A Short History of Bible Clutter

00:00:05.000 | How did our Bible pages get so cluttered?

00:00:08.800 | If you open your Bible at a random page, you'll find verse and chapter numbers have been added, of course.

00:00:14.200 | And often the text has been scrunched into a two-column layout, like no other book we read,

00:00:20.100 | and often with a bunch of tiny cross-references printed down the middle of those two columns.

00:00:25.200 | Section headings have been added, and so too have been book introductions and often study notes,

00:00:30.200 | colorful images, call-out boxes on the pages, and a concordance and maps and other things in the back.

00:00:36.400 | Our Bibles are loaded with extra clutter.

00:00:40.200 | The history of how our Bibles got so jammed with notes and markings is a long one,

00:00:44.500 | and Bible readers are beginning to ask what the clutter is doing to the psychology of our Bible reading.

00:00:50.100 | And should we be preserving space in our lives to read the Bible without all of these markings?

00:00:55.800 | I connected with Glenn Powell, the executive director of the Biblica Institute for Bible Reading,

00:01:01.300 | a think tank dedicated to studying trends in Bible reading and design.

00:01:05.800 | Glenn is also the author of the new book, "Saving the Bible from Ourselves, Learning to Read and Live the Bible Well."

00:01:12.800 | We recently sat down and recorded this weekend conversation,

00:01:15.800 | and to start I asked him about the history of verse and chapter numbers that we see.

00:01:20.300 | Who added those to our Bible?

00:01:22.800 | Sure, it's actually a little piece of a bigger story with the Bible.

00:01:27.800 | It's actually pretty hard to find Bible manuscripts that are perfectly clean with no markings on them at all.

00:01:34.800 | It's often said that the very first manuscripts were just a series of letters

00:01:38.800 | with not even spaces between words and punctuation, that sort of thing,

00:01:43.800 | which is basically true.

00:01:45.800 | However, very early on, people started saying, "Look, we need to have these things with helps."

00:01:52.800 | The early manuscripts were read out loud, so oftentimes the very first things that appear

00:01:57.800 | are breathing marks, little spaces between words, page numbers, those sorts of things.

00:02:04.300 | And I think what happened over time is we just started inserting more things into the text,

00:02:10.800 | all with the interest of providing help, of course.

00:02:13.800 | There were practical reasons for these things.

00:02:16.300 | But by the time you get to the end of the history of the Bible in our time,

00:02:21.800 | these helps, these additions, have pretty much overwhelmed the text.

00:02:26.800 | So, chapter numbers, surprisingly to many people when I speak about this,

00:02:30.800 | came rather late in the game.

00:02:33.300 | The chapter system that we know in our Bibles today came from Stephen Langdon,

00:02:37.800 | who was an English church leader in the early 1200s.

00:02:41.800 | So to think about the fact that the Bible existed without these chapter numbers

00:02:46.800 | for over a thousand years is startling to many people.

00:02:51.800 | And I think just the realization, I think one big light that comes on for people

00:02:58.800 | is to know that the Bible itself has a history as a book,

00:03:02.800 | and that it developed over time in its format,

00:03:05.800 | and that the Bible doesn't have to be what we see today.

00:03:09.800 | And in fact, it always hasn't been what we see today.

00:03:12.800 | And they're interested to know that verses and chapters have separate histories, really.

00:03:17.800 | The chapter numbers were inserted--Langdon was actually working on Bible commentaries,

00:03:23.800 | and so it's very helpful to find the Bible in sections that are easier to find specific pieces.

00:03:29.800 | So the chapter numbers came in for that reason.

00:03:32.800 | Also, many times, some of the various chapter number systems--

00:03:36.800 | there were more than one at various points in the Bible's history--

00:03:40.800 | were included so that people could find passages for public reading of Scripture.

00:03:44.800 | So it's these practical uses that really developed the form,

00:03:49.800 | the changing form that we see in the Bible.

00:03:51.800 | Verses came 300 years later in the 1500s,

00:03:55.800 | and it's interesting, the gentleman who started the verse number system,

00:04:00.800 | the man that we know, Robert Estienne, a French printer,

00:04:05.800 | was actually working on a Bible concordance.

00:04:08.800 | So verses, of course, are more precise than chapters,

00:04:11.800 | and so he needed something closer to smaller pieces of the Bible than chapter numbers.

00:04:17.800 | So he inserted verse numbers into a Greek New Testament

00:04:20.800 | and added numbers to the Hebrew breathing marks that already existed in the Old Testament,

00:04:26.800 | and voila, you get the modern chapter and verse Bible for the very first time in the 16th century,

00:04:33.800 | which is, again, surprisingly late in the Bible's history.

00:04:36.800 | And again, it's fascinating, I think, to realize that both innovations were added to the text

00:04:43.800 | in the search of better reference help, commentaries and concordances,

00:04:48.800 | and that's what led to the introduction of chapters and verses.

00:04:52.800 | The history of oral Bible reading is a rich and incredible story of its own,

00:04:57.800 | but it'll have to wait for another podcast episode.

00:04:59.800 | I want to talk about the implications of this reference style in a moment.

00:05:04.800 | When we open our Bibles, we also see a two-column style.

00:05:08.800 | Where did that originate, and how does that style influence our engagement with the Bible?

00:05:15.800 | Well, when you think about the scroll, right, opening horizontally, columns had to exist.

00:05:21.800 | Those lines can't go on forever.

00:05:23.800 | So, you know, the scrolls certainly had columns.

00:05:26.800 | It was a question of how long is the length of a column.

00:05:30.800 | And then when you switch to the codex form of the book, what we would know as a book form,

00:05:35.800 | first on animal skins and later on paper, it became just a practical matter

00:05:41.800 | of being able to fit as much material onto a page as possible.

00:05:46.800 | And so it was really that practical desire, I think, that drove this.

00:05:50.800 | Because the Bible's a big book.

00:05:52.800 | It's hard to fit it into a single volume without putting two columns on the page,

00:05:58.800 | which really maximizes the use of space with your words.

00:06:02.800 | The problem I have with double-column Bibles, or even worse, this terrible thing I saw a few years ago,

00:06:09.800 | which is a three-column Bible, which was almost impossible to read.

00:06:14.800 | It squeezes the Bible down into a few hundred pages, but what can you do with it?

00:06:20.800 | So the two-column was a page-saving, space-saving device,

00:06:27.800 | but it really is very hard on things like poetry.

00:06:32.800 | So Hebrew parallelism, that the lines are always meant to work together,

00:06:37.800 | they're talking to each other and so forth, this becomes almost impossible to see in a two-column Bible

00:06:42.800 | because you can't fit a whole line of the Hebrew text across a column, so you end up indenting.

00:06:48.800 | Then you have multiple levels of indents, and the page becomes indecipherable.

00:06:53.800 | You can't really see what's going on with the Hebrew poetry,

00:06:57.800 | so therefore you don't really read it as poetry, you're just reading words.

00:07:00.800 | Yeah, that's really key. The Bible is a huge book.

00:07:03.800 | I mean, that's just reality, and then it's packaged with a lot of added references and other notes and materials.

00:07:10.800 | How did the rise of concordances change how Christians read the Bible?

00:07:15.800 | Well, and again, I tell you, it's the desire to make good use of the Bible.

00:07:19.800 | So concordances are very helpful things, and now, of course, we can do all this electronically.

00:07:24.800 | It's so fast and so easy to look things up, which is great in many ways.

00:07:28.800 | The problem is concordance drives you to use the Bible in a particular way,

00:07:33.800 | and when we back-design or back-format the Bible to fit our desire for something like a concordance,

00:07:41.800 | then we're changing what the Bible is in its regular presentation.

00:07:45.800 | So it would be one thing if we said, "Well, we need reference Bibles for when we're using the Bible to reference things."

00:07:51.800 | Like when I want to do a word study and I look up words,

00:07:54.800 | finding the verse number is much faster than scanning a chapter for that word.

00:07:59.800 | However, when we change the form to fit that particular need,

00:08:03.800 | what we've done without really thinking about it is we've hurt reading.

00:08:07.800 | So when we changed the Bible into a chapter and verse Bible,

00:08:10.800 | plus added all these other modern additives, cross-references, section headings, footnotes,

00:08:16.800 | all the other stuff that we put in Bibles, we've really made it hard for people to just flat-out read the Bible.

00:08:23.800 | And one of the things I contend in my book is we should be reading first and studying second,

00:08:28.800 | and actually doing our study in the context of having read whole books,

00:08:33.800 | because that's really what authors intended.

00:08:36.800 | Their central unit is not a verse, is not a chapter, it's a book.

00:08:40.800 | Those are the central units the Bible is built on, and I think we should read holistically first,

00:08:46.800 | and then do our study in the context of that reading.

00:08:49.800 | And I think the modern Bible reverses those things.

00:08:53.800 | It does. Yeah, it does. And verses and chapters are two fairly recent phenomena,

00:08:58.800 | even more recent than newer data smog, as you call it.

00:09:02.800 | I'm thinking of those tiny cross-reference texts that are listed in Bible margins.

00:09:07.800 | When you have a column of references to point you to related texts as you read, what's your fear?

00:09:14.800 | What does this phenomenon do to our Bible reading?

00:09:17.800 | Yeah, it's interesting. I didn't really do the research to know when that originated.

00:09:21.800 | I should probably track that down. That would be a fascinating piece of this history,

00:09:25.800 | of the development of the format of the Bible.

00:09:28.800 | But I know how they function. They function, again, helpfully in the right ways,

00:09:33.800 | but the problem is they tend to take over.

00:09:35.800 | And what it does, again, is I say it prevents long-form, in-depth, kind of lose-yourself-in-the-text reading.

00:09:45.800 | I don't know if you ever knew the book The Shallows by Nicholas Carr,

00:09:49.800 | what the Internet is doing to our brains.

00:09:51.800 | And I think he has a fascinating chapter in there about how, in electronic media,

00:09:56.800 | when we have these built-in distractions, hyperlinks, ads running down the side of the page,

00:10:03.800 | a million things on a page to look at and click on,

00:10:06.800 | those distractions become actually addictive to our brain.

00:10:10.800 | And in fact, there are studies that show that actually starts to rewire our brains,

00:10:15.800 | so that our brains prefer the distractions and like to keep clicking on new things

00:10:21.800 | rather than stick with a long piece of text, reading it, absorbing it, understanding it in a deeper way.

00:10:28.800 | And I think, you know, cross-references down the middle column of a Bible,

00:10:32.800 | they're kind of an early version of a built-in distraction system.

00:10:36.800 | They tell us that if we jump around the Bible, looking at this verse and that verse,

00:10:42.800 | not necessarily stopping to take the time to read each of those references in its own context.

00:10:48.800 | What kind of book am I looking at? Is this poetry? Is it a letter? Is it a narrative?

00:10:54.800 | And what's the context of what's happening in that book?

00:10:57.800 | I think the danger of a cross-reference system is that it becomes a kind of an out-of-context distraction system

00:11:04.800 | that tells us this is serious study of the Bible,

00:11:07.800 | when actually it can easily become a superficial kind of study of the Bible,

00:11:11.800 | unless I stop to do the due diligence of making sure every reference that I'm looking up is read in its own context,

00:11:19.800 | which of course is a time commitment. It's a commitment to read the Bible a particular way.

00:11:23.800 | The danger is, I think I'm really getting significant Bible study, topical study, these sorts of things,

00:11:31.800 | but there's a clear danger. And again, I'd say the first and the primary and the most natural thing to do with the Bible

00:11:38.800 | is to read individual books at length in their own terms.

00:11:43.800 | So understanding the kind of literature it is, who was the author, who were they writing to, what was the issue, those kinds of things.

00:11:50.800 | One of my first Bibles was a Thompson's chain reference Bible.

00:11:54.800 | You would pick a topic and then bounce from Genesis to Revelation verse by verse thematically.

00:11:59.800 | I'm having flashbacks of that right now, but you're exactly right.

00:12:02.800 | Biblical cross references are like a pre-digital hypertext, really.

00:12:08.800 | You ask this question in the book, I think it's so important, I want you to address it now.

00:12:13.800 | You say this, "Which of the following is the Bible most like?

00:12:17.800 | A. Bartlett's familiar quotations, B. The Reader's Digest Guide to Home Repairs,

00:12:24.800 | or C. The collected papers of the American Anti-Slavery Society." Great question.

00:12:31.800 | These are illustrations, of course, not exact representations.

00:12:34.800 | So what is more close to the right answer and what do the other two options imply?

00:12:40.800 | Right. We want to believe, and many times we're presented with a Bible that's either A or B.

00:12:45.800 | That is, it's either a collection of familiar quotations, so we see the usual suspects,

00:12:51.800 | Philippians 4.10, Jeremiah 29.11, Joshua 1.9, all these verses that get regularly shared as the most encouraging, most uplifting collection.

00:13:03.800 | It presents the idea, and social media I think has just made this problem kind of even stronger, it's heightened it,

00:13:10.800 | that the Bible just is a collection of these little gems, these precious one-liners,

00:13:17.800 | that just do amazing work to encourage us and strengthen us and so forth.

00:13:22.800 | So there's that, and the problem is that answer says, well, the Bible is meant to be used in a way that

00:13:29.800 | you can look past all those verses that don't fit this model and find the good ones.

00:13:35.800 | Now, we never really stop to ask, why are these good ones buried in all this other text,

00:13:40.800 | and what do we need that text for? If we're not using it for our daily encouragement,

00:13:45.800 | I don't really need the other text. And so it narrows the Bible down into these really tremendous bite-sized pieces that we love,

00:13:55.800 | but it ignores the rest of the text. So it misrepresents what the Bible actually is,

00:14:00.800 | and has just become the way that we're familiar with using the Bible.

00:14:04.800 | The second answer, B, the Reader's Digest Guide to Home Repairs, again,

00:14:09.800 | says that the book was designed to be a kind of a self-help book. That what I do is I think of a topic,

00:14:16.800 | marriage, for instance, and I look up all the verses, all the passages that are about marriage,

00:14:22.800 | and I think that by adding them together, I can get the Bible's teaching about marriage.

00:14:27.800 | Problem is that that kind of work isn't contextualized. It doesn't say, well, the marriage of the patriarchs

00:14:33.800 | was set in a certain cultural setting, and it operated a certain way in ways that we don't do,

00:14:39.800 | things that we don't do anymore, ways that we don't operate, and had assumptions that we don't work with anymore.

00:14:44.800 | So you can't just look up the marriage of, say, Jacob, and say that's a model or something for what God's intention is for marriage in every respect.

00:14:54.800 | It isn't. And through the story of the Bible, God's teaching about marriage moves forward into more light, I would say,

00:15:05.800 | which is this key point that I really learned from Gerhardus Voss, who was a professor of biblical theology at Princeton

00:15:12.800 | back in the day, and really did tremendous work on helping us read the Bible well as a revelation that gets more clear

00:15:19.800 | as it moves toward Christ and towards God's ultimate intentions for human flourishing.

00:15:25.800 | So really, we need to end up with C, the collected papers of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

00:15:31.800 | That is, the Bible is a collection of different kinds of writings, each of which exists in its own context,

00:15:38.800 | its own literary form, and they have to be taken as this kind of a collection.

00:15:43.800 | It's true that the collection of the Bible comes together to tell this amazing, redemptive, restorative narrative of what Jesus the Messiah has done,

00:15:54.800 | but the books themselves are the core units. The Bible is the collection of those things.

00:16:00.800 | It's not a collection of verses. It's not a collection of little how-to passages.

00:16:05.800 | Again, it's a matter of receiving the Bible on its own terms, receiving the Bible in the form that God actually chose to give it to us.

00:16:14.800 | That, I think, is something that our modern format tempts us to move away from.

00:16:20.800 | Yeah, it certainly does, and the market seems to push these "scripture McNuggets," a phrase you use in your book,

00:16:27.800 | these isolated verses applied to a situation of life, not a horrible habit in itself,

00:16:32.800 | but certainly not a sufficient method for understanding the sweep of those books.

00:16:36.800 | You write this, quote, "In an atmosphere where consumer choice is the bottom line,

00:16:40.800 | the pressure is overwhelming on Bible providers to shape the Bible to these market-driven expectations.

00:16:46.800 | The core proposal is that these and similar tools will help you quickly find the small pieces of the Bible that seem to speak directly and meaningfully

00:16:54.800 | to you individually, without having to bother with who these words were first written to and what they might have meant then."

00:17:02.800 | Where do you see this, and what types of things illustrate this market trend in your mind?

00:17:07.800 | Yeah, it's interesting. My own experience, nearly three decades in Bible publishing, in a non-profit setting, yes,

00:17:14.800 | but we also know what it's like to have market pressure.

00:17:17.800 | Donors, and when I was selling Bibles in a non-profit atmosphere, there were still demands that I felt as the publisher to make the Bible a certain kind of thing.

00:17:30.800 | We always would introduce helps into our Bibles.

00:17:33.800 | This introductory material, the front and the back of New Testament, Gospels of John, Bibles,

00:17:38.800 | our material is mostly used for low-cost outreach and evangelism, but I felt that pressure.

00:17:45.800 | When we met with a partner, and we're producing a specialty New Testament, one of these niche products for a certain kind of target audience,

00:17:54.800 | you know, think of the whole list of the kind of Bibles that you see these days.

00:17:58.800 | When I met with that partner and they said, "Yeah, here are the verses that we found that are most helpful for this audience."

00:18:04.800 | And I would say, "Well, I think the whole Scripture is helpful for this audience."

00:18:08.800 | And we would have these discussions, and I would feel the pressure to say, "Yeah, but these people aren't readers.

00:18:14.800 | They're not big readers. So this audience, we can't expect them. It'd be great if they would read more of the Bible,

00:18:19.800 | but we can help them find these little Bible vitamins that especially speak to this situation that they're in."

00:18:25.800 | So this desire to kind of adapt the Bible to an audience in a market sense so that people will buy a product.

00:18:33.800 | And I think, and that's a really dangerous thing because the Bible is what it is.

00:18:38.800 | And it has words of correction and teaching besides just encouragement and promises.

00:18:46.800 | And so the danger with a market-driven Bible is that the pressure is to turn the Bible into a very happy thing all the time.

00:18:54.800 | And it's hard to sell people correction, for instance, you know, depth.

00:19:01.800 | These are things that people don't necessarily want to buy. They want to be encouraged.

00:19:04.800 | Life is hard. We understand that. But the Bible has to be respected kind of for what it is.

00:19:11.800 | And so there's been a real change, I think, in how people think about the Bible with the increasing commodification of the Bible.

00:19:18.800 | Making the Bible into a commodity that has to be bought and sold will necessarily put pressure on the Bible to be a certain kind of thing.

00:19:27.800 | And we need to be really aware of that as the Church.

00:19:31.800 | The Church should be the prime caretakers of the Bible, not something like a business, in my opinion.

00:19:37.800 | Because business has a goal. It's not that they're bad people. It's that businesses have to sell things.

00:19:44.800 | And there's pressure to form things in certain ways when something has to be sold.

00:19:48.800 | Whereas the Church is free to say, "This is the Word of God. This is what it proclaims. This is what it teaches."

00:19:54.800 | We have to conform ourselves to it, not it to our consumer desires.

00:20:00.800 | Yeah, we must think of how the market demands influence our Bible design and how we engage the text as a key point.

00:20:07.800 | In your book, I sense another caution, an implicit pushback as I read it. And I think it's healthy.

00:20:14.800 | You seem to say that for a lot of us, when we say that we have confidence in God's Word,

00:20:19.800 | what we're really saying is that we have a certain amount of confidence in an edition of a study Bible that puts enough guide rails around the text

00:20:28.800 | to protect a reader from messing up on interpretation. Is that right? Do I sense that right?

00:20:34.800 | Yes, there is. And I think that's right. I mean, I live and work among evangelicals.

00:20:39.800 | I have for three decades now in the Bible ministry in particular, Bible publishing, Bible work.

00:20:45.800 | And it's clear that the group of evangelicals that I interact with, they have a high view of Scripture in their minds.

00:20:55.800 | And I'm not doubting the sincerity, but I think the danger is that the Scripture that we have a high view of is so often,

00:21:04.800 | I think this is a danger in particular for Protestants, because we see ourselves as the Bible people.

00:21:10.800 | We're the people who kind of brought renewal and reformation to the church in the name of the Scripture.

00:21:16.800 | This is what the Scriptures actually say. But over time, any group, I would say, can build up kind of its own tradition.

00:21:24.800 | And then it's a danger for every single one of us that at some point we quit letting the text be the text.

00:21:31.800 | And we think of our notes and our guardrails as the thing that is really where the authority is.

00:21:39.800 | Once back when the Christian Booksellers Association were having their annual summer gatherings of booksellers and authors,

00:21:47.800 | those big events that would happen annually, I heard a presentation by someone doing research on Bible use.

00:21:53.800 | Saying that with the average study Bible, what was actually happening more often than people were reading the text

00:22:00.800 | and going to the notes for explanation on the text, people were starting to jump straight to the notes

00:22:06.800 | and not reading the text and just reading the study notes. And again, I think this is a fascinating thing.

00:22:13.800 | And again, it's a huge point in my book, is the relationship of form and content.

00:22:18.800 | Because study Bibles put the design emphasis on the call-outs, the notes, they're usually,

00:22:25.800 | if there's going to be color on that page, it's going to be around the call-out material, not in the Bible text.

00:22:30.800 | The Bible text doesn't really receive significant design attention. So our eyes are even drawn to the notes first.

00:22:38.800 | And I think for many people, the notes then replace the text as the real source of authority.

00:22:44.800 | And I think that's the danger. So the danger with even the group that thinks of itself as having the highest view of Scripture

00:22:52.800 | is that at some point we will say, "I'm so comfortable in my positions, I don't really have to delve into the text

00:22:59.800 | and put things back on the table and just see what the Scriptures actually say again."

00:23:05.800 | Anybody who spends time with the Bible is in danger, I think, of saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this. I've read this.

00:23:12.800 | I got this one down. It's all figured out." We need to make sure we're always ready to listen to the text first

00:23:19.800 | and put our material, which is not inspired, our thinking, which is not inspired like the original text was,

00:23:25.800 | and say, "Hey, a real high view of Scripture says, 'Let the text be the text and always seek to let it speak to me.'"

00:23:33.800 | Even on things where I think I might have my mind settled, you know, and it's true, you can't question everything at once.

00:23:39.800 | We have to have places where we stand, but we need to always be willing to say, "What does the Word of God say?"

00:23:45.800 | not, "What have I always said that the Word of God says?"

00:23:49.800 | Yeah, I think that's a wise and helpful pushback for lovers of study Bibles like me.

00:23:56.800 | So we have this TMI Bible, this Too Much Information Bible, as you call it, which is cluttered with all these things.

00:24:03.800 | When we talk about the market, we talk about "the market." How much of this is really tied to reader impatience?

00:24:12.800 | The time commitment you mentioned earlier, we want the point fast, we want the application now.

00:24:18.800 | Therefore, our Bibles come super technical looking as a reference document.

00:24:23.800 | Right, and much of the material in my book is tied to this, what I call a modernistic paradigm.

00:24:29.800 | Information, and information at our fingertips, is a huge value in the modern world.

00:24:34.800 | We want to be able to access information. The electronic revolution has just heightened that again, so it's now on hyperdrive, this thing.

00:24:42.800 | I expect to be able to look things up. I mean, if you're presenting a talk these days, you know that there are people in the room, you know,

00:24:50.800 | who will check what you're saying immediately as you're talking to Google it, "Is this really what it says?"

00:24:56.800 | So this expectation of instant access to information is a big deal in our culture.

00:25:02.800 | And so this idea that the Bible should be broken down into that kind of information, again, helpful in many ways.

00:25:09.800 | I love my electronic Bibles. I use it, and it's great. When I have YouVersion on my phone, my pastor's preaching,

00:25:16.800 | I can look things up, check things, I'm doing all that. So that's great.

00:25:21.800 | But the danger is, when am I just taking that stuff away, all that information gathering, information accessing,

00:25:30.800 | overloading my brain with multiple distractions, when am I simply living deeply in the text?

00:25:37.800 | When am I reading it, just absorbing it, reading at length, so I'm getting the flow of an argument over time?

00:25:44.800 | In one of Paul's letters, I'm seeing, you know, there are deep things in the narratives of the Old Testament,

00:25:51.800 | things that we don't pick up because we're always reading small.

00:25:55.800 | And so if we would spend time with narratives and see very intentional, like repeated phrases in stories about Samuel and Kings,

00:26:04.800 | those things are crafted very intentionally, and I fear it's just lost on modern readers

00:26:09.800 | who have this bias toward easy, quick access to information, not dwelling in the text at a deep and slow way.

00:26:18.800 | I think the Christian church in a world that is not going to slow down anytime soon, we have to be somewhat countercultural,

00:26:24.800 | as we are in other areas. Morally, we kind of realize there's a need to be countercultural. I hope we do.

00:26:31.800 | But we need to be countercultural in ways that we live within our book.

00:26:35.800 | Even if the rest of the culture doesn't do that anymore, that needs to be something that we form Christian people into being dwellers in the book,

00:26:43.800 | not just people who access information superficially.

00:26:47.800 | That's so good. Amen. But we must end. This has been helpful, Glenn. Thank you.

00:26:52.800 | I'll end by asking you about some really interesting trends. In opposition to all of this, in recent years,

00:26:58.800 | there are some really good options for readers who want a clean Bible.

00:27:02.800 | Bibliotheca went viral as one example. The ESV Reader's Bible is my choice.

00:27:08.800 | And the NIV Books of the Bible functions similarly.

00:27:12.800 | I remember when the ESV Reader's Bible launched last year, I used it to read the book of Ezekiel in one setting,

00:27:19.800 | and it was like nothing I've ever experienced before.

00:27:22.800 | Waves of powerful metaphors and images and no temptation to stop and parse every phrase,

00:27:29.800 | just to let those metaphors wash over me. How do you explain to people the experience of reading a decluttered Bible?

00:27:37.800 | It's very interesting you bring up this question. I've had people push back when I'm giving presentations on this topic,

00:27:42.800 | saying, "Yes, my Bible is busy." As you say, there's a lot of stuff going on on that page.

00:27:47.800 | But of course, I can read right past that, and it doesn't really hinder my reading at all.

00:27:52.800 | And then I hand them one of these new Reader's Editions, which I think I've become the biggest purchaser of these Bibles

00:27:58.800 | because I hand them out to everyone saying, "Yeah, you have a Bible, but you have a modern reference of Bible.

00:28:03.800 | You need a Reader's Edition because that's what we are doing with the Bible these days,

00:28:09.800 | and this is the thing that we have to recover."

00:28:11.800 | Then they read it, and they say, "Wow, that really is a different experience. It changes.

00:28:16.800 | I don't get to a chapter number, no stop signs. I keep reading.

00:28:21.800 | I read in the natural sections when the story takes a break. Maybe that's where I take a break or it changes.

00:28:27.800 | But I don't have these artificial markers telling me that this is an intentional unit,

00:28:32.800 | and this is meant to be taken just on its own out of the context of this bigger writing."

00:28:37.800 | So I'm really excited to see Bible publishers embracing this new kind of reading.

00:28:42.800 | And I hope that all of them will do that with all of the translations that we have available to us these days,

00:28:49.800 | because it's just good for the Bible. It's good for the church that people have a form of the Bible

00:28:55.800 | that lets them see the Bible in something closer to its original form,

00:28:59.800 | rather than the reference book format that everybody has at this point in time.

00:29:04.800 | So I hope they do well for these publishers. I'm glad to see these things taking off.

00:29:10.800 | The Bibliotheca thing was amazing. To think that many people who wanted to get a four-multi-volume Bible

00:29:17.800 | in this clean format, in a well-crafted book.

00:29:21.800 | This is the things we need to start bringing back to our Bibles. Instead of having such utilitarian Bibles,

00:29:27.800 | I think books that are actually crafted to honor the Scriptures as the gift from God that they are,

00:29:33.800 | that will invite people into reading. I mean, it's hard enough to get people to read these days,

00:29:38.800 | but give them a difficult format? What chances do we have of getting people to read Bibles that are hard to read?

00:29:45.800 | And so this new category, I hope it grows. I hope it becomes normal, becomes the new normal,

00:29:51.800 | so that one day soon, anybody who has a Bible will say, "Yeah, I have a reader's Bible,

00:29:56.800 | and maybe I have a reference Bible too, or maybe that's just what I have as a setting on my electronic Bible."

00:30:02.800 | So sometimes I need to reference the Bible. But my main thing with the Bible is to be always reading it.

00:30:08.800 | I'm reading it holistically. I'm feasting on the Bible. I'm not snacking on the Bible anymore.

00:30:14.800 | That was Glenn Powell, the Executive Director of the Biblica Institute for Bible Reading,

00:30:19.800 | a think tank dedicated to studying trends in Bible reading and design.

00:30:23.800 | He's also the author of the new book, "Saving the Bible from Ourselves, Learning to Read and Live the Bible Well."

00:30:29.800 | Also be sure to check out the simplified Bible projects I mentioned in this podcast if you don't own one.

00:30:34.800 | Bibliotheca went viral as one example, but the ESV Reader's Bible is my choice.

00:30:39.800 | The one-volume edition is the one I use, and the six-volume set is coming out in the fall.

00:30:44.800 | It looks very appealing. I can't wait to see that.

00:30:46.800 | And of course, the NIV Books of the Bible project is in the mix too as another option.

00:30:51.800 | Well, thank you for listening to this weekend conversation.

00:30:54.800 | We return on Monday, and I put John Piper back on the hot seat,

00:30:57.800 | answering your tough Bible theology and ethics questions.

00:31:00.800 | I'm your host, Tony Ranke. Thanks for listening, and have a great weekend.

00:31:03.800 | [End]

00:31:05.800 | [Music]

00:31:07.800 | [Music]

00:31:09.800 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

A Short History of Bible Clutter

Chapters