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Similar The divine library, Ancient Near Eastern T, Novum Testamentum Graece, The Hebrew and Aram, American Standard Version | ||
Bibliotheca is a five-volume version of the Bible created by Adam Lewis Greene published in 2016. It was funded in mid 2014 through a thirty-day Kickstarter campaign for which Greene set a goal of $37,000, but the campaign raised over $1.4 million. Greene's aim, as detailed in his Kickstarter campaign video, was to enhance the experience of reading biblical literature by giving the content a more novel-like form, omitting chapter and verse numbers and annotation, utilizing a sewn binding and opaque book paper (rather than Bible paper), and creating original typefaces optimized for legibilty, among other features.
Contents
Translation
Bibliotheca features the American Standard Version translation with some modifications, mainly the elimination of archaic word forms (e.g., “thou” and “doth”), but a project update from Greene in April of 2016, featuring a note from Bible scholar David deSilva, suggests other changes were made to the text: “Without damaging the literary quality of the base translation, we were able to suggest many changes that would bring the translation up to par with where textual criticism and Greek lexicography currently stand, not to mention alert Adam to a few all-out mistranslations of the original Hebrew and Greek in the ASV (every translation has them).”
Miscellaneous
Because the text of Bibliotheca is spread across five volumes, it was possible to utilize a thicker, more opaque paper than the thinner, more translucent paper typical of most Bibles.
Bibliotheca has several features in common with The Books of the Bible (published by Biblica in 2007), which separates the text of the Bible into separate volumes and does not have chapter or verse numbers. However, The Books of the Bible does not include the Apocrypha, nor does it have the same level of production and design quality found in Bibliotheca (e.g. Despite being available in multiple volumes, The Books of the Bible, like traditional Bibles, still features Bible paper, does not have a sewn binding, has narrow margins, and is typeset with a comparatively utilitarian typeface and page layout).
After Greene's 2014 Kickstarter project, evangelical publisher Crossway Books (a division of Good News Publishers) began work on their own high-quality multi-volume Bible set and produced a product similar in style, concept, production methods, and marketing (including a video strikingly similar in tone and length to Bibliotheca's campaign video), which was published on October 31, 2016, just weeks before Greene began shipping his final product. However, Crossway's similar product could be viewed as less ecumenical as it does not include the Apocrypha.