What does it mean when somebody says "It is like reading the Bible without the good news"?

I have never heard this before, either. What station was it? Fox?

Well, I channel surf when watch the news. Could have been Fox, could have been CNN or even the standby networks. But is that the point? I figured it was just an old saying I had not heard of before.

Well, I think that without the “good news,” people wouldn’t read the Bible. I.e., it would be a horrible chore to read it and not have anything good to get out of it.

Maybe the good news is that if you follow God’s laws you go to heaven?

The good news is Jesus. The Old Testament tells of a Christ, the Messiah, coming to save the world . The New Testament is when Christ returns. Without “the good news” we are left with only half the story (Bible) and no saving Grace. EDIT: It is a good story, but useless is what it basically means.

I haven’t heard this expression before. I would take it to refer to something lengthy and tedious like a legal contract.

Never heard it before either, but If it weren’t for the message of redemption, the Bible would consist mostly of variations on the theme “Here’s what God expects from you, and oh by the way, you’re constitutionally incapable of delivering.” Not very uplifting stuff.

Wow, @thorninmud, what does Redemption have to do with the Constitution? EDIT: I like what you said. It was very eloquent and beautiful.

Without the good parts of the Bible, you’ve got a lot of murder, rape, genocide, war, apocalypse, chicks lusting after dudes with giant horse dicks, crazy ass people, draconian laws, and genealogical lists.

So basically, to say that something is “like reading the bible without the good news” is to say that whatever you’re referring to is really, really sucky.

It means the guy loves soundbites & rigorously defends his right to use them.

I’d consider it an attempt to sound clever yet down home that falls very short of what he wanted to say. He fails on both counts.

It sounds to me like a way of saying that someone has missed the point. A Christian will tell you that you need the Good News—which is a term for the gospel of Jesus as depicted in the New Testament—to understand the rest of the Bible. Without it, you are missing the key part that puts the rest into context. So if you read the Bible without the Good News, you will have missed the point of the story.

Yes, missing the point. Exactly what @SavoirFaire said. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Came to give the same answer as @SavoirFaire: etymology of ‘gospel’

@josie I’m wondering if what you actually heard might have been this quip by Rep Dave Camp that’s been reworked and recycled and passed around in tax reform circles: “The tax code is 10 times longer than the Bible, without the good news”

That’s a little less ambiguous than what we’ve been assuming.