it?