(upbeat music) - Happy Friday, everyone. A podcast listener named Matt was one of several listeners who emailed us to ask us about a new Bible that's trending online. Matt asks, "Pastor John, what are your thoughts "about the new four-volume Bibliotheca Bible, "which costs $75? "Do we need aesthetically and artistically pleasing Bibles?

"What are the benefits and what are the drawbacks?" - I think the most important thing for me to say is that I love the Bible. Under God, it is the most precious possession that we have in the world, yes, even more precious than other people. And therefore, I support its distribution everywhere and by every means that preserves its accurate meaning and does not sin in the construction or the distribution of it.

That's my overarching passion. Yes, get the Bible into as many hands in this world as possible in a faithful translation in as many forms that will be helpful to people and not undermine the meaning or the truth of the Bible. Now, this project, Bibliotheca Bible, is a project to put the Bible into four volumes with no verse or chapter numbers on beautiful paper in beautiful bindings with the ASV, American Standard Version Translation, which was published in 1901 and is characterized, everybody knows, by a very formal literalism.

I say literalism because it is pretty wooden. It is going to have the these and thous taken out with the corresponding verbs updated. The copyright has expired on that text, so it's in the public domain, which is what makes this project financially feasible, I presume. And the aims, as I understand them, just watching the video that's been made available, is to make a version of the Bible, a form, a packaging of a Bible, which is, quote, "elegant, simple, and pure," and to enable readers to read it, quote, "with a fresh set of eyes," and to, quote, "experience it anew." Now, I pray that that will happen.

I think that's an laudable goal, to want a fresh set of eyes to be created by a fresh presentation. The reason I don't protest the expense of the Bible is because, as far as I can tell, there's no intent on the part of the publisher to make this normative, like, "This is the way all the Bibles should be, "$75 in beautiful bindings." I don't think that's the mindset at all.

The publishers aren't saying, as far as I know, "All Bibles should be printed this way "and be this expensive." And, of course, it's nothing new, right? I own a $200 Bible because it was given to me, because it's got a lambskin cover. I mean, there are Bibles of every price imaginable, ranging from 50 cents to hundreds and hundreds of dollars, based largely on the nature of the cover and the binding and mass production and all that.

So I'm happy to have the Bible available in another format, with enough formatting differences to draw people into it in a fresh encounter with the Word of God. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. You can't bind the Word of God. It's running free and doing its work wherever you faithfully present it.

But it might be helpful to hear just a few reasons why I think this Bible won't replace traditional Bible formats. I mean, for all the good things you can say about taking out verse divisions and chapter divisions, for freshness' sake, there are some really good reasons why this will not do away with, and should not do away with, our traditional Bibles printed with verse divisions and chapter divisions.

So here are a couple of reasons. One, because we love to share our discoveries, and the greater the discoveries are, the more we want to share them, and verses make it possible for us to share something we saw because we can tell people it's that chapter so-and-so and verse so-and-so, and they can just find it and share it.

Number two, we love to study our Bibles and see what the Bible say about all kinds of topics and how one part of the Bible sheds light on another part of the Bible, which means that we need to find our way around in five or 10 or 20 places in the Bible that speak about something, and it's very hard to do that if you can't jump around with the help of verses and chapters.

Number three, we love to memorize precious sentences in the Bible, but we know the danger of taking them out of context. With verse and chapter divisions, we can find our way right back to the context where we are learning and see what it says in the surrounding verses. Number four, we love to teach groups of people what the Bible says, and in a group, it's very helpful to direct all the eyes to the same place, and we can do that way more easily if we can say it verse so-and-so in chapter so-and-so.

Fifth, we're not only citizens. This is a comment about the beauty of it. I love beauty. However, we are not only citizens of this world who savor the beauty around us, right, including book bindings and layouts. I'm reading a book right now about George Herbert, and it's simply beautiful.

The paper's beautiful, the cover's beautiful, the writing is beautiful. I love just holding the book, so I resonate with what's behind this. We are that kind of human being. We're not animals. We love beauty, and the Bible ought to be, at times, presented in that kind of way, but we are also pilgrims who are aliens here and who travel lightly on our way to heaven and are striving to get the Bible, its message and its truth into as many hands as we can, which means simplicity and economy become, in some contexts at least, just as important as elegance.

A Bible that costs $1, and there are Bibles that cost $1, can be put into the hands of many people more easily than a Bible that costs $75, and so that pilgrim principle, I think, drives us to economy as well as beauty in different settings. And one last thing.

The ASV will never replace the more readable contemporary versions. It is literal, and I love that, but it is wooden also, and in some places, so structurally foreign to our way of writing that there are greater barriers than these and thous that people are gonna run into. So last thing I'd say is God bless the project.

God bless it, and may thousands of people not just encounter the text in a fresh way, but may God himself make his way through this new version into people's lives. - Amen, thank you, Pastor John, and for more on this project, go to the website bibliotheca.co. And it's probably worth mentioning here that Crossway has just recently released the ESV Reader's Bible, which is a one-volume Bible with a lot of the same aesthetic values of the Bibliotheca Bible, but for only a fraction of the cost.

I think you can get a copy for 20 bucks right now on Amazon. It's worth checking out the ESV Reader's Bible. Also, it's no fair for Pastor John to ever mention a book he's reading without giving us the title. The title of that George Herbert book is titled Music at Midnight, the Life and Poetry of George Herbert, authored by John Drury, D-R-U-R-Y.

Well, speaking of reading beautiful books, the weekend is upon us. I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and we'll see you on Monday. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)