New Resources from John Bunyan!

John Bunyan is most well-known for his work on the bestselling Pilgrim's Progress. But he wrote many more volumes than just that great work of fiction. He penned numerous sermons and treatises, three of which we are excited to now provide for you on Blue Letter Bible.

Firstly, Bunyan's work Come and Welcome to Jesus is now available. This resource focuses on Christ's open arms of fellowship to all believers who accept Him as Lord and Savior. The editor describes the work thusly: "It is an enlightened display of the dealings of the Father in giving sinners to Christ; the Son in saving them by his atonement, mediation, and intercession; and the Holy Spirit in sanctifying and fitting them for glory." Before you begin reading, we recommend browsing the Table of Contents or looking through the introduction.

Secondly, we offer A Treatise of the Fear of God. In this volume, Bunyan provides a biblical examination of how we are to view our Almighty God with the proper fearful and reverential worship that He so deserves. He highlights what a blessing it is to us as Christians to fear the only One Who has power over all things, and in turn, our very lives.

And thirdly, Christ: A Complete Saviour has been added. This work aims to make clear the role and significance of Christ in both our justification and sanctification. An excerpt from the section titled "The Use" reads as follows: "Let me exhort you to the study of this..the priestly office of Christ is the first and great thing that is presented to us in the gospel—namely, how he died for our sins, and gave himself to the cross, that the blessing of Abraham might come upon us through him."

All three of these publications are immensely beneficial for a believer to engage with and read through. The experiences in Bunyan's and his giftings in writing make any work of his a delight to read. To take a look through Bunyan's resource library on BLB, we recommend starting on his author page.

We Completely Remapped Our Hebrew Data

In March of 2021, a specialized Blue Letter Bible team began work on mapping all of our KJV and NASB95 Hebrew data to the English equivalents in those translations. We are excited to announce that after nearly three years of development, by God's grace, we have completed this project as of November 2023. This includes over 46,000 total verses mapped (23,000 per version) and over 532,000 Hebrew words updated (266,000 per version)—all of which took over 2,000 cumulative hours of work!

Prior to this project, users could only see the generic Hebrew (or Aramaic) "root form" for many words and phrases in the Old Testament, rather than being able to see the specific Hebrew (or Aramaic) "inflected form" from which each English word was translated in every Old Testament verse. This created many instances where a single Hebrew word is linked to multiple English words, and vice versa. Due to the massive scope and complexity of this project, we needed a team of specialists to methodically work through the data. And so, through our seminary contacts, we hired several Hebrew language specialists to begin mapping.

The accuracy of our tools and resources is vital to us because of its importance to rightly dividing the Word of God. Therefore, we aim to develop and enhance the tools and resources that we offer so that you, our users, can more faithfully understand God's Word. With this thorough mapping of Hebrew to English, we pray that God will use our efforts to bless your time in the study of His Word for His glory.

Our sincere thanks go out to the dedicated team members who spent many hours diligently linking words and reviewing verses. Back in 2022, we took some time to interview a few of them to get their thoughts on the project. If you would like to learn a little bit more about the project, you can watch an edited version of that Q&A on our YouTube channel.

Amplified Bible Now Available on BLB!

We are constantly receiving requests for different resources, tools, and even Bible versions from our users. One of the most common requests is that we add the Amplified Bible (AMP) to our library of translations. It was obvious to us that it was something our users greatly desired to have on the site. And so, we are pleased to announce that we now offer the AMP on Blue Letter Bible.

The first full version of the AMP was completed in 1965. After fifty years had passed, significant changes in both the style and usage of the English language had been made. With this in mind, the Lockman Foundation revisited this well-loved translation of God's Word and began to revise it. This eventually led to the release of the new Amplified Bible in 2015.

We at Blue Letter Bible believe that this translation will be an amazing resource for our users. The expanded text provides clarification on the meaning of Scripture while remaining faithful and true to the original text. In fact, the AMP focuses on including certain phrases from the original manuscripts that do not flow well in most English translations.

We want to thank our friends at the Lockman Foundation for their permission to provide this version to our users. They are long-time friends and partners of the ministry, and we are blessed by their generosity. To learn more about the Amplified Bible, we highly recommend reading the version's preface on our site and the information page on Lockman Foundation's website.