Bible Question:
Greetings. Is there a way that I can create additional paragraph breaks throughout my NASB bible, for purposes of making it more quotable for sermons? Please bear with me here as I go through some facts, purely for the sake of isolating bible study methods. ---- Currently the bible has nearly 1200 chapters with roughly 30,000 verses after my last rough estimate, and I'm greatly rounding the figures out here, so I can do an easier math. Then, we may further tabulate that the average pastor and/or sermonizer in the pulpit will give roughly 100 unique sermons per year (50 on weekends and 50 on weekdays). If each sermon is one hour long (and most sermons are shorter), this then allocates that a pastor/sermonizer does 100 hours of teaching per year directly from the pulpit. Further, the now deceased J. Vernon MgGee did a full radio exposition of the entire bible over a five year period with weekday shows of 1/2 hour each, which equates to 2 1/2 per week for 250 total weeks. Hence, a full bible exposition would potentially require 650 combined hours of pulpit teaching time, according to this vastly approximated measure. Further, it takes approxiamtely 60 hours for the entire bible to be verbally read aloud, as evidenced when the bible is placed onto a cd or tape set, via a bible orater. Hence, one tenth of a sermonizer's pulpit time is spent directly quoting scripture, according to these very rough figures. Whereas, 9/10ths of the time is spent in exposition, etc. ---- Anyway, that's my math so far. So, what's that got to do with anything practical? Well, I went through the bible and isolated sets of the top 100/200/500/1000 scripture units and highlighted them through comparative analysis. This largely started so I could look up verses easier on most any primary topic. I yet need to arrange these scripture units topically into a systemized set of 100 to 400 sermons (or thereabouts) with 4 to 12 quotable scripture units apiece. So here's my problem. I lack an accurate way to practically slice the larger paragraphs in the NASB down into smaller paragraphs of about 3 to 4 verses each. When I teach, I seldom like to quote more than 3 or 4 verses at a shot verbally, because it'll lose people. ---- Is there an efficient way to slice NASB paragraphs into smaller, more quotable units, in a relatively accurate fashion? - Blessings, Reighnskye |
Bible Answer: Hello Reighnskye; Years ago I was involve in Intervarsity Christian Fellowship at the college I attended. While there I went to a week long retreat to Catelina Island off the coast of california with them. There the particular program I was involved in was a study of the first half of the book of Mark. We spent about 5 days for 6-7 hour per day doing nothing but studying those first eight chapters. What you might be interested in was the method we used to do the study. They call it a Manuscript study. They used the NIV though but it will work with any version. They took the first eight chapters and took all the chapter breaks and verse divsion out and ran all the sentances together separated only by the punctuation which they left in. Then during the study we as a classs after reading the manuscript decided where to put paragraph breaks. We then would go through highlighting and circling repeated words or phrases then connecting the repeated words together to see how the sections of manuscript were connected. By locating repeated words we began to see what was important to the writer. It helped to discover context and the ideas the writeer wanted to get across. There were other thing we looked for as well but needless to say I was so impressed by what we discovered in the scripture that this became my primary way of studying ever since. Realise though that even using this method some paragraghs will be more than 4 verses. If you want more information you can probably contact Intervarsity Christain Fellowship and ask them about it. If you want to contact me personally about it my e-mail address is; aerberich@ev1.net Blessing to you Aaron |