Product Updates
Questions on Every Verse
Every question readers ask about a verse in the Anselm Project Bible is now public and rewritten to read like commentary.
All questions about individual verses in the Anselm Project Bible are now public. Click a verse in the reader and you will see any question other readers have asked about it, and the latest questions from across the whole Bible collect on a page of their own. The obvious way to build this would have been a comments section, but I definitely do not want a comments section.
What Happens to a Question
Three things happen to a question before anyone else sees it. It is stripped of anything that identifies anyone, so the question becomes public but no one else does. It is checked for profanity. And it is rewritten to read like something that could sit in a commentary, which means you do not have to phrase it perfectly to ask it. You can type the half-formed thing the way it actually occurred to you, and a clean version is what lands on the verse.
The rewriting is the part I care about most. Two things keep people from asking questions about the Bible: the fear of looking ignorant, and not knowing how to put the question into words.
The first is why so many real questions never get asked out loud — the ones about whether a hard command still binds, or why God does something that looks unjust, or what a strange verse is even doing in the text. The anonymizing takes care of that. The rewriting takes care of the second. What you are left with is a question sitting on the verse, reading like it belongs there, attached to no one.
Why Not a Comments Section
Comments sections on the internet become the internet. They fill up with people performing for each other, arguments that have drifted miles from the subject, and things nobody would say to your face. I have no interest in bolting that onto Scripture.
What I wanted was a way to let questions and answers accumulate on the verse without the social machinery a comments section runs on. I think the church is a much better place for the social discussion on a verse.
What Ends Up on the Verse
Click a verse and you see what other readers may have wondered about. If there's nothing there, ask the question yourself. If you would rather browse than read straight through, the questions page shows the newest ones. It's a last in, first out system, so the latest ones are always at the top.
It is live now. Click any verse in the Anselm Project Bible, or open the questions page to see what people are asking.
God bless, everyone.
