One Man Will Tweet the Whole Bible

Sunday, 15 August 2010

One Man Will Tweet the Whole Bible
By Aaron at Faith and Geekery
This may be a new twist on the command of Jesus to “follow me.”

A worship pastor from the UK has committed to tweeting the entire Bible over the course of the next three years. Chris Juby just started a week ago and is scheduled to finish on November 8, 2013. You can follow him at @BibleSummary. In addition to his Twitter feed, he’s keeping a website archive that also offers other information about the project.

Instead of tweeting the entire Bible word for word (which, let’s face it, wouldn’t work that well with the 140-character limit and would result in an obnoxious number of tweets flooding your Twitter stream each day), he’s summarizing each chapter of the Bible — one chapter per tweet, one tweet per day. That’s quite a bit more manageable, both for him and for his followers.

In an interview with the UK’s Telegraph, Chris explains the inspiration for this project.

It is my normal habit to read a chapter of the Bible each morning and I always read through from Genesis to Revelation.

As I was coming to the end last time, I thought I needed a way of focussing my mind a little bit more on what I was reading. I thought a summary would be a good way of doing this. I already use Twitter, so I thought I’d share my summaries.

So far, it seems to be working out pretty well. His most recent tweet reads as follows:

Gen7: Noah and his family went into the ark with two of each creature. It rained for forty days and forty nights and the earth was covered.

This should be a fun project to watch. Given his summary of Genesis 5 (“Gen5: Adam’s line was: Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech and Noah. Noah’s sons were Shem, Ham and Japheth.”), the books of the law, such as Leviticus and Numbers, should be particularly interesting to see.

Of course, this isn’t meant to take the place of actual scripture reading; it’s simply an additional resource. As Chris said in the Telegraph, “I hope in doing the summary, it will inspire people to read the Bible for themselves. My summaries are no substitute for the real thing.”

While this is a new spin, Bible-related tweets are nothing new. This article at Mashable offers a variety of other religiously-themed Twitter accounts, Christian and otherwise.

What do you think? Will you be following @BibleSummary?