Summer Worship

Written by Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinonia Farm in Plains, GA, the Cotton Patch Gospel retells the gospels and some of Paul’s letters as having taken place in the rural south of the 1950s and 60s. Bethlehem has become Gainesville, GA, Jerusalem is Atlanta, Rome is Washington DC. Jordan intended this version of the scriptures, which he translated using his own deep knowledge of biblical Greek, to “help modern readers have the same sense of participation in [the story] which the early Christians must have had.” Jordan was the first to admit that not everything translates perfectly and he had to make some subjective interpretations, but what has resulted from his work - left incomplete upon his death in 1969 - is a way of engaging the familiar with a new lens and enlivening scripture in ways otherwise impossible.