Because the two primary systems planned for this website are chapter-based and verse-based for learning the Bible, it is important to remember that the Bible as originally written had NEITHER chapters or verses, and so I want to share a couple of thoughts about these artificial divisions of the Bible. First, just to get our…

The vast majority of us cannot read the Bible in the original languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek) and so we must read it in translation. Therefore, the purpose of any Bible translation is to take the original languages that we don’t know and – wait for it – “translate” these texts into a language that we…

For centuries after the Bible books were written, all copies were necessarily hand-written until the invention of the printing press, and this introduced both accidental copying errors and the possibility of deliberate changes. With the invention of the printing press, the possibility of these accidental and deliberate changes is greatly reduced though not entirely erased.…

For those interested in my detailed views on the canonization question about which books should be recognized as Scriptural, I am only going to give a short answer in this post without giving detailed book-by-book arguments. Before giving even a short answer, let me note as I did in yesterday’s post about inspiration that for…

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…

The four intended tools for this website mimic index cards in some ways, but go well beyond. The big idea is to have your own data about each chapter and then to interact with that data in a variety of ways on a regular basis. It will be some time before the website is built…

I think of cows as “chewing the cud” to digest their food. That’s a layman’s term useful for urban dwellers like me. I’m sure that there is a better, more technically correct way to describe it, but all I know is that cows chew their food more than once before digesting it, and in principle…

I’m going to be talking about using index cards or a spreadsheet or a database program to do Bible study, and at first glance this might seem to cheapen Bible study. It might seem like we’re cramming for a final exam or just trying to play a Bible trivia game better than our peers, and…

The fundamental system I have used for the past 12-plus years is based on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that I have programmed, and while this might sound odd at first, it’s really just a fancy way of doing some basic Bible memorization using index cards. The website version will be a database that you interact…