Six Best Phone Apps for Bible Students
One Saturday as I worked at my desk in an empty church building, one of my congregants appeared at my door and said, “Doug, I’ve got someone here I’d like to introduce to you.”
In a moment, I was shaking the hand of a former congressman and current head of a major endowment in the Obama administration. He had a substantial and learned bearing and I was a little star-struck having such a prominent national figure suddenly sitting down in my office.
He was in our town to give the commencement address at the local college the next day. He was a houseguest of my parishioner.
This visit, however, was more than just a friendly greeting. The two men had come to my office in a bit of a crisis. They explained to me that the guest’s speech was based on a beloved Bible verse, which he had memorized in childhood. The verse had become part of his philosophy of life.
As he was reviewing the speech he decided that he ought to make sure that he had memorized it properly and had remembered the chapter and verse accurately. Borrowing a Bible from my parishioner, he went to the passage. He was horrified to read words that were completely unlike what he had memorized. He looked at the verses before and after and nothing seemed familiar. He checked to see if he had turned to the wrong book. With a rising sense of panic he told his host of the dilemma and the two of them drove to my office.
I was confident, as they explained the situation, that I knew what had gone wrongly. He had, I guessed, memorized the verse years out of a King James Translation. He then consulted a contemporary translation that was in my parishioner’s home and was startled at the difference.
I pulled down a King James Bible. He recited the verse and the chapter and verse numbers.
“Oh boy, I thought,” panicking myself, ”these are a mile off.” My thoughts raced. Was the verse a variant reading that no longer appeared in contemporary translations? Were we in the wrong testament? I was at a loss.
Finally, I had him recite the verse one more time and I typed it word for word in a Google search box.
A stream of results came back. We had our answer. He had remembered the biblical words perfectly. What we hadn’t anticipated was that the translation he had used as a child was completely unfamiliar.
Public embarrassment averted. Google.
We live in a time when a vast amount of information is available to anyone who has access to a computer. With a simple smart phone an elementary school child gains access to a wealth of information which far exceeds the 2500 years it took to gather a half million scrolls which filled Egypt’s famous Library in Alexandria, the most significant center of learning in the ancient world.
Google is an amazing gateway that brings it all to our fingertips.
There are other sites as well. With a few taps, important information, which even experts would have to hunt for, is available quickly and simply.
Simplicity is part of this. I’m sure that there are a hundred best sites for Christians. But once you have more than a couple places to go to find information, you’re back in the need for some kind of expert to point out where to look.
Here are five more apps or websites that I find myself consulting over and over. Some of them are phone apps and can be found at the Play Store. Others are adaptive websites that are useful enough to warrant placing an icon on the phone’s home space.
The Apps
oremus Bible Browser
This site will give you the Bible in King James and NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) versions. There may be better sites for various English translations. I have one on my own website’s Bible reading page that takes readers to an NIV translation. But I keep Oremus bookmarked on my laptop computer because it gets me to any Bible verse quickly. If my writing calls for a verse or two from the Bible, I can retrieve that text in seconds, copy and paste, and navigate around quickly.
Oremus gives the additional benefit of being an English concordance. A concordance is an simple and powerful tool that basically rearranges a book by the word. If I wanted to locate ever occurrence of the word, “house” in the Bible I’d go to the concordance and look up “house.” It would give a column of references.
Oremus provides a search box for the user to type in any word. The search process returns a list of chapter and verse citations.
It’s Oremus’ simplicity and speed that earns it a place on this list.
Interlinear Old Testament and New Testaments
This app (OT NT) or website will allow the user word for word translation, parsing, and lexicon for the whole Bible. As word “interlinear” implies, this application displays Bible text as several parallel lines of information. There is the Greek or Hebrew text, the English translation and transliteration, which helps with pronunciation, and clickable references numbers which take the user to standard lexicon definition. Finally, each word is parced, which means that its grammatical role in the sentence is laid out.
When the two apps, one for each testament, are available, a user can check a text as an independent source of information. This can be done in church, class, or while watching television. What was once to private preserve of scholars in theological libraries is now at the fingertips of anyone who can download the apps.
Christian Classics Ethereal Library
I’m not sure why the word “ethereal” is necessary other than to give this site a memorable handle. This site is just what it says it is–a library. The Christian movement has produced quite a literature over its two thousand years. Saints, theologians, commentators, spiritual directors and famous ministers have recorded their thoughts in a fairly large collection. This site is the card catalog and all of the books that would fill this collection. If you wanted to consult one of John Wesley’s sermons, Calvin’s biblical commentaries, or St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries, you’d find it here. As with the other sites listed here, access to this library frees us from reliance on someone else’s interpretation. It allows us to venture into intellectual territory that was once the private preserve of theologically educated leaders.
There is not a phone app for the CCEL. But users can download an icon from the site onto their phone desktop and bookmark the library on their laptops.
Hymnary.org
This is the musical version of the CCEL. Anyone who loves hymnody will want to know about this resource. Hymnary.org contains a vast collection of hymnbooks, hymn tunes, lyrics, and background information. Church goers, about 20% of Americans, care deeply about the hymns they sing and the content of their hymnbooks. A minister can stand in the pulpit and preach the Arian Heresy and the congregation will barely notice, nor care. But if the minister selects an unfamiliar hymn or one deemed offensive, there might be an ugly scene at the church’s front door as the congregation exits.
The Revised Common Lectionary
This site is perfect for worship leaders who need quick reference to the various Bible lessons that are linked with each of the Sundays and holidays of the Christian Year. As a minister, I was forever struggling to retrieve the chapter and verse of the lessons that were linked to the dates of our worship services. That changed when I stumbled onto this website. Sponsored by the Vanderbilt Divinity School, this site allows users to synchronize the lectionary with their Google Calendar. Suddenly, my computer and phone calendar always has the correct Sunday reading on display.
The use of scheduled readings from the Bible grew out of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the late 1960’s. Today, many Roman Catholic and Mainstream Protestants base their worship services and sermons on assigned texts. Lay users of this lectionary site will have a pretty good idea of what many, if not most, churches will be talking about on any given Sunday. This site also provides suggestions for prayers and music, which link to the scripture lessons of the day.
All of these favorite sites are the opposite of slick. They won’t do your thinking for you. But they will save you the time-consuming hunt for the kind of data that will ground your thinking in hard facts.
