Saturday, August 29, 1998

PC resources speed up study; just be careful, religious scholars say

By Vikas Bajaj

The Dallas Morning News

The computer screen is split into quarters. One lists the chapters of Genesis. Another has a glossary. One displays a biblical passage, and the fourth lets you pick the translation. Will it be the Authorized (King James) Version or one of a dozen others?

A click on one word speeds you forward through several thousand years of biblical history to a New Testament passage with a similar theme or to a later appearance of the same word.

Another click can show how the King James differs from the work of modern scholars; yet another delivers expert commentary.

Electronic Bibles -- Torahs and Korans, too -- are a scholar's tool, a layperson's guide and a use of technology that has some experts jubilantly chanting"revolution" and others nodding cautiously.

Dozens of CD-ROM titles and Web sites are making it easier to look up passages and reference material, compare translations, and unearth differences and similarities within holy texts, tasks that take much longer with leather-bound books.

Electronic links within a holy text and between reference works -- coupled with high-powered search tools and immense storage capacity -- have made it possible to put scriptural libraries onto a CD and the Internet.

Much of the development has taken place in the past five years, with electronic Bibles leading the way, said Tom Beaudoin, author of "Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X" (Jossey-Bass Publishers).

"It's a mistake to think that God somehow wished the technology of the book to be the technology of the Bible," he said."The presence of God is no more confined to a page than a computer screen."

In the days before the printing press, most Christians' experience of the Bible was wholly aural. The text was read aloud and sung in church.

"What's happening is revolutionary -- maybe even more so than Johann Gutenberg," the inventor of the movable type press, said William Nix, president of the Dallas-based Electronic Bible Society.

The nonprofit society, which is supported by gifts, puts rare religious texts on CD-ROMs and distributes them for a donation.

Electronic versions of Scripture range greatly in their offerings. Some include a small resource library. Others just have multiple English translations.

CD prices range from $50 to $500. Internet sites are free.

The software is gaining a large following in seminaries and among ministers, said John R. Walters, associate professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky.

"The nice thing about these tools is that they include a lot of other tools," he said."It helps a great deal to bring a lot of scholarship together in some powerful ways."

For example, concordance software can be used to track the occurrence of Greek or Hebrew words and how their English translations differ throughout the Bible.

But intellectual pitfalls await the uncritical user.

Walters said some Bible readers mistakenly assume that a word or phrase in one passage is synonymous with the same word or phrase in another.

"Just because one of the passages uses 'son of man' in Isaiah and in the Gospel doesn't mean Jesus and Isaiah meant the same thing," he said.

Such differences are more difficult to notice in electronic resources because they quickly transport the user from one verse to another.

Seminarians are divided over the technology, said Burge Troxel, Dallas Theological Seminary's directory of academic computing.

"There are some faculty members that believe the computer is a shortcut," he said."Others would say we are training ministers, not scholars. Our objective is to help them use this to make sermons."

Besides shortening research hours for scholars, the software is marketed to and popular with families and laypeople.

"It has a lot of promise for getting an average person who is interested in the Bible to do some of their own study and not rely entirely on the study of others," Troxel said."To let them glean insights for themselves -- that's always a more healthy Christianity."

But religious authorities emphasize that there is no substitute for study under an expert.

The Talmud, a collection of Jewish writings, is"available in book format as it is in a CD-ROM format, but even if you have the book you still won't be able to understand it unless you study it with a rabbi," said Rabbi Yaakov Rich, executive director of the Dallas Area Torah Association.

Others caution that, unlike a traditional concordance, an electronic concordance can take away the adventure of exploring the text.

Beaudoin said electronic texts present only the material that the user wants to see, often out of context. The danger is that readers won't see the holy texts in their totality.

"A lot of Christians since Gutenberg have had biblical knowledge that is a mile wide and an inch deep," said Beaudoin, who is pursuing a doctorate in religion and education at Boston College."Now with the cyber technology, you can have a knowledge that is a mile deep and an inch wide. Ideally, you want a broad and deep view."

Reservations aside, scholars say the electronic tools can be a good supplement to traditional resources.

"What I find is this kind of technology is a further step in helping people take their spiritual life into their own hands," Beaudoin said.

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