The World Wide Word

I just stumbled upon this site: Bible Gateway. I'm not much of one for religion from a belief side of things, but being a religious studies major in undergraduate I can always appreciate a good resource.

Bible Gateway isn't about to replace my Oxford's Annotated Bible, but it is a pretty good, and free, online source to the bible text. My major beefs are that it only includes the Protestant Canon, leaving out the apocrypha, which are some of my favorite. Also it doesn't have the best part of the OAB, the annotation!

But you can search the texts by keyword, and it has this, which is cool: you can view a passage not only in many language translations, but in different translations and articulations in the same language. Its like a modern day Hexapla! You can really see how loose the language of the bible really is, and how taking any passage literally is literally an exercise in dogmatics. Just try comparing a passage between the three different King James Versions. There is no "literally" when it comes to the bible, because the literature is easy to change! This is a perfect example why any sort of "Bible Code" theory is ridiculous, let alone citing a passage as an example of literal holy law.

The bible is one of the greatest books ever, but it is only great if you can understand what it is. It's an evolving fluid text that traces the history of a large portion of a culture's belief structure. If you want to belief it is the word of god, then fine, but ask yourself why the word of god changes so easy when you click the "Update" button of the version selection. Because God is the Internet? Whoa... subject for a different post...