The Big Idea: Hundreds of millions of people read the Bible online, looking for truth, meaning, and help. We are working to make the world's most truthful, meaningful, helpful Bible Study site.
Since 2011, the New Christian Bible Study project team has been building a site that lets you go to the Lord's Word in a comfortable language, and - while you're there - get insights into its real inner meaning, and then how to use those insights to live a better life.
Here are 4 of the key pieces:
1. A nice, clean, friendly user interface (20 languages so far)
2. The Old and New Testaments (85 translations in 48 languages so far, with comparisons, lookups to the Hebrew and Greek, and much more).
3. Swedenborg's theological works, including his detailed Bible exegesis (now up to 445 translations in 24 languages, plus 48 original texts in Latin)
4. Explanations. We offer 13,000+ explanations of Bible chapters, stories, words, and spiritual concepts - enough to keep you busy for a while!
Is this working? Yes! We welcomed more than 4.2 million visitors in the past year and... it's a very global audience. More and more, we're seeing people get engaged. They tell us how this project has helped them. They ask good questions. They're volunteering to help, too, and it's really heartwarming to see the love and talent and insight that people bring to the table.
We're happy with the results we're seeing, AND we still have many things that we need to do.
Here's what we're hoping to do next:
- We're going to keep working to create good, well-researched, approachable chapter summaries for every Bible chapter. We're about 60% of the way towards this goal now, and it's going well.
- We want to make the meanings of Bible words clearer. We used some older texts to start this, and we're updating the whole data set, so readers in more languages can readily see the symbolic meanings of the key words in every Bible story. It's been a slog through dense tomes, but it's working.
- We are gradually getting more translations of the Bible - modern and accurate ones - in all the major languages. We have a lot now, but there's still room to improve!
- We've processed almost 500 texts in our "Writings for Everyone" initiative, and we still have around 125 gaps yet to fill. Some 30 of those are in the works; there's lots happening, in French, Japanese, Spanish, Zulu, Hindi, and other languages! There are active pipelines in at least 12 languages. We work closely with the translators to get the texts clean and cross-linked, and get them online.
- And much more, too -- we're working on ways to make your reading and studying easier, and more readily applicable to your life.
We have a small team of contract software developers who do the core work, and volunteers who help with writing, editing, audio content, video content, art selection, text markup and importing, scanning -- many things! We've also had great help from student workers each summer; it's been a real team effort.
Many, many thanks too, to the many generous donors who have financially supported the project. With no endowment, it's been a nail-biter at times.
If you like what we've done, and where we're headed, please consider making a donation.
