The Strand Study Bible

A s powerful and inspirational as Scripture is, it is sometimes daunting in its scope and difficult in its organization and content. Like many young believers, my first attempts to read Scripture at times left me confused and frustrated. So often I yearned for a broader context within which to understand what I was reading. The book you hold in your hands is the product of my 38 year/38,000 hour quest to find anything and everything that might make the Bible more real and interesting and understandable to me. All of the reference material I incorporated into this work – from the map excerpts spliced into the text to the cross-references to the notation of historical world events – all of it is to make this sacred text more accessible and comprehensible. I hope and pray you find that it is. S adly, Christians all over America often argue over which English version of the Bible should be studied. While some favor the Alexandrian Text [ASV (1901), RSV (1952), Anchor Bible (1964), Amplified Bible (1965), Jerusalem Bible (1966), New English Bible (1970), NAS (1971), The Living Bible (1971), Good News for Modern Man (1976), NIV (1978), New Century Bible (1988), The Message Bible (1994), and The New Living Translation (1996)], others (like myself ) favor the Antioch Text [KJV (1611) and the New King James Version (1982)]. However, common sense says: What good is any version if you can’t understand it? Point being: Whatever version one chooses to study, it still has to be understood. So this is what I did... I took the King James Version and made it understandable. I called it THE STRAND STUDY BIBLE . U nlike Calvin, who wrote his Institute of the Christian Religion just two years after his conversion, I waited almost four decades after my conversion before putting my thoughts into print. So while you may not agree with everything that you read within this reference work, as a believer, you will agree with the majority of it. Do not allow the 1–5% of what you may not agree with to ruin the 95–99% of what you do agree with. J. Vernon McGee in Thru The Bible (I Cor. - Rev.) notes: Perhaps when we get to heaven, we will find it true that there are three sides to every question: your side, my side, and the right side. Maybe the Lord will have to straighten out both of us. 1 The important thing, however, is that we ought not to argue over the non- essentials since we agree on the essentials. Please, enjoy what you “can” from this work of thirty-eight years.

1 McGee, J. Vernon. Thru the Bible (I Cor. –Rev.), Nashville, TN, Thomas Nelson, 1983. Print.

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