I was happy to have the opportunity to talk about 35+ years of developing Bible software, starting at home, then at Parsons Technology, then at Laridian. Check out biblebuyingguide.com for reviews of Bibles and other materials related to reading and studying the Bible.
Your Power Supply is Smarter than You Think
I recently purchased an Apple Vision Pro. I’ll eventually have some thoughts about this platform and its potential for Bible software, but right now I want to talk about that boring little brick you plug your iOS device into when you charge it.
I’ve owned an iPhone since the day it was introduced, an iPad since its launch date, too, and now a Vision Pro 1.0. Just like many of you, I have drawers and computer bags full of those little USB power supply bricks and a variety of the bigger ones that come with MacBooks. I figured out a long time ago that I can plug any device with a USB charger into any USB power supply even if it’s intended for a different device. So I charge my iPhone and Watch with my MacBook charger and have been known to plug my MacBook into an iPad charger just for grins.
When I got the Vision Pro, I saw someone on YouTube put a meter inline with the charging cable and note that it would draw up to 60 watts when connected to his MacBook power supply, even though it ships with a 30 W power supply.
I have just a little bit of experience with electronics, having learned Ohm’s Law for my ham radio license 50 years ago (!) and having built a number of transceivers and other electronic gizmos. I’ve been assuming that all these devices needed 5V at some number of amps — 1.5 A for iPhones and 2.1 A for iPads and many more amps for my MacBook. They are all interchangeable, so they must all use the same voltage, right? Maybe just limit the current?
Wrong.
Turns out these little power supply bricks are smart. They talk to your device and negotiate a voltage the device can use and the current limit the supply might have at that voltage. Between your device and the power supply, they work out the optimum arrangement for operating your device and charging the battery. Voltage ranges from about 5V to about 20V and current is adjusted so as not to exceed the limits of either the power supply or the device.
I guess they’ve been doing this since about 2012. Who knew? Not me.
Image by ChatGPT/DALL•E, of course.
The Unattainable Quest for a Perfect Bible Translation
It is impossible to translate the Bible accurately. Your English Bible does not say what the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts said. And this isn’t just a problem with English — since Jesus spoke in Aramaic, the original Greek texts of the Gospels didn’t say what Jesus said.
These words might sound outrageous, but they are factual. Whatever we believe about the inerrancy, infallibility, and inspiration of the original autographs, and whatever we believe about the preservation of God’s Word through the ages, we need to come to terms with the nature of language and translation when we read the Bible in a language and a culture outside of that in which it was written.
Language is Rooted in Culture
Each human language is a product of the environment, culture, history, and collective consciousness of a group of people. These factors determine the vocabulary, syntax, idioms, and other features of the language that people speak in a given region at a given time.
Linguists believe that the human brain is wired for grammar and that babies don’t have to be taught to speak as much as taught how the language of their family fills in the blanks in the concept of grammar that they already have in their newborn minds. Despite this, because external conditions are different everywhere, languages develop in ways that make them markedly different.
Consider the Pirahã language, spoken by the Pirahã people of the Amazon. It has no words for specific numbers. It has concepts like “some” and “many”, but not “seven” or “seventy times seven”. If you believe that it is significant that Jacob had 12 sons and Jesus had 12 disciples, how do you convey that idea in in the Pirahã language? If you believe Daniel’s “seventy weeks of years” started on a particular date and ended (or will end) on a particular date, how would you translate that to Pirahã?
Sometimes the problems aren’t technical, but cultural. How do you convey the precise meaning of the Inuktitut word “qaggiq” in English to an American? Yes, it’s a large communal snow-house or igloo used for community gatherings, dances, and traditional celebrations, but are you sure you understand its full depth of its meaning to those who live in a communal culture with social practices very different from your own? Consider a more relatable example: are you sure you can explain to a person with no exposure to any Western religion the difference between a church, synagogue, temple, and a mosque? Even if they understand that these are all “buildings for religious activity”, and that a church is specifically Christian, can you convey the full range of memories and emotions that you recall when you speak of your church? And once you get that down, can you make that person understand that your local church is not so much a building as it is the manifestation of a metaphor?
The point is that the simplest words have meaning that are rooted in the culture in which they are spoken. An American might cringe to hear his British friend say he’s going to put on a jumper before going out in the cold. And imagine the shock to the Brit when the American says he need to change into a different pair of pants since they’re going to a fancy restaurant! Even though both of these people speak English, it’s not the same English because language is cultural. One puts on a sweater, not a sleeveless dress (“jumper”) before going out in the cold in America. And one might change his trousers, not his underwear (“pants”) when going to a fancy restaurant in the UK.
Languages Are Spoken, Not Written
We tend to think of English in its written form. Many or most of the grammar rules we learn in school apply when writing, and when we’re translating the Bible, we’re translating from one written form to another.
But languages are first and foremost spoken. It’s statistically rare for a language to have a writing system. Only about 10% of the world’s 6000-7000 languages have a writing system. And many of those 600 or so writing systems are understood only by the scholars and practitioners who create them — the people who natively speak the language have no need to read or write it.
As a result of the fact that language is a spoken phenomena, languages exist and have meaning for very short periods of time. And they naturally evolve. While English has been around in one form or another for about 1600 years, you’d have a very difficult time understanding any English speakers from just 500-600 years ago. Most of us struggle with the KJV, and it’s only 400 years old. And we only understand the KJV when you show it to us in writing, modernize the spelling, and explain to us that ye, yu, and yt should be read “the”, “thou”, and “that”, since “y” in those cases is standing in for the archaic English letter þ (thorn). We’d also need to think hard about “long s” in words like “ſinfulneſs” (sinfulness) and “Goſpel” (Gospel). These don’t affect how the language was spoken, but are evidence of how language (in this case, written language) changes over relatively short periods of time.
Languages Die
The implication of the fact that languages that are primarily spoken rather than written is that when the last native speakers of a language die, the language dies with them. This brings us to biblical Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. These are dead languages. Nobody speaks the ancient dialects of these languages any longer. What we know about them comes from analyzing ancient texts, inscriptions, and manuscripts; comparing with known languages and deciphering through similarities; studying modern dialects; translating ancient dictionaries and lexicographical works; and uncovering inscriptions or writings that shed light on ancient languages. These are imprecise and incomplete efforts.
The fact that the biblical languages are no longer spoken yields interesting problems. For example, we refer to Habakkuk as “Habakkuk” only because the Hebrew word חֲבַקּוּק occurs in two places in the book and it looks like it might be someone’s name. We don’t really know what it means or where it came from so we simply transliterate the Hebrew. Similarly, the last verse of Habakkuk contains the word נְגִינָה, which occurs only in this one place in all of ancient literature. It’s usually translated something like “stringed instrument” or left out entirely, but any translation of it is just a guess.
The word translated “daily” in the Lord’s prayer (Matthew 6:11) is ἐπιούσιος in Greek, and occurs nowhere else in Greek literature. We don’t know what it means. The prefix ἐπι- means “upper” or “above”, so we assume “needed” or “necessary”. So maybe “daily bread”. It’s just a guess.
There is No “Right” Philosophy of Translation
These problem in translation don’t necessarily change any major doctrine or invalidate your salvation. But what they do is speak to the issue of the big argument we all like to have about whether our favorite English Bible is better than the others. Does it emphasize “formal equivalence” or “functional equivalence”? Or is it one of these other translation philosophies:
- Formal Equivalence:
- This is another term for the “word-for-word” or “literal” approach, emphasizing maintaining the form of the source text, including sentence structure and words.
- Functional Equivalence:
- Similar to “dynamic equivalence”, this approach focuses on conveying the intended function or meaning of the original text rather than adhering to a strict word-for-word translation.
- Optimal Equivalence:
- This approach attempts to strike a balance between formal and functional equivalence, aiming for a middle ground between adhering to the source text and ensuring comprehension in the target language.
- Free Translation:
- This is a more liberal approach to translation where the essence of the original text is retained, but the translator has the liberty to rephrase, add, or omit text to make it more comprehensible or relevant to the target audience.
- Paraphrastic Translation:
- Similar to paraphrase, this approach involves rewording the original text extensively to explain or clarify the meaning, often expanding the text considerably.
- Idiomatic Translation:
- This approach focuses on translating the ideas into the idiomatic expressions of the target language, ensuring the text resonates with the cultural and linguistic norms of the target audience.
It is a logical fallacy to think you can pick one of these and have a chance of being “right”. That’s not how translation works. There is no “correct” way to translate the Bible. One Christian cannot say to another that the translation he or she is using is “bad” because it is a paraphrase. Or because it is too literal. Or because it isn’t literal enough. You can’t have a preference among these translation philosophies because none can lay claim to being accurate all the time.
So What Do We Do?
It should be obvious that we’re asking all the wrong questions when it comes to choosing an English translation of the Bible. It is literally and objectively the case that no translation of the Bible can be said to be “best” (or “worst”), and that even “better” (or “worse”) is a subjective term. Any translation that makes an attempt to convey the meaning of the source material without introducing bias (such as changing the gender of a person or injecting the translator’s dogma or tradition into the text) is as good as any other.
This leaves you and I in the position of having to use external resources such as commentaries and Bible encyclopedias to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. We should compare multiple English translations and explore the causes for differences when we discover them. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of trying to find The One English Bible that is True and Accurate. It would be nice if such a thing existed, but life isn’t always easy.
This is PocketBible’s very raison d’être, and why we’re not satisfied with doing what other major Bible apps do when they publish dozens or hundreds of translations of the Bible and no reference material.
PocketBible for Android Updated – Version 1.7.15
On Tuesday, August 29, 2023 we uploaded a new version of PocketBible for Android to Google Play (version 1.7.9, build 290). This is the first update in quite a while — we’re a little embarrassed to say it’s been about 5 years. Since the end of August we’ve uploaded several revisions — the latest being 1.7.15.
Because of the issues you’ll read about below, it was necessary to get this update released as soon as we could. As a result of jumping 5 Android versions (from version 8 to 13 — that’s “Oatmeal Cookie” to “Tiramisu” for those of you who follow Google’s cutesy naming system for their operating systems), we knew we would discover little things that would need to be fixed right away and so far that has indeed been the case. Updates are documented near the end of this article under “Phase 1”.
Why So Long?
I don’t want to make any excuses but I also want to be honest about what the situation is. You may know that the development team here is pretty small. We don’t have people assigned to each platform. We move from iOS to Windows to macOS to Android as needed. I originally developed our Android app, but pretty quickly passed it off to a more junior person. When that person left, I hired a replacement. About 5 years ago, that person left, too.
By then, the app was in pretty good shape and didn’t need a lot of updates. It had gotten to where I no longer knew my way around the code. And since I’m not an everyday user of the Android platform in the same way I am iOS, the operating system changed to where I no longer knew it either.
So when the Android app eventually needed updating I went to an Android programmer I knew who worked on it as a side gig for a few months. Eventually he took a different full-time job and couldn’t work on it any longer. So I found a really good contract developer who did a lot of the work to bring it into the 2020’s and get us almost up to Android 12.
And then this Bible thing happened…
Why Update Now?
If you’re a regular reader of this blog (that’s about 4 of you I think), you know that earlier this year we discovered a problem in the way Bibles are processed and stored for use in PocketBible. When we first wrote PocketBible, any time a new Bible was released we had to update the code in PocketBible and release a new version. This is because Bibles are very special and form the heart of how PocketBible works. That means any unique aspects of how they interact with other Bibles and with Bible reference books often has to be done directly in the PocketBible code.
So years ago we updated the Bible format PocketBible uses so that these unique aspects could be embedded into the Bible and not require PocketBible itself to be updated each time we released a new Bible. Turns out we didn’t go far enough. We have several new Bibles coming out that are just different enough that they couldn’t be published without updating every version of PocketBible. So we decided to stop what we were doing on the new Windows version of PocketBible and update every other version of the app. Then go back to the Windows version and update it, too, for this new format.
The macOS version with these changes was released a couple months ago. The iOS version is in beta.
And then this Google thing happened…
PocketBible Disabled on Google Play
Google decided late last year that if your app wasn’t built with the latest or next-to-latest version of their SDK, that you couldn’t be on Google Play. (It is more complicated than that, but that’s the net effect.) They said they were going to disable apps starting in May 2023. But they gave us the option to request an extension to August 2023, so we took it.
Then, after acknowledging we had until August, they said they changed their mind and they were going to pull the app in May.
We were right in the middle of macOS and iOS updates at the time and had been planning to get to Android before the end of August, so we have spent about 3 months explaining to people how to side-load PocketBible and bypass Google Play.
This forced us into a two-phase approach to making the Bible-format updates to the Android app. First, we needed to bring it up to date with the latest SDK. Google required version 31 compatibility, but version 33 is the latest so we went all the way to 33. Until that was done, it was pointless to start into the change for Bible files
Phase 1
Version 1.7.10 (September 2, 2023) addressed these issues:
- If you were using an SD card to store your books, they seemed to have disappeared. The method of finding your SD card changed in a recent version of Android OS and PocketBible was looking in the wrong place. It should be able to find them now.
- When using the dark UI theme, the list of books open in the active pane was displayed with gray text on a gray background. Similarly, the pop-up list of recently visited verses was similarly gray-on-gray.
- The dark mode theme was inexplicably using a dark blue color instead of a black color for the top and bottom action bars. Turns out this change was introduced as a debugging tool by a contract developer and we kind of liked it so we left it in. You did not like it. We reverted to black and very dark gray for the action bar, bottom action/tool bar, pane tabs (AFS), and go-to-verse buttons.
- An issue with viewing and saving Autostudy reports (AFS) was resolved.
- Resolved an issue that caused the app to crash when “Buy/Apply Upgrade” was selected from the navigation menu.
- Books that include the Laridian logo on the title page now use our newer blue and orange logo. In the process of doing this we fixed some previously unreported problems with displaying images.
- In the process of doing this upgrade, the minimum supported version of Android OS went from 4.1 “Jellybean” up to 4.4 “Kitkat”.
Version 1.7.11 (September 7, 2023) addressed these issues:
- We thought we had fixed Strong’s number searches but we hadn’t.
- Title page logo image was not being displayed on newly downloaded or moved books.
- Splash screen image was too tall on tablets in landscape orientation.
- Changed the image on the login screen to the new Laridian logo.
- Made internal changes related to how colors and styles are applied in the dark and light UI themes. There could be minor color changes as we seek to better organize the code in this regard.
Version 1.7.12 (September 20, 2023) addressed these issues:
- Re-architected the process of launching the app to get control over the transition from the onboarding slideshow, registration reminders, and registration/login screens to the main book view.
- Addressed a problem where deleting a book would remove it from the list but not actually delete the file.
- Added new UI color schemes for AFS subscribers.
- Minor changes to the default “Light” and “Dark” UI color schemes to improve general appearance.
- Treat the legacy AFS and AFS subscription differently, since features are now different between the two.
- Revert to “no AFS” if the user logs out of their account.
- Show logged-in customer ID, feature set, and AFS expiration date in About box.
- Get rid of boxes around bottom action bar buttons.
- Style the audio and autoscroll context menu bars with rounded corners and slightly more transparency.
- Added an option to control whether or not pane tabs show the book category (AFS). Only show the category when pane is inactive. Active panes always show abbreviation of active book.
- Removed “Exit” from the action bar menu. This is a hold-over from when mobile operating systems did a bad job of managing memory when apps were left running. It’s 2023 and nobody exits apps anymore.
- Don’t do the navigation menu animation demo. We all know there’s a slide-out menu on the left side of the app.
- Updated Help to describe tabbed panes. Include info on turning on/off categories in pane tabs. Document new AFS features.
Version 1.7.13 (September 25, 2023) addressed these issues:
- Restore “Journal” to the navigation menu for Legacy AFS owners. In 1.7.12 it accidentally required an AFS subscription.
- Make standard “Dark” and AFS “Black” themes darker based on user feedback.
- Adjust splash screen blue to match launch icon blue.
- Add an option to disable linked-to verse highlighting.
- Fixed some problems running on Android 4.4
Version 1.7.14 (September 28, 2023) addressed these issues:
- If the user deletes the Users Guide then selects “Help”, it is automatically reinstalled from the app bundle.
- Words of Christ could be unreadable or appear be displayed in the wrong color when certain highlight colors were used and “words of Christ in color” option was turned off.
Version 1.7.15 (October 6, 2023) addressed these issues:
- Resolved an issue where bottom action bar was getting partially hidden (or over-compensated for) under certain circumstances related to pixel density:
- Split screen
- Side panel open
- Note editor (or any time keyboard was showing)
- Addressed several aesthetic issues when font size was set to its largest and smallest sizes in Android Settings and when “make everything bigger/smaller” was set to its extremes:
- Pane tabs (AFS).
- Note title above editor.
- Go-to-date dialog for devotionals
- Go-to-verse spinner and book/chapter/verse picker for Bibles.
- Margin preference screens
- Splash screen
- Made the text color used for book titles on the library lists have more contrast.
- More correctly position the autoscroll and audio toolbars in more circumstances (AFS).
- Addressed further problems with saving and printing Autostudy reports (AFS).
Phase 2
The above just gets us to where we can start doing the work we came here to do. We need to port the C++ code that has already been implemented in PocketBible for macOS and iOS to Java for Android.
Beyond
Once we get this work done, we hope to more actively update the Android app. Admittedly, it has been a bit of a problem child over the years and we’ve let it get away from us. But more importantly, finishing work on this version will let us return our focus to PocketBible 3 for Windows, where we have to do it all again in yet another programming language.
Thanks for your patience.
No Exit
While updating the Android version of PocketBible over the last couple of weeks, we took what we thought would be the non-controversial step of removing Exit from the action bar menu. In the light of some complaints, I thought I’d explain.
History
While the removal of the Exit function from PocketBible for Android seems abrupt and a step backwards in terms of giving users control over what’s going on on their device, the fact is that it’s the presence of the Exit function that is an anomaly.
Back in 1993-94 we experimented with Bible software on the Newton MessagePad. Including an Exit option on that platform was allowed, but the OS did a good job of managing memory without it and it wasn’t absolutely necessary.
Introduced in 1996, Palm OS discouraged apps from having a way to exit. It managed apps itself. Users weren’t supposed to think of “apps” so much as accomplishing a task. The idea of “launching” and “closing” were foreign to the “Zen of Palm”.
At about that same time, Windows CE was telling developers that mobile users didn’t need an explicit way to close their apps; the operating system would handle it. The app didn’t ever terminate itself; it was just told when it was about to be terminated, then it was terminated by the operating system.
iOS came along in 2007. Apple strongly discouraged developers from including any kind of exit functionality. Again, the OS managed memory better than the user could. Keeping apps around meant they launched faster.
Including the ability to exit an app was not recommended in Android (2008). Once again, the OS was better able to manage resources than the user.
So we come into last week’s decision to remove Exit from the action bar menu with a 30-year history of mobile operating systems discouraging or disallowing “exit” or “close” functionality in apps.
Benefits
The main advantage to the user of allowing the OS to manage running apps is that frequently used apps are more quickly and easily available.
Android facilitates this behavior by being able to intelligently decide which apps it should terminate to make memory or other resources available for the currently running app. It has ways of controlling how much CPU time is used by background apps so they can continue to work if necessary without affecting the responsiveness of the foreground app. (PocketBible doesn’t do any work when it’s in the background, but many apps do.)
Allowing Android to decide when to load and unload apps lets it more effectively manage battery life by minimizing loading activities and controlling background activities.
Android is able to predict which apps a user is likely to launch and keep them ready in memory as part of reducing launch time as described above. Similarly, it can terminate infrequently used apps when you’re done with them.
The Dark Secret
Don’t tell anyone, but that Exit option didn’t actually terminate PocketBible. What we did was programatically press the “back” button on the bottom of the screen while ignoring our own navigation history. So it was as if you had pressed “back” a dozen times to get past all the verses you had visited, then pressed it one more time to go back to the launch/home screen. We maintain your navigation history for your next session, of course, but internally that’s all we were doing.
Android has a “halt” method we can invoke to force the app to stop, but using it is strongly discouraged. It doesn’t allow for a controlled exit of the program and can cause data loss. So, yeah. Exit didn’t exit.
So How do I Exit the App?
Easy. You can exit PocketBible the same way you exit all your other apps, and with fewer screen taps than you were doing before. Just tap the “Home” button (or perform the “Home” gesture if that’s how you have it configured).
In other words, you could say we didn’t remove Exit, we just moved it to the bottom of the screen and made it look like a little circle. Yeah, that’s what we did — we just moved it to make it more convenient.
You’re welcome! 🙂
God as Friend: The Use of Pronouns in the King James Version
As a young Christian, I spent hours listening to and reading from the King James Version. The archaisms and semantically shifted words that confuse modern readers became normal for me. So when God told Adam he had given him herbs and trees for *meat*, I understood without thinking about it that Adam wasn’t using them to make veggie burgers, but rather he had plants and fruit for food.
But it’s easy to get the wrong idea about how the English language was used by the KJV translators and as a result, come to wrong conclusions about the nature of the Bible and how it speaks about God.
-Eth Endings
For example, by the early 1600’s when the KJV was published, people were saying “walks”, “runs”, and “falls” for “walketh”, “runneth”, and “falleth”. The translators weren’t using the -eth forms of verbs to make them sound more stuffy and formal (the way we hear them today), but were rather borrowing the language of older English translations in order to make the text seem more familiar and traditional.
For example, the Tyndale Bible from 1525 (about 85 years before the KJV) had this for Matthew 17:15:
“Lord have mercy on my son, for he is frantic: and is sore vexed. And oft times he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water.”
The KJV of 1611 reads:
“Lord, haue mercie on my sonne, for he is lunatike, and sore vexed: for oft times he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water.”
The KJV retains the -eth ending as a callback to the Tyndale Bible.
Orthography
The other thing we obviously see is what appears to be a step backwards in spelling. The KJV spells “have” as “haue” and “mercy” as “mercie”. Most people don’t understand the degree to which English was in flux at the time. Spelling was definitely not standardized, though efforts were being made in that direction. People tended to spell as they spoke, so spelling might reflect a regional dialect or accent.
The problem comes when we try to cite the KJV as authoritative in one of these areas. We might make an uneducated assertion that “mercie” was the correct spelling or even preferred spelling on the basis of it being used instead of “mercy”. In reality, it’s hard to justify that position.
If this verse were written in the vernacular of 1611 (at least the vernacular of some of the people of that day), it would not be out of line to say it might read:
“Lord, have mercy on my son, for he’s mad and deeply troubled: for often he falls into the fire, and often into the water.”
This is much closer to the way we might write it today. Here it is from the ESV:
“Lord, have mercy on my son, for he has seizures and he suffers terribly. For often he falls into the fire, and often into the water.”
Second Person Pronouns — Thou vs. You
Another mistake we might make from the language of the KJV is to believe that God is being addressed with great respect through the use of “thee” and “thy” instead of “you” and “your”. Consider this passage from Psalm 25:
4Shew me thy ways, O LORD; teach me thy paths.
5Lead me in thy truth, and teach me: for thou art the God of my salvation; on thee do I wait all the day.
6Remember, O LORD, thy tender mercies and thy lovingkindnesses; for they have been ever of old.
7Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions: according to thy mercy remember thou me for thy goodness’ sake, O LORD.
English used to have “formal” and “informal” pronouns for “you”. This is comparable to “tu” (informal) and “usted” (formal) in Spanish. When speaking to a superior, one would say “You are correct; your will be done.” But when speaking to a child or a close friend, you would use the more intimate “thou” and “thy”. These informal forms sound exactly the opposite to us today. They sound stuffy and formal. But consider Shakespeare — throughout Romeo and Juliet, the various noblemen of Verona refer to each other as “you”. But when Juliet speaks of (actually, unbeknownst to her, to) Romeo, she uses more intimate pronouns:
O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Denie thy Father and refuse thy name:
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworne my Loue, And Ile no longer be a Capulet.
A better example comes a couple centuries earlier in The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. Chaucer wrote in the Middle English Period (late 14th century). In The Miller’s Tale, there’s a scene between the characters Nicholas and Absolon:
Absolon: “Speak, sweet bird, I know not where thou art.” (This line uses “thou,” the informal singular pronoun.)
Nicholas (pretending not to recognize him and using the formal): “Who is it that calls thus? Who is it? You?”
In this brief exchange, Absolon uses “thou” in an intimate, playful manner, while Nicholas responds formally with “you,” establishing a social distance.
What’s Going On?
I believe the KJV transators intentionally refer to God using informal pronouns to make Yahweh seem more personal and accessible. I can’t prove it, but I would observe that Greek has different pronouns for “you” (the one person reading this blog article) and “you all” (all of you who read it over time). It doesn’t have “formal” and “informal” forms of second person pronouns. So the use of “thou” for God and “you” in many other cases isn’t necessarily following the original languages.
Further, as pointed out above, by 1611 “thou” forms had fallen out of popular use, so whatever was going on in the KJV was not following that trend.
From Bethlehem to Calvary: The Life of Jesus and Our Role as Believers
Following up on our last post, I asked ChatGPT 4 to summarize the life of Jesus as presented in the Gospels, then explain what the New Testament says our response to his life, teachings, ministry, and example should be. It generated a dozen titles for this article and I asked it to pick the best one. It picked the one you see above.
I then asked DALL•E to create an image that depicts an event in the life of Christ in a “realistic, Renaissance style” to use with this article. It seems to have depicted Jesus’ birth going on in his tomb while he teaches at some kind of a dog fight and a two lame men crawl to him to be healed. DALL•E has a ways to go, in my opinion.
The Life of Jesus
The life of Jesus Christ, as depicted in the New Testament’s four gospels, begins with His miraculous birth in Bethlehem to the Virgin Mary and her husband, Joseph. This event, heralded by angels and later celebrated by the visit of the Magi, confirms the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies regarding the coming of the Messiah.
As an adult, Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River, marking the beginning of His divine mission. This event is immediately followed by a forty-day period of temptation by Satan in the desert, which Jesus resists. He then commences His ministry in Galilee, recruiting His first disciples – Peter, Andrew, James, and John.
Among the most significant events during Jesus’s ministry is the Sermon on the Mount, where He delivers profound spiritual truths and moral guidelines, including the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus’s time on Earth is also marked by numerous miracles, demonstrating His divine power through acts such as healing the sick, casting out demons, feeding a multitude, and walking on water. He conveys His teachings through parables, offering lessons about the Kingdom of God, forgiveness, and love.
At one point, Jesus is transfigured on a mountaintop before Peter, James, and John, where He converses with Moses and Elijah, further affirming His divine nature. Eventually, He journeys to Jerusalem, resurrecting Lazarus from the dead along the way. His triumphant arrival in Jerusalem, marked by crowds greeting Him with palm branches, signals His role as the prophesied King.
During His final week in Jerusalem, Jesus cleanses the Temple and engages in heated debates with the Pharisees and Sadducees. He foretells His death and resurrection and, at the Last Supper, establishes the practice of sharing bread and wine as symbols of His body and blood.
The climax of Jesus’s life story unfolds with His betrayal by Judas, subsequent arrest, trial, and crucifixion under Pontius Pilate. However, death does not claim Him; on the third day, He rises from the grave, first appearing to Mary Magdalene, then to His disciples. After spending forty days further instructing His followers, Jesus ascends to heaven.
Although the Apostle Paul does not contribute directly to the gospel narratives, his epistles provide profound insights into Jesus’s teachings and their implications. Paul emphasizes Jesus’s role as the Messiah, advocating for justification through faith in Christ, the transcendence of the law by God’s grace, and the concept of the Church as the body of Christ. His teachings illuminate the transformative power of God’s love in Christ, the reconciliation between God and humanity through Jesus’s sacrifice, and the hope of eternal life offered by His resurrection.
Our Response to Jesus’ Life
In response to Jesus’ life, ministry, teachings, and example as depicted in the New Testament, there are several fundamental actions that individuals are encouraged to take.
The cornerstone of this response is faith, a deep-rooted trust in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and acceptance of His sacrifice for humanity’s sins. This faith goes beyond intellectual agreement, involving an inner commitment to Jesus as one’s savior, leading to salvation and eternal life.
Repentance is another pivotal aspect. It means turning away from sin, acknowledging our shortcomings, and striving to change our ways to align our lives more fully with God’s will. It’s an ongoing process of spiritual growth and moral improvement that Jesus’ teachings continually emphasize.
Love, as taught by Jesus, is central to the Christian response. This involves the Greatest Commandment: loving God wholeheartedly and loving our neighbors as ourselves. It means embracing kindness, compassion, and justice, reaching out to others in empathy and understanding.
Obeying Jesus’ teachings and commandments is another vital response. Adherence to His guidance involves ethical and moral conduct such as honesty, forgiveness, humility, and non-retaliation. It’s about living out the principles laid out in the Sermon on the Mount, embodying the values Jesus championed.
Jesus also calls for followership, a commitment to follow His example of humility, service, and sacrificial love. This means willingly bearing individual crosses, forsaking selfish desires, and potentially suffering for Christ.
Finally, Christians are charged with spreading the Good News of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection to all people. Jesus commissioned His followers to share His message, to engage in evangelism and discipleship, leading others to faith and supporting them in their spiritual journey.
Overall, the New Testament presents a transformative response to Jesus’ life and teachings, calling for personal faith, repentance, love, obedience, followership, and commitment to sharing the gospel.
How Did it Do?
ChatGPT 4 did a good job summarizing the life of Christ and teachings of the New Testament, without adding a bunch of expected disclaimers about how opinions vary and that the authenticity of the accounts should be questioned. It also taught me and my spell-checker a new word, “followership”, which is the capacity or willingness to follow a leader.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
The Story of the Old Testament, by ChatGPT
I asked ChatGPT to recount the history of the Old Testament, without getting bogged down in the details — just focusing on the significant parts of the narrative. I then asked it for a creative but appropriate title for its work. I have to say, it pretty much nailed the assignment.
DALL•E kind of punted on generating an appropriate image, but hey; it’s just an AI so cut it some slack.
From Creation to Covenant: Unveiling the Tapestry of Ancient Israel
In the beginning, according to the Old Testament, God created the heavens and the earth, forming the world and everything in it. Adam and Eve, the first humans, were placed in the Garden of Eden but disobeyed God’s command and were banished from paradise.
The narrative then moves to the story of Noah and the Great Flood. God saw the wickedness of humanity and decided to cleanse the earth. Noah, a righteous man, built an ark and saved his family and pairs of animals from the floodwaters.
Next, the focus shifts to Abraham, who is considered the father of many nations. God made a covenant with Abraham, promising him descendants as numerous as the stars. Abraham’s son Isaac and his grandson Jacob continued the lineage.
Jacob’s twelve sons became the twelve tribes of Israel, and his son Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers but rose to power in Egypt. Through a series of events, Joseph eventually saved his family and brought them to Egypt during a severe famine.
Generations later, the Israelites became enslaved in Egypt. God raised up Moses as their leader and used him to deliver the people from bondage. Through miraculous signs and wonders, God brought about the Exodus, leading the Israelites through the Red Sea and into the wilderness.
In the wilderness, God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and established a covenant with the Israelites at Mount Sinai. Moses led them on a journey towards the Promised Land, but due to disobedience and lack of faith, they wandered for forty years.
Joshua succeeded Moses as the leader, and under his command, the Israelites conquered the land of Canaan. They established themselves as a nation and settled in the Promised Land.
The Israelites went through a cycle of obedience and disobedience to God, with various judges rising to lead them during times of crisis. Eventually, they desired a king, and God anointed Saul as the first king of Israel. However, due to Saul’s disobedience, God chose David as his replacement.
David, a renowned king, established Jerusalem as the capital and desired to build a permanent dwelling place for God, but it was his son, Solomon, who built the magnificent Temple in Jerusalem.
After Solomon’s reign, the kingdom split into two: the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. The prophets played a crucial role during this time, calling the people to repentance and warning of the consequences of their actions.
The kingdoms faced threats from various empires, leading to the exile of the northern kingdom by the Assyrians and the eventual destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Babylonians. The people were taken captive to Babylon.
After seventy years, the Persians conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple under the leadership of figures like Ezra and Nehemiah.
The Old Testament concludes with prophecies of a coming Messiah who would bring salvation and establish an eternal kingdom. These prophecies set the stage for the events of the New Testament and the birth of Jesus Christ.
No, Not That Apple
Because we’re a Bible software company and because we produce software for Apple devices (iOS and macOS), we sometimes hear from people who are concerned because of Apple’s deep connections to evil and the influences of Satan. The most frequent evidence cited is the Apple logo, which is clearly the same apple from which Eve took a bite before handing it off to her husband, thus condemning all of humanity.
First of all, the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was not an apple. Apples grow on apple trees. You’ve never seen a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, so you don’t know what its fruit looks like. Or tastes like. And the Bible just says “the fruit”, not “the apple”.
So we could stop there and move on to a more useful topic. But let’s continue.
The Original Logo
Ignoring for a moment that there was no apple in the story of the fall in Genesis 3, and therefore the Apple apple could not refer to the Eden “apple”, it’s reasonable to ask, “Then where did the Apple logo come from?”
The original logo of Apple Computer Co. was this woodcut. In it, we see Sir Isaac Newton about to “discover” gravity when an apple falls on his head. The story is undoubtedly apocryphal, but, just like we imagine naked Adam and Eve gorging themselves on apples behind conveniently arranged foliage, the image of Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree in his Sunday best while reading a book is how we imagine gravity being discovered.
The falling apple inspired Newton to think about gravity. The name “Apple Computer Co.” stands for inspiration and discovery. That’s what the company wanted to be identified with. Hence the incorporation of the apple (and Isaac Newton — a God-fearing Christian, by the way) into Apple’s logo.
The Modern Logo
Very early in their history, the folks at Apple discovered it was difficult to reproduce this complex image on their products. So they reduced it to the essential image of the silhouette of an apple with a bite taken out of it.
“Aha!” you might exclaim. “That’s the bite by which Eve disobeyed God!” You would exclaim that right before I smacked you upside the head and reminded you that the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was not an apple, but rather was the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
No, the bite out of the Apple logo apple serves three purposes. First, it distinguishes the silhouetted apple from the similar-looking cherry (which is also not the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, by the way). Second, it is a play on the word “byte”, the technical term for 8 bits of computer memory*. Finally, it is an homage to famed computer science pioneer Alan Turing, who died by his own hand and was found with a half-eaten apple at his bedside.
As tempting as it is to don my tinfoil hat and go looking for conspiracies behind every (apple) tree, I’m not biting. Not on this one. Sorry.
* A byte is 8 bits of memory. A half-byte (4 bits) is called a nybble. Yes, we computer nerds are a witty lot.
Trying Not to Panic Over Updates to the Bible
Recent updates to the New American Standard Bible, Christian Standard Bible, and, less recently, the New Internatlional Version, English Standard Version, and Amplified Bible have awakened discussion about the possibility of introducing error or succumbing to pressure to conform with the world when updating the English Bible.
There is a lot of misinformation out there about new translations. Christians are put in a very awkward position and most don’t realize the nature of it. On the one hand, we have language, which is continuously evolving. This evolution is relatively slow, but not so slow that you can’t see it if you’re looking for it. Those of us with more than a couple decades under our belts can definitely see changes between how the language was spoken in our youth vs. how it is spoken now. On the other hand you have the Bible, which we hold in high esteem and which we believe to be (or contain) the very Word (or words) of God. We can’t imagine God not expressing himself perfectly the first time, and just assume that our English Bibles should be just as unchanging.
When looked at in the big picture, we understand that we need a Bible written in our native language, and that by that we mean not just English but Modern English. We can probably understand the Great Bible (1540) and King James Bible (1611) but not in their original blackletter font and Early Modern English orthography. Even the vaunted 1769 and early 1900’s editions of the KJV that many Christians cling to as the Bible have been significantly modernized in order to be readable. Despite this innate understanding, we are at least slightly repulsed by the idea of “updating the Bible”.
It’s when we start to act this general understanding (that is, that we need a Bible written in our native language) that we get into trouble. One of the big problems is gender language. Because it’s a politically sensitive issue, there’s a feeling like the Bible should be above it. But setting aside where our personal politics lie, we have to admit that we want an accurate translation of the Bible. The fact is that the biblical languages do not convey gender in the same way English does, and the way English conveys gender has been changing. We try not to say men when we mean people. And we are trying to figure out if we like using they to refer to a single person of unspecified gender.
Personally, I’ve avoided these issues by not picking a favorite. I have a lot of experience with the RSV (predecessor of the ESV and descendant of the ASV) and the KJV (the most successful of the Early Modern English translations). For years I carried a side-by-side KJV/NIV. I was reading from the 1977 NASB when the 1995 edition came out. I’ve read through the Christian Standard Bible (CSB), World English Bible (WEB; modernized ASV), NIV (1984), and KJV; some of these more than once. I’m about 30% through the 2020 NASB. I don’t consider any of these to be the Bible; they are all just translations of the Bible into my language. By adopting this position, I completely avoid any emotional response to any new edition of any of the versions of the Bible I read.
I like to think this is an enlightened, mature perspective. Let others get hung up in arguments over which imperfect translation of one of several imperfect collations of imperfect copies of imperfect copies of the original manuscripts is somehow “best”. I choose to focus on the fact that Jesus summed up 3/4 of the Bible (the Old Testament) in two commandments (love God; love others) and his own ministry in one sentence (the Son of Man came to seek and save that which was lost). Paul summed up his ministry (and thus the bulk of the New Testament) in 2 Cor 5:14-21. Those fragments are enough to occupy one’s life; precisely how they are worded doesn’t change their implications or importance. And much of the rest is just exposition.
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash