Marking Up Your Bible

In my men's Bible study, we talked about ways of studying the Bible, including marking up your Bible with notes along the way. The idea is to have one copy of the Bible that is set aside for this particular purpose so that you can make notes in and around the text as you make observations. When you come back to that same text later, you have your own notes to help you remember what you've noticed before. Plus, just the act of writing notes helps you to think your way through a passage.

It's best to have just one Bible for this, so that you don't have notes strung around in many different places. Choose a Bible that has good space in the margins for personal notes. I recommend a translation that is more literal, such as the NASB, ESV, or NKJV. Other kinds of translations, such as the NET or NIV, are good to have for other purposes, but since individual words will make a difference (as you will see), your "mark up Bible" should be one of the more literal translations.

You can certainly choose your own method of mark up, but stay consistent! Think a long time before starting to mark up to make sure you have a system you want to use. You don't want to mark up one way, and then later change your mind and mark up another way, and then end up with a Bible with different kinds of mark up. You might even make some photocopies of some pages to "practice" on to see which mark ups you want to use.

Let me share my method, not because it's any better than other methods, but just as an example. My method is pretty simple:

• Circle: I circle words or phrases that are repeated in a passage. For example, in Isaiah 45, the idea there being "no other" God is repeated (vv. 5, 6, 14, 18, 21, 22, 24), even though different words are used. So I circled each occurrence. Now, every time I go back to Isaiah 45, I see some circles and quickly realize that the exclusive nature of God is an important theme in this chapter.
• Underline: I underline commands, especially ones that apply to us. Later, when I see an underline, I know there's a command for me to obey in that passage. I don't usually underline commands given to people in the narrative if the command doesn't apply to us (like telling Moses to go to Egypt - it's a command, but not to us, so I don't underline it).
• Exclamation point: In the margin, I put an exclamation point next to thoughts that are particularly important. Maybe it's the key point of the passage. Maybe it just strikes me as I'm reading as being particularly important. The exclamation point is like saying, "Look here!"
• Check mark: I put a check mark in the margin next to promises, especially promises that apply to us. Maybe they are promises that have already been fulfilled, maybe not, but the check mark alerts me that there's a promise from God to us here.
• Highlight: I don't highlight much, but if there's a phrase that is a core truth to the Christian life, I'll highlight it. I also highlight cross-references in the margins that I've looked up and have found to be particularly helpful.
• Square underline: I will underline some words or phrases with tips on each end to make the words look like they are sitting in a shallow box if the word or phrase is defined by the passage. For example, John 17:3 says "This is life, that..." The phrase that follows defines what "life" is. So I put a square underline under that word to alert me later that this verse defines what "life" is.
• Margin notes: Sometimes, you've just got to write a thought in the margin - no other mark up will do. These include inspired thoughts, cross references not already list, helpful interpretations, etc.

Be careful not to mark up too much! If you mark up everything, it's as good as marking up nothing, and then your Bible is harder to read. Be smart. As an extreme example, most sentences in Mark start with "And..." Don't bother circling every "and" - yes, it's repeated, and yes, it means something, but you don't want all that ink spilled on your pages.

Also remember that whatever you mark up and write will be there for the rest of the life of that Bible. I've written down things and then years later read it again, wondering, "What was I thinking?!? That's the stupidest thing I ever saw!" Try to mark up the things you think will also be relevant tomorrow and next month and next year.

For those who have a problem writing in their Bibles, I have one piece of advice for you: Don't do it. If you don't want to, then don't. It helps to have a Bible dedicated just for this purpose which you can treat like a pre-filled notebook of Biblical texts for notetaking, but if you'd rather not, don't do it and don't worry about it. This is not the test of a true Christian.

Find your own method. Some of you probably have mark up habits that I would like to use myself.

The Latest NIV

The 2011 update to the NIV translation of the Bible is due out this month (the online version has been available since last Fall). One of the major goals of this translation was to provide a more "gender-inclusive" translation. The issue is that original languages (Greek and Hebrew) often used masculine pronouns ("he," "him," "his") and related words in ways that were intended to include both genders. The new NIV, along with the earlier TNIV and the NRSV, attempt to provide a version that doesn't grammatically exclude women.

This is a noble goal. For those passages that are clearly intended to apply to men and women alike, we want the text somehow to reflect that. No one should feel like an afterthought in God's plan. But this approach to translation is not without its difficulties:

• Many gender-neutral translations change passages that really should be left in the masculine. For example, being a "son of God" is not exactly equivalent to being a "child of God." Not that sons are better than daughters, but that there were certain unique aspects to the sonship relationship in the culture of the author that get lost in these translations - the idea of inheritance, responsibility, carrying on the family name, and so on. Those ideas are part of the imagery of the phrase, but we lose it when the translation only focuses on the more generic child relationship.
• In order to make a passage gender-neutral, often times the translator has to resort to an awkward phrase (for example, using "sons and daughters" every time "sons" occurs). The extra wording can clutter up a sentence easily. Using the masculine, with an inclusive meaning, reads more smoothly.
• Or, the translator will use a plural ("they," "them," "theirs") instead of the singular in order to neuter the sentence. This effectively takes gender out of it, but then you've changed the nuance of a phrase, losing the personal touch of an individual relationship with God, and sometimes sounding grammatically incorrect.

The noble goal has plenty of landmines. An attempt to clarify the meaning of a passage can actually skew the meaning of the passage, which by definition would be a poor translation.

For more information about the new NIV and the translation choices they made, see the following websites: http://www.cbmw.org/Blog/Posts/CBMW-Responds-to-New-NIV2011 and http://galvestondailynews.com/ap/bee3b4/.

The NET (http://net.bible.org) does a very reasonable job of indicating when a passage is meant to be gender-inclusive. They make pretty good choices of when to retain the masculine wording, and every time they choose a more gender-inclusive phrase than the original language, they make a clear note of it. So, you always know what the original said, plus you get a good indication of which verses are meant to transcend gender.

The interesting point for me in this is the translation principle - if the text says "men," but the text means "men and women," what's the best way to translate it? If it says "men" and means "men," then the answer is simple (but some translations still change it!). But should a translation mirror the verbal text or the meaning of the text? The answer is that both can be good choices, as long as the reader knows what you've done. The translator should either leave the text alone and let the readers and commentators decide, or they should change the text with a clear note of what the original says. That's why I like the NET - they do this well. Only when it's obvious to be inclusive should the translator even consider a more inclusive phrase. When in doubt, the translation should leave the text as is.

Translating the Bible is filled with difficult choices. With the hub-bub around the new NIV, I don't want to immediately criticize it just because some gender-loaded terms got translated in an inclusive way. That can be a valid translation. However, as the CBMW article above notes, there are enough of unnecessary changes in the new NIV, changes that skew the meaning, to be a very strong concern. (Furthermore, there are enough difficulties with the current NIV that I choose not to use it, and especially not for teaching.)

We should all know that the original languages used the masculine for a convenient and clear style, not to exclude women from God's grace. A good friend of ours, Dr. Fred Sanders, made the recent observation that it's not just the women who have to tolerate being called "sons of God" - we men have to tolerate being called the "bride of Christ"!

The NET Bible

I like to use several different translations of the Bible, depending on my purpose. I like the New American Standard Bible (NASB, Update 1995) and the English Standard Version (ESV) for study, although I sometimes use others. I like the New English Translation (NET) for personal reading, and sometimes for study. Some translations are more word-for-word ("literal", such as NASB, ESV, NKJV, NRSV), and some are more thought-for-thought ("dynamic equivalent", such as NET, CET, NIV).

The difficulty with translating is that a strict word-for-word translation often comes out very difficult to understand in English. For example, a very literal translation of Romans 5:8 is "But demonstrates his own love into us God that yet sinners being we, Christ for us died"! We get the point, but you wouldn't want to read an entire Bible like that! Every translation makes it more readable in English than this, but some go further than others to smooth out the language. But, the further one goes to smooth out the language, the further from the original it gets.

There are several websites that have many translations available for reading, comparison, and study. I particularly like Logos, YouVersion, and Biblos. They allow you to compare translations, make personal notes, even share your notes with others, and investigate the original language versions (Greek and Hebrew). There are many others: The Unbound Bible, StudyLight, BibleGateway, and so on. Many versions have their own on-line versions, like the ESV.

One of my hands-down favorites is the website for the NET. The NET is a translation that's meant to be a little easier to read (it's more of a dynamic equivalent than a literal), but it stock-full of thousands and thousands of footnotes. But the footnotes in the NET are different than in most Bibles, giving you the best of both worlds in translation.

Most footnotes are commentary about the text or something about the ancient copies of Scripture. The footnotes in the NET, however, are mostly about the translation choices made by the translators. In other words, most of the extra comments are about why the translator translated the passage as he or she did, what other options were available, and so on. If the NET chooses a phrase that is more clear in English, there's often a footnote telling you what the Greek or Hebrew phrase is literally. So you get the best of both words - a very readable translation, but also information about what the original language says quite literally.

The NET website also has tons of other study tools: You can get to the Greek and Hebrew easily. There are commentaries, lists of hymns and artwork that go with the passage you're reading, and a way to compare several translations at once. And of course, you can search for just about anything - and it will find what you're looking for in not just the NET translation, but in any of the 10 translations it supports.

Give the NET a spin. Just click here. And if you want to really have fun, the main website that hosts the NET Bible is called Bible.org, which has online articles, audio, video, self-study courses in theology, and so on. (And for super Bible nerds, my newest favorite website is BibleArc.com, which is a great tool for analyzing the structure of a passage - watch the helpful instructional videos to watch how it's done.)