A paraphrase Bible was meant to expound on selected difficult texts. This paraphrase Bible furnishes commentary and interpretation without any of the original text. It represents the attempt to make the Bible more accessible to the average reader, and to condense the vast work into a more manageable format. Before the Reformation, such efforts to modify the text would have been condemned as heretical, but following the Reformation, it became imperative to make the Biblical text comprehensible to the layman as well as clergy.