The Good News Bible taught me the power of words, but also stole my youth

For my 15th birthday, I got a Bible. I have it in front of me now. Underneath the message “To dearest Christina, with much love from Mummy and Daddy” there is a red sticker saying JESUS. Next to it, in rather childish handwriting, I’ve written: “died for ME!!” On the inside jacket there are more stickers: “He was born to die”, “Have a happy new life with Jesus” and, with letters turned into hearts and smiley faces, “GOD LOVES YOU”. Underneath the stickers, I’ve written out a quote from the book of Romans. “If we hope for what we do not see,” it says, “we wait for it with patience.”

My parents would have been surprised to see me talking about patience. Their view of the sulky teenager who spent hours hogging the bathroom was that she was more keen on her family’s patience than on developing any of her own.

They must have been surprised when I asked for a Bible. Two years earlier I’d stopped singing the hymns at the Anglican church we’d always had to go to – the price we paid for Sunday roast chicken and ice-cream. I’d discovered Camus, and you couldn’t really sing “Praise my soul, the King of Heaven” if you now knew there wasn’t a God and wanted to be authentic. You couldn’t be authentic if you even went to church, so I was relieved when my parents said I could stop.

But then I discovered boys. The boys I found were at a youth club attached to a Baptist church, so it wasn’t long before I found God too. This God was quite different to the one I’d grown up with. That God was distant, and busy, and not too bothered with the details of your life. He just wanted you to be nice, and kind, and polite. The new God wasn’t distant at all. He wanted every single thing that happened to you to be all about Him.

When I was a child, the Bible was a very old book, written in old-fashioned language you couldn’t understand. For a while, I thought some of the words the vicar used in prayers were magic words, like abracadabra. When I realised that one of them was actually three words – “but, above all” – I was disappointed. The new God didn’t like things to be old-fashioned. He liked things to be instant and easy. He spoke to you, the youth leaders told us, through the Good News Bible, which was described on the cover as “Today’s English Version”. He spoke to you, in fact, as though you were having a chat over a pint.

This Bible really did change my life. It told me that the things I liked – the Boomtown Rats, David Soul, chocolate eclairs – were things you couldn’t like all that much if you loved Jesus Christ. It didn’t actually mention the Boomtown Rats, but when it said things like “let the Spirit direct your lives, and you will not satisfy the desires of the human nature”, it made it clear that the things you liked probably weren’t a great idea. It was, it turned out, a good way of making sure you felt guilty all the time.

It is quite hard to do a degree in English literature and believe, or try to believe, that the Bible is God’s literal word of truth. It is also quite hard to do the things students who have just been released from the prison of family life tend to do. So mostly I didn’t do them. While my fellow students were getting drunk, or pregnant, or trying things a bit stronger than Nescafé with Coffee-Mate, I was discussing the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

I did escape. Thank the God who definitely didn’t write the Good News Bible, I did, eventually, escape. I didn’t get my youth back. No one can give you your youth back. But in the process of finding a faith and losing it, I did learn an awful lot. I learned, for example, that almost anyone can believe almost anything, and that arguing with them probably won’t change their mind. I learned that you can take a great work of literature – packed with stories, poetry and images that have shaped the face of western art – and turn it into something not just dangerous but banal. And I learned that what is beautiful, true, brave and good isn’t something you can ever put in a book and call “truth”.

But I also learned, through reading a book I probably wouldn’t otherwise have read, how one collection of ancient texts can echo through almost all the texts that follow them, and how you can’t really understand those texts if you haven’t read the earlier ones. I learned how those texts are echoed in the laws and values and structures of our society, and that many of those laws and values and structures are pretty good. I learned that it would be a shame to chuck out the baby (in the manger) with the bath water, since all cultures need to understand their roots.

The Good News Bible certainly taught me about the power of words, but it also taught me about the power of translation. Words that make you yawn in one translation can, in another, make you feel the hairs on the back of your neck. “Keep busy always in your work for the Lord, since you know that nothing you do … is ever useless” doesn’t have quite the same ring as: “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, for ye know that your labour is not in vain.”

If you have ever been in love, you should read the Song of Songs. If you have ever been in despair, you should read the Psalms. If you want some “spiritual” advice, you could, I suppose, turn to Deepak Chopra, but you’re probably better off going to Ecclesiastes to be told that “there’s nothing new under the sun”. It is, in any case, good to be reminded that sometimes there is a lot to be said for things that are really quite old.

• This article was amended on 14 August 2014. An earlier version referred to Proverbs where Ecclesiastes was meant.