It's amazing how many good Christian resources you can find on the web these days. One site that I've been looking into for quite a while is bibleserver.com, a cooperation of different bible societies, which allows you to browse a number of different modern translations online. Now, most of these translations, I already have in my BibleWorks, where they can be used a lot more comfortably. The most important ones, I even have on my palm, which I always carry in my pocket. But then again, some I don't have and I didn't even know they existed in a digital form anywhere.
Follow up:
Now, short of considerable fiddling around with tools like cUrl and others, it is simply not possible to download any of those texts from bibleserver.com, since it uses cookies and sessions and redirects the user to a result page after each request. So, with bibleserver.com, you're stuck with viewing bible texts online or typing them into your palm by hand.
Unless you start observing, and you find a shortcut around all the redirects and cookies: bibleserver.com uses the following procedure to retrieve a particular text:
Now, knowing all of this doesn't help you a whole lot until you take a look at some of the member bible societies' sites. You'll quickly find out that any bible text displayed on them is pulled directly from the bibleserver.com database. In this way, looking at the International Bible Societies' site, I found that there's a nifty XML api for bibleserver at http://www.bibleserver.com/xml.php, but unfortunately, it's limited to a number of known IP addresses and therefore not usable for the general public.
Next, I took a look at the German Bible Society's site, where you can find the 1984 Luther translation, as well as the German "Gute Nachricht" translation online. However, what was really interesting was the format of the urls on these pages. For example, the link to the Luther translation of Matthew 28:20 would be http://www.dbg.de/channel.php?channel=35&SELECT=lut&INPUTREF=40028020. Take a look at the parameters:
Now I got really curious: A quick look at bibleserver.com's translation overview showed me that, among others, they have the NIV online. So I replaced SELECT=lut with SELECT=niv, and, voilà , this is what I saw. Nice and clean, no redirects, no cookies, nothing.
Now the rest is up to you. I wrote a quick and dirty PHP script to do my pulling. But I think you see how it works. You know how to construct the URLs and once you find out that each individual verse is nicely wrapped in a separate (there are no other tags on the page), there's not a whole lot left to do -- except read the bible you just pulled.
Comment feed for this post
I'm also a student at the Vrije Universiteit, under the supervision of Dean Van de Beek. I was wondering if you knew of any one-volume Pentecostal systematic theologies?
Unfortunately, systematic theologies are direly lacking in classical Pentecostalism. I could, however, point you to the following works:
- Duffield, Guy and Nathanael van Cleave. Foundations of Pentecostal Theology. Los Angeles, CA: LIFE Bible College, 1983. This is a quite comprehensive volume which reflects classical Pentecostal theology rather well. The authors come from a Foursquare-church perspective. Unfortunately, in terms of Academics the book has some deficiencies (e.g. not even a bibliography).
- Horton, Stanley M. and Gary McGee. Systematic Theology: A Pentecostal Perspective. Springfield, MO: Logion Press, 1994. Although somewhat more of a reader in systematic theology, this volume provides a nice overview over classical Pentecostal theology.
I guess that's the best we can come up with at the moment. There are some contributions from outside of the classical mainstream (J. Rodman Williams' "Renewal Theology" or Clark Pinnock's "Flame of Love", for example), but otherwise that's about it. Inside the Assemblies of God movement, I am also aware of some very old theological treatises (Ernest Williams, Myer Pearlman, P.C. Nelson), but they hardly deserve the label "systematic theology."