AUDIO BIBLE | AUDIO BIBLE REVIEWS

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Materials for Pastors

By Joe Felim

If you are a pastor or other religious leader, you know that getting your church members into and reading the Bible on a daily basis is the key to spiritual growth, church growth and outreach. But did you know that over half the people around the world cannot read? Just under half the people in the United States read at a level that makes them incapable of understanding what the Bible says. If this is the case, and you are a pastor trying to get your congregation to read, then what are you to do? There is one bright light that makes sharing the Word of God with members of your congregation much easier, and that is the audio Bible. There are many versions of the audio Bible. The King James audio Bible, the NIV audio Bible, and the Catholic audio Bible, are available in both a CD and mp3 format, making for ready access by your congregation.

The types of materials that pastors will find available online includes the New Testament recorded on a CD, in a compressed mp3 format. What this means is that you can receive CDs for every member of your congregation, who can then play them at home on ordinary CD players, computers and DVD players, and listen to the Word of God at home or anywhere there is a playback device. The New Testament is also available in a downloadable mp3 format, allowing for it to be transfered to a tiny portable mp3 player. This makes Bible study easy to take with you anywhere you go.

By using the Internet, church members and leaders can also find New Testament readings and missionary stories from the field available in a podcast form. The result is that you can subscribe to the podcast, and then select the podcast episodes you wish to listen to on your home computer or mp3 player.

Pastors can use this digital technology to reach young church members as well. You will find children’s versions of the Bible stories of the Old and New Testaments, as well as a host of great age-appropriate sing-along songs, available on CD, mp3, and podcast formats. In this way parents can introduce their children, who might not yet be old enough to read, to the power contained in the Bible.

Another benefit to pastors who work in a culturally diverse church is that the audio Bible has been translated into hundreds of languages. Because of this, it is likely that you will find an audio Bible in the variety of languages you need to meet your church member’s specific linguistic needs.

The audio Bible brings God’s Word into the everyday lives of your congregation members, and being introduced to it, allows you to build on what they are hearing, and deepen their spiritual growth along the way.

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Bible Study Tools

By Joe Felim

These days many Bible study resources are available online at no cost, such as Crosswalk Bible Study Tools (bible.crosswalk.com). You can also purchase excellent Bible study software for your computer. If you need advice on Bible study books, ask your pastor or the manager of a Christian bookstore.

Your Bible study can be very profitable by just reading and meditating on the Bible all by itself. In fact, such meditation is essential to spiritual growth. But to learn more, having the right tools is important.

Obtaining a study Bible is the place to begin. But as your Bible studies increase, you may want to invest in some more specialized books. Some to explore:

* Bible Handbook. Provides a great deal of information about each book of the Bible, life in Bible times, history of the English Bible, etc.

* Bible Dictionary. Brief articles on each significant subject, word, and person in the Old and New Testaments. You’ll often find helpful summaries of Bible teaching.

* Bible Concordance. While study Bibles provide an abridged concordance, you can find an unabridged concordance that helps you find every occurrence of a particular word in the Bible. The best-known of these is Strong’s Concordance (based on the KJV) which identifies each Greek and Hebrew word, and gives it a brief definition and a number. Now concordances are available for the NIV and NASB containing Strong’s numbering system.

* Bible Commentary. Bible commentaries provide an overview and running explanation of each book of the Bible. A good place to start might be with a fairly recent one-volume commentary on the whole Bible. There are also a number of inexpensive commentary series available that cover each book in the Bible, if you want to study a particular book in greater depth.

* Word Study tools include an interlinear New Testament that shows the Greek text on one line and a literal English translation below it. A Greek-English Lexicon provides clear, precise definitions for each Greek word in the New Testament. Some of these are keyed to Strong’s numbers so they can be used by students who haven’t learned to read Greek letters. Similar resources are available for Hebrew as well.

* Topical Bible. A topical Bible will give a great many scripture references listed by topic. Great if you’re doing a topical or thematic Bible study.

* Bible Atlas. An atlas contains more than detailed maps. It also describes the geography and places of the Bible, usually with fascinating illustrations and archeological details.

If you were to ask a carpenter to build a house with hand tools he could probably do it. But with power tools the job will go more quickly so that the carpenter will have time to spend on the details. Bible study books are tools that help cut the time you need spend on Bible learning, so you can get to the really important matters of your study — seeking after God himself.

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What is Bible Software?

By Joe Felim

Is software that is designed to display and allow a user to study the Bible. Basic Bible software, typically aimed at mobile phones or older computers, is designed to display the text of a single Bible translation only. More advanced packages have a larger number of features, including displaying a wide variety of theological resources to assist in studying the Bible. Displaying multiple translations of the Bible, along with commentaries about the Bible in their native language assist users to gain insights into the Bible, even if they have little or no knowledge of ancient Greek and Aramaic, languages that the original Bible was written in. Other resources include cross references, lexicons, theological writings, maps, charts and language aids such as dictionaries, grammars and original language texts.

Most Bible software is available as a base package containing a few resources, with the ability to add in additional resources (for free or at cost). Common features include Bible reading and searching, while some software offers features like gospel synopsis, morphological and syntactical searches of original texts, sentence diagramming, note taking, manual and dynamic highlighting, lectionary viewers and so forth.

Interest in using software to display and search the Bible has existed since the early 1980s. This allowed users to search the text of the Bible much faster than would be possible with Bible study tools and materials. So the first Bible programs were mainly used for finding where certain words were located (at first in the King James Bible, then other translations were added). Later as computers improved in their ability to handle foreign language fonts, the original Hebrew Old Testament and ancient Greek New Testament texts of the Bible were added. When working with the original biblical languages, one of the first capabilities to be added was morphology (often called parsing), information concerning the forms of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and other words (many of these parts of speech assume different forms in different contexts). At this point we saw the emergence of Bible software programs, some of which are still around today.