TouchBible: a Bible iPhone web app
Thanks to John Bennett (via Twitter) I learned about TouchBible, a web app providing searchable access to the Holy Bible for the iPhone and iTouch from iBibleZ. This is a preview of the application on YouTube:
TouchBible does not offer as many translation options as The Bible Gateway, but does offer the following versions currently:
English
- King James Version (KJV)
- American Standard Version (ASV)
- English Standard Version (ESV)
- Bible in Basic English (BBE)
- Darby Bible Translation (Darby)
- Webster’s Bible (WEB)
- Youngs Literal Translation (YLT)
Chinese
- Chinese 汉è¯/漢語
- å’Œåˆæœ¬ – Chinese Union Version (CUV)
Have you found and tried other online searchable Bible web apps for the iPhone? I used a searchable Bible program on the Palm I used a number of years ago, and have REALLY wanted to have a searchable Bible on my iPhone. The downloadable NT Bible which iBiblez offers is actually just an html attachment you can view using the iPhone’s mail feature. It does support selection of individual NT books and chapters, but not keyword searching. Hopefully developers with iBiblez or other groups will use the iPhone SDK to create an actual application which runs entirely offline and permits Bible searches with multiple translation versions. I’m sure we’ll see that before long!
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It is my firm belief that on the one hand the Bible is a series of 66 books, written by (inspired by) God Himself, but on the other hand it is also a very difficult book. I think that is not possible for people who are not familiar with the main story line of the Bible, the main characters (God, Jesus Christ, Abraham, Moses, etcetera) and the Bible’s great concepts (sin, salvation, holiness, etcetera) to just start reading the Bible and understand what they are reading.
New Bible readers should first take a Bible-course or study a book or a website that gives them an introduction to God’s Scriptures.
While I agree that elements of the Bible can be challenging to read and understand, I disagree with the idea that the Bible is incomprehensible to people who are not familiar with its stories and main characters.
We need to remember that it is God who reveals himself through his Word, and He uses many different mechanisms to reveal himself. I agree that introductory and explanatory/supplementary materials can be wonderful aids to opening up the scriptures for us, but I also would not want to discourage someone from directly opening the Bible and reading God’s Word directly.