PORTLAND, OR - Christians across the nation breathed a sigh of relief when investigative journalists discovered that the "Bibles" allegedly being burned by protesters in Portland were actually not Bibles at all, but just some book called The Message.

"I was all set to riot," claimed one visibly upset professing Christian man from Texas. "Everyone else just smashes windows and sets fires when they see things that make them mad. Why not us Christians? They were attacking symbols of the country like the flag and knocking over statues, and I was mad, sure, but it wasn't until I saw them attacking the Word of the living God that I really wanted to riot-I mean protest- like everyone else!" 

"False alarm," he added with a sigh of relief. "It wasn't a Bible at all!"

Sources in the Christian publishing industry indicate that The Message is a highly idiomatic rephrasing of the actual Bible that's actually just a subjective interpretation of each divinely inspired text.

"At its best, The Message encourages intellectual laziness in Christians to not dig deeper to understand the actual words that are in the Bible," said another Christian in Seattle. "At its worst, it's a paraphrase that inserts highly subjective interpretations and false teachings, glossing over sin, the holiness of God's Name, and the exclusivity of the gospel."

"Anyone who believes in or even just casually reads The Message is going to hell, probably," wrote another concerned discernment blogger known only by the cryptic username "KJV1611Only."

At publishing time, a group of highly agitated conservative Christians, inspired by what took place in Portland, began burning piles of The Message themselves.