Memorize the Bible

I believe that the Bible is authored by the one true and living God who created heaven and Earth.

This statement can be parsed out in different ways, but it simplifies to the above statement.

I will parse the statement in just a moment, but first I want to point out that for purposes of this website, it doesn’t matter if you agree or disagree with me. You might be an atheist or adhere to some other religion and are just curious about what the Bible says. For purposes of this website these tools to help learn what the Bible says are helpful for that purpose regardless of what you want to do with that knowledge.

Of course I want you to believe the Bible and to believe in the one God described in His book, but that is not the point of this website.

To parse my opening statement, I will have some posts in the coming days that do so, but these qualifications and clarifications fall into some different categories.

First, we might ask something like “which Bible”? Technically we are talking about what is known as the canon of Scripture. In short and simple form, I endorse what is sometimes referred to as the “Protestant Bible” of 66 books, which is generally the set of books that come with the Bible you might purchase at a local bookstore unless that Bible says something like “with Apocrypha.” I will soon have some brief thoughts about canonization in later posts.

Second, there are textual issues associated with the Bible. In other words, if you and I were fluent in the original Bible languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek), could we have confidence that when reading the Bible in the original languages we were looking at the original text even though those texts have been hand-copied for centuries? I will have brief thoughts about these textual issues as well.

Third, most people including myself are not able to read the Bible in the original languages, so we rely on translators to put the Bible into language we do use on a daily basis. Any translation has inherent limitations, and I will have brief thoughts about this as well.

Fourth, and finally for now, there are a handful of other things to think about regarding how the modern arrangements of our Bibles affect the way we read and understand it. For the moment, I am primarily thinking about the arrangement of the Bible into specific books, chapters, and verses in ways that subtly affect our thinking, but there are other issues as well. Because the tools associated with this website tend to be chapter- and verse-based, it is important to understand where these divisions came from.

Other issues will be covered as well, but these are the main ones.

So, if I were to take these issues and re-word my opening statement in a way at least somewhat mindful of them, it might look something like this:

I believe that the Bible is authored by the one true and living God who created heaven and Earth. That Bible consists of 66 books as commonly understood by Protestant Christians today, and while it does contain some textual questions in a small number of places, these do not affect our basic understanding of the Scriptures. Every translation introduces unique issues to think about, and we should be aware of these whenever we are not reading the Bible in the original languages. In addition, the modern divisions of the Bible into books, chapters, verses, and in other ways and with other publisher’s notes does subtly affect our understanding of the Bible in a number of ways that we should guard against.