Archive for June 2006

We’ve released eighteen new spots in the “Bible for Life” radio campaign. Each one-minute spot has someone reading a passage from the ESV and meditating on it.
This month features Cheri Keaggy, Anthony Evans, Amber Ross, and others.
Listen to all the spots at www.bibleforlife.org.

Crossway has implemented several changes to the audio at the ESV Online Edition.
Flash is now the default audio format
The former default audio type, RealAudio, was painful for everyone involved. Crossway’s tested their Flash solution for five months and have found it to work (and scale) well. You click the “Listen” link, and it plays the [...]

Michael P. Foley wrote in Friday’s Wall Street Journal about the language used in liturgies:
Contrary to widespread belief, there has never been a tradition of the vernacular in Christian liturgy, if by “vernacular” you mean the language we speak on the street. Many of the earliest Masses were offered in a language the congregation could [...]

Bobby at Bobby’s Blog has been studying the Psalms under C. John Collins, a member of the ESV Translation Oversight Committee. Bobby shares one thing he learned about the Psalms:
Anyway, part of the hermeneutic Dr. Collins drills into our heads for understanding how to read and interpret the Psalms is so ridiculously amazing, I’m [...]

Crossway has received a preliminary shipment of the ESV Journaling Bible we mentioned in April. Only a couple hundred remain from this initial shipment at the time of this writing. More are coming in August.

We’ve added a new endorsement to the Endorsements page:

“Excellent job. I find the ESV faithful to the original Greek and Hebrew texts, yet in a very readable format. I am recommending the ESV to my students and faculty.”
Dr. Brett Peterson
President, Coastland University

Our experiment with Mechanical Turk went better than we expected. We were able to approve 85% of submissions automatically, and we ultimately approved 98.3% of submissions. These figures came in higher than we planned: we thought we would approve 80% automatically and ultimately approve 90-95%.
We would (and probably will) use Mechanical Turk again for similar [...]

Justin Taylor points to a four-part series on the history of the English Bible.
Daniel Wallace delivered this series in March 2001, six months before the ESV came out:

From Wycliffe to King James (The Period of Challenge)
The Reign of the King James (The Era of Elegance)
From the KJV to the RV (from Elegance to Accuracy)
Why So [...]

Update 3:20 PM U.S. Eastern Time: All the HITs have been uploaded and claimed, so none remain. Thanks to the 78 of you who participated. We’ll let you know how it works out.
We want to pay you two cents (US$0.02) to help us improve the ESV text database. You don’t need any special biblical knowledge.
What [...]

George at Grantian Florilegium praises the ESV:
I have been using the English Standard Version almost exclusively for the past three years now—for teaching and preaching as well as for personal study and devotions. The more I use it, the more I appreciate it. Besides the extraordinarily clear and accurate text, the helpful cross reference system [...]