Union Church of Bay Ridge

Advanced Study Links for Bible, etc.

These are links for sites that are helpful when you know your way around a little.

click here for the Revised Common Lectionary

at pcusa.org

(once there, you can navigate between the Sunday/Festival cycle of readings

and the daily devotional cycle of readings)

click here for a link to Vanderbilt Lectionary Project

(all the readings for all three years, plus a great collection of royalty-free art)

To find an online edition of the whole Bible, RSV and KJV,

the National Council of Churches recommends the Bible Browser of an organization called "oremus.org"

click here for a link to www.devotions.net/bible/00bible.htm

this will do simple searches, find quotes, passages, etc.

But now you ask, "How do I really research a particular idea in the Bible?

How do I follow a concept through the Old and New Testaments in the Bible?"

The same way your computer finds things.  You search by keyword.   Those of you who have legal training will know what a concordance is.  In fact, the earliest concordances were developed when legal scholarship was still focused on the "law of God" --the Bible.

A Biblical concordance is simply a list of every word in the Bible and every instance in which it is found.  If you are looking for a phrase, search by the word in the phrase that is the least common. 

Here's the best online concordance I have found:

click here for a link to www.bibletab.com

This is a reputable conservative-evangelical resource, which means that it is very good on Bible (even includes original-language info), but be forewarned, some of its links may take you to...some odd corners of the Church Universal.  Some notes on how to use a concordance:

• A concordance is particularly useful for seeing how the Bible itself understands the meaning of a word (look up "helper" if you have a minute), or for finding a particular verse or story when you can only remember a few words. 
• if you're trying to remember a quote, use a King James Version concordance, that's probably what's rattling around in your head.  Then you can use the website's software to find a more modern reading if you like. 
• If you can't find the quote searching by one keyword, try another. You might be misremembering a word.  Remember that the concordance can't search by concept, only by actual word. There is a Roget's Thesaurus to the Bible, but not on line.  Ask your pastor, she has one in her library. (Or Amazon will be happy to sell you one.)
• If you still can't find it, consider the possiblility that it might not be a Bible quote, but a quote from something else (Shakespeare and Benjamin Franklin are two sources commonly confused with Scripture).  Google it and you will probably find it.
• Remember that every concordance is tied to actual words in a particular version, so if you really want every instance of a particular word in its original language, you have to use a Greek concordance for the New Testament and a Hebrew concordance for the Hebrew Bible (a.k.a. the Old Testament). 
• Mercifully, someone called Strong noticed this about a hundred years ago, and came up with a numbering system which is now standard, so in the online concordance you find first the "Strong's number" for the word you're interested in, then go look up the word by that number and you'll find, not necessarily the English word, but every instance of the original word in the original language, and all the different ways in which that Hebrew or Greek word has been translated, depending on the context and/or the point of view of each group of translators. Most instructive.

Remember, your pastor doesn't really know many facts, what she knows is how and where to look things up.  She has a lot of reference books and is happy to help you learn to use them.