My Bible Project

All Christians begin their theological reflection with a reference to the Bible.  All my life I have tried to understand the Christian message.  As an emeritus professor of religious studies, I begin my retirement Bible project at the age of 74 in 2013, by reading the bible in French, La Sainte Bible: traduite en francais sous la direction du L’Ecole Biblique de Jerusalem, the 1961 edition of the Jerusalem Bible that I first studied in 1962.  As a guide to help me with this translation I will use the New Revised Standard Version of the New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha: An Ecumenical Study Bible Completely Revised and Enlarged, the 1994 edition.

For the New Testament I will also use Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine by Eberhard and Erwin Nestle and Kurt Aland, the 1960 edition that I used fifty years ago. To help with the Greek New Testament text, I will use The Jewish Annotated New Testament of the New Revised Standard Version, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, 2011, along with the two editions mentioned in the first paragraph.  As a further aid I will use the on-line Bible Concordance http://biblesuite.com/h/hezron.htm.

Although the original texts had no chapters or verses, I will use the common chapter and verse format found in the Jerusalem Bible, along with the various titles and subtitles in the chapters of this edition.  By reading in a language that is not my mother tongue, I hope to gain a greater comprehension of the texts beyond the common understanding. I will then write a short summary and commentary about each paragraph or section that I am reading, using the French and English versions, along with the various footnotes that these editions of the Bible have provided.

I am going to go through the Bible, book by book, chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, paraphrasing and citing each section of Bible.  This is not a task that will be accomplished in a year or two, or maybe ever at all.  However, I set out on this adventure with a basic understanding of the Bible, as an old man who has spent some time reading and thinking about these writings.  Now, I want to do it in a comprehensive sharing way.