At long last, an emoji Bible

As an ever larger proportion of humanity increasingly communicates via the internet, an anonymous Bible reader has “translated” the world’s most-translated book into the unique English shorthand that makes cyber-communications so efficient.

Using Unicode “emoji” icons that will show up on nearly all computer systems, accompanied by common online abbreviations, the iOS ebook — available for reading on iPhones and iPads — runs to almost 3,300 pages.

The book is a project of the Bible Emoji website, which “translates” Biblical verses into “emojis” by substituting certain words, such as “world” or “God,” with emoji equivalents.

The Bible… translated w/ Emojis! pic.twitter.com/3OsT7Nr8iD

— BibleEmoji ???? (@BibleEmoji) May 29, 2016

???? of Luke 2:14

Glory 2 ???? in the highest, & on ???? peace, good will toward men.

— BibleEmoji ???? (@BibleEmoji) March 27, 2016

The Twitter account bills itself as “Scripture for millennials.”

In an interview with the Australian daily Guardian Australia, the author said, “I thought if we fast forwarded 100 years in the future, an emoji bible would exist. So I thought it’d be fun to try to make it…

“I wanted to make it similar to how you might text or tweet a Bible verse, by shrinking the total character count.”

But the dictionary is limited – just 80 emojis that serve in lieu of 200 words.

According to Jezebel, the author’s purpose is clear: “this new, hip bible (now with 15 percent fewer words) might finally be the ticket to luring the heathen tweens to God.”

While “Spread love, not fear” is written as “spread 😍, not 😨,” with half the words finding an emoji equivalent, less popularly known verses, such as Exodus 22:18 in the King James version — “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” — merely changes “to” to “2.”