I’m particularly excited about a project we’re working on about niche Bibles. Our feature will be a gallery of various Bibles, but it will be supplemented with an essay by Glenn Paauw, a longtime director at the International Bible Society. Paauw is a one-of-a-kind editor, reader, listener, and general force for good in his part of the world, and for years he’s been working on a dream of his called The Books of the Bible. Paauw’s dream came to life last year when IBS released the first edition of The Books, which is a Bible without additives–no verse numbers, no chapter numbers, no footnotes or gutters or much of anything save pure text. It’s also an attempt at reordering the actual books of the Bible to reflect other possibilities of reading and experiencing the text. 

Over the last few centuries, we’ve come to believe that the key to better Bible reading is to add more and more stuff to the text. Modern Bibles are cut into two columns and laced with cross references, footnotes, section headings, commentary and all manner of what-not and hooha. We’ve split books that were originally whole and severed natural connections within big sections. Our Bibles are a complicated mess. 

Bible additives like these left philosopher John Locke complaining that the scriptures “are so chop’d and minc’d, and as they are now Printed, stand so broken and divided, that . . . the Common People take the Verses usually for distinct Aphorisms,” and “even Men of more advanc’d Knowledge in reading them, lose very much of the strength and force of the Coherence, and the Light that depends on it.” In other words: we’ve adapted the Bible to the point that it’s nearly impossible to understand. 

Paauw suggests that if Bible literacy is down, and it is (along with all kinds of religious literacy), then part of the blame rests on the way we’ve been publishing the Bible. An organic Bible, he claims, might encourage actual reading of the text.