28. Look Out, Wycliffe and Tyndale, There's a New Kid in Town

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
——The Merchant of Venice, I.iii

Long after I got back from Athens, dear reader, I did something I should've done before I went, something B. had encouraged me to do before I even officially joined Loudmouth: I loaded a copy of Q.'s Bible software onto my laptop and took a look at it.

Why had I hesitated so long? Well, to be completely, bluntly honest, ignorance was bliss. I had spent enough time reading the churlish copy on Q.'s Web site to know that his software couldn't be anything special. But I didn't want to know just how bad it was — because if it turned out to be really awful, I'd have to reconsider my involvement in the band. And I wanted to go to Greece.

Of course, when I got there, Q. expected me to hand out copies of his software, and I used my ignorance of it as a partial excuse for not doing so. If not quite unethical, this wasn't the most honorable thing I've ever done. After I got home and starting writing about my experience, I knew I'd have to review the software at some point. Naturally, it would now be more difficult to approach the task with an open mind: I suspected my opinion of Q. might color my reading of the software, instead of approaching the software as a way to learn more about Q. But that was a risk I would have to take.

As I've already mentioned, my laptop crashed a few days after I installed the software, so my review will be rather perfunctory. And if it's influenced by the way Q. treated me, too bad. He shouldn't have treated me that way.

Perhaps I'd better start at the beginning, with Q.'s credentials. What, exactly, qualifies him to publish Bible software? Well, in his youth he was a member of a Bible quiz team that placed second in a regional tournament. I can do him one better — my Bible quiz team won the first statewide meet we ever attended. Nyah, nyah, nyah. (Here, for entertainment purposes only, is a satirical, fictional piece from LarkNews on the topic of Bible quizzing.) I can say with some authority that quizzing does enable one to rattle off Bible verses, facts, and figures from the germane to the arcane. One of the more entertaining features at Q.'s old Web site, in fact, was a sort of über–Bible quiz containing questions that ranged from relevant to downright bizarre.

What quizzing doesn't do is equip one with a systematic theology or viable hermeneutic. For that one goes to Bible college, and Q. attended Northwest College (now Northwest University), affiliated with the Assemblies of God denomination.

I'm not saying Q. wrote the über–quiz, because I don't know. But one can see in it the influences of both a quizzing background and a conservative Bible college education. From Bible college come classifications and (rather too glib) thematic summaries of Bible books, as well as the basic ideas about Bible interpretation. From quizzing come arcane questions about the length of time Noah spent in the ark and the number of people raised from the dead in the Old Testament, as well as a verse-reference drill. A more troublesome legacy of quizzing, though, is the free-association "prooftexting" approach to Bible interpretation endorsed in question 82:

82. To develop a proper Biblical viewpoint, it is best to...
a. To say what you feel is the best viewpoint
b. Use one scripture to prove the viewpoint
c. Use at least two scriptures to prove the viewpoint
d. Only use verses from the New Testament to develop the viewpoint

The "correct" answer here is c, but that's a dangerously simplistic approach to the Bible. Lots of questionable "viewpoints" — slavery, racism, genocide, human sacrifice, vegetarianism, treating women as property, etc. — can be propped up with two scriptures, if you choose them carefully. Perhaps I shouldn't make too much of this grammatically challenged quiz, but it would appear that although its author has been to Bible college, he or she still confuses "Biblical literacy" with having a head full of trivia, and still thinks that stringing verses together to "prove a viewpoint" is a valid method of interpreting the Bible.*

It so happens that around the time we went to Greece, Sarah was teaching a class at Northwest University, so she asked Q. about his experience there. He told her he didn't value it that much, because he got there already knowing more about the Bible than his professors did. So here's a hypothesis: Armed with the knowledge he's gleaned from Bible quizzing, the author of this quiz goes to Bible college. Perhaps he trips up his professors on some iota of Bible trivia — so he secretly believes he's smarter than they are. He absorbs just enough Bible scholarship to give him a veneer of respectability, but not enough to deflate his hubris.

One needn't hypothesize, however, to find evidence of Q.'s hubris. Back in 1998 there was a page on his Web site placing the release of his own software on a timeline of Bible translations, in a way that implied a comparison between his achievements and those of John Wycliffe and William Tyndale. Let's be clear here: Q. hasn't translated a blessed thing, he's just gathered the works of many translators, English and otherwise, and put them on a CD-ROM. Nothing unique about that — Bible Gateway has already done it online, using an interface that, even after a disappointing redesign, is still far ahead of Q.'s. Bible.cc, while not quite as easy on the eye as Bible Gateway, has also beaten Q. to the punch. The only original contribution by Q. to his software is his boneheaded, misspelled, ungrammatical commentary, the following example of which I extracted from it before my laptop crashed:

The dictionary says... Body In the English it means: A) Flesh of a human being, excluding the spirit. B) A collective of people in one area united together with having commonalties.

What type of building does the Bible call the body? If you owned
a billion dollar building how would you take care of it?
{1 Corinthians 3:16-17}
{1 Corinthians 6:15-20}
{1 Corinthians 9:24-27}

Well, for starters, I would make sure that my building got proper sleep and enough to eat. If you want my two cents, here they are: (1¢) Comparing oneself to Wycliffe and Tyndale is an act of megalomania unless one is willing to face the dangers they faced. (2¢) A person who compares the above excerpt to the literary achievements of Wycliffe and Tyndale deserves to face the dangers they faced. Anyone got a match?

*OK, I know vegetarianism doesn't belong on the list. That was a joke, all right? Ha, ha.