The main feature of this site is the passage list. This is a full listing of every titled passage in the English Standard Version (ESV). When you first load the page, the passages are sorted in the canonical order (i.e. the order you see them if you open up a standard copy of the ESV Bible). There are four buttons above the table that allow you to sort the passage list chronologically, by book compilation date or by the traditional author (where known), in addition to the standard canonical ordering. Refer to the sections below for a more detailed description of each of these arrangements.
To view a single passage, click on its passage reference in the righthand column and it will be loaded on Bible Gateway. To open multiple passages, use the checkboxes to select the passages you want to view and then click the Open Selected button which will appear whenever any box is checked. Please note that there is a maximum number of pages that can be viewed on Bible Gateway at any one time. To clear your selection click the Clear button.
Clicking on the main page heading will bring up a page listing all of the ESV books, chapters & verses on Bible Gateway. There is also a search bar at the top of the page that searches Bible Gateway for keywords, scripture passages or biblical topics. See the Bible Gateway tutorial page for a detailed description of the search features of their site.
This project is similar to another at openbible.info, which I discovered midway through development. It is a site I highly recommend checking out.
The four orderings of scripture shown on this site are based on the pericopes (titled passages) within the ESV. It is hoped this work will prove helpful to some in navigating scripture as it has several advantages over the use of the traditional chapters and verses. Specifically:
This pericope-based approach is not readily portable to other translations as the breakup of pericope sections, and the titles assigned to them, are the specific editorial work of the ESV translators. The orderings at this site are the result of thousands of small decisions and judgement calls, made by someone who is not an expert in the field. They are imperfect, potentially inconsistant in places and have not been properly tested and verified. They should therefore not be relied upon. Any conclusions drawn from them should be validated by adequate research undertaken separately. The below resources were used loosely to inform these efforts:
This is a laymen's attempt at a chronological arrangement of the whole biblical text. With the aim of putting together the 'pieces of the puzzle', numerous scriptural harmonies have been composed over the ages, which line up parallel accounts side-by-side. Many of these concern the gospels. There was also a lesser focus on the historical writings of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles.
These harmonies sometimes provide interesting insights, allowing the same story to be told from several different points of view. Moreover, when reading the Bible in canonical order, it may not be obvious that some non-narrative portions of scripture directly tie into specific events in Bible stories. For example, several Psalms give the precise occasion when they were written and when read together with their associated event they may provide a deeper insight into the thoughts and feelings of the people involved.
In this site's chronological arrangement, to maintain a balance between readability and accuracy and to tie in better with the site as a whole, complete ESV pericopes have been left intact. With varying degrees of success, another objective was to order parallel accounts in a way that maintains the literary flow of individual books where possible. This explains for example, why Luke often appears first in a set of parallel accounts, even though the book of Matthew appears first in the canonical order.
As the orderings are based upon entire ESV pericopes, chronological inaccuracies will occur whenever non-contiguous passages are present within a single pericope unit. The inability to break up pericope units means that overlapping passages will not be able to be precisely 'lined up' like they would if a verse based approach was used. In some cases, where non-contiguous passages from multiples sources are being arranged, parts of one or both of these units may be unable to be harmonised. However, given the considerable advantages to consistency and readability, these short-comings are considered an acceptable trade off.
This option keeps complete biblical books intact and orders them by the date many conservative scholars estimate they were completed and compiled into their final forms (e.g. when the 150 Psalms were collected into a single five volume collection). Like the Chronology option, much of this is educated guesswork as there is considerable disagreement between scholars concerning exact dates of authorship.
This option sorts passages by the author to whom they are traditionally ascribed. The ordering is determined by the estimated date of composition of an author's earliest work. Where no author is known, passages are ordered according to their approximate date of composition, possibly grouped together with other anonymous works.
All trademarks and/or copyright material are the sole property of their respective owners. Bible Gateway is a trademark of Zondervan Corporation. Scripture references are from English Standard Version. © 2001 Crossway Books. Any work on this site, unless otherwise noted, is under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Website by Matthew Hayward. 2016.