How to Study the Bible Across Canons: A Practical Guide

Reading the books left out of your Bible next to the books in it works best with a method. Here is one, using the tools built into this reader.

Start with what kind of book it is

Before reading an unfamiliar book, check what it is. Each non-KJV book opens with a short introduction giving its author, its approximate date and its scope, and each book page says which churches, if any, receive it as scripture. A book on the Church Orders shelf, for example, is labelled as a church order, not as scripture, and the Talmud, the Zohar and the grimoires sit on their own shelves as historical sources. Knowing this first stops you from reading a medieval legend as if it claimed to be scripture, or the reverse.

If you want to know what a given church holds, the pages under Browse by Tradition list the books for the Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox and Eritrean Orthodox traditions, and the comparison article shows them side by side.

Follow the cross-references

Under many verses you will see a line beginning “See also,” with links to related verses. These come from two sources: the OpenBible.info cross-reference dataset, which builds on the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, a classic set of cross-references for the King James Bible, and a set of links between the canons that were chosen by hand, connecting a verse in one tradition's books to its echo in another's. Following them is the quickest way to see how texts answer each other.

A worked example: open 1 Enoch chapter 1 and look at verse 9, which describes the Lord coming with ten thousands of his holy ones to execute judgement. Its “See also” line points to Jude, verse 14, which says that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these things. Reading the two together shows the New Testament letter drawing on a book that most Bibles leave out.

Look at the original words

For the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament, each verse has a “Words” control that opens the verse's original words one by one, with the dictionary form, the Strong's number, the grammar in plain English and a short gloss. Other verses show the original-language line beneath the English where this site carries the Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic or Geʿez text. This is useful when an English word is doing the work of several: the gloss and Strong's number let you see what the translators were choosing between.

Search a word across every text

The concordance indexes every word across the whole library, not just the King James Bible, so you can follow a word, name or idea from the Old Testament into the Apocrypha, the pseudepigrapha and the Apostolic Fathers. There are also topical entries that gather the passages on a theme such as worship, unity or light. When a word's number matters, the gematria tool computes English, Hebrew and Greek letter values for a word or phrase and finds other words with the same value. Treat gematria as a tradition to explore and not as a proof.

Look up the background

The dictionary is Easton's Bible Dictionary, and the Learn articles explain the people, groups and sources the texts keep mentioning, from the Pharisees and Sadducees to the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Where a Learn article draws on a verse, it opens the passage inline, so you can check the claim against the text.

Keep track as you go

If you sign in, you can bookmark places, mark reading-plan days as read and keep private notes on any day. There are plans for the whole Bible, the New Testament, the Gospels, the Psalms and more, and none of them needs an account to read.

A simple routine

Pick a passage. Read the book's introduction. Read the chapter. Follow two or three cross-references. Open the Words control on a verse that puzzles you. Search one key word across the library. Finish with the matching Learn article, if there is one. That takes about twenty minutes and shows you what a single verse looks like from three or four directions.