Berean Bible - United by the Cross
A Bible to Share
I know your time is valuable, so I’ll start at the end. The Berean Reader’s Bible and the Berean Study Bible are current English translations and available for free. You can find it at https://berean.bible/ or you can get an unofficial audiobook version here.
Now let’s start at the beginning
You’re probably familiar with the idea that we have multiple translations of the Bible, but you may not know why. There’s a lot of things that are difficult to explain in other languages.
Imagine telling someone about a message. The note says, “I love my spouse, my career, microwave popcorn, and sleeping with the TV on”.
There’s a few problems here:
Your one word has multiple meanings
The person is from a country that’s never heard of electricity
There’s no words in their language for microwave or television
Oh yeah, you don’t speak the same language
What is your solution?
You have an app to translate what you say. How do you decide what to say? Do you change words to keep the meaning? Do you say the closest equivalent in their language? Is it ok if you change any of the words so they can understand what you’re talking about?
You can take someone else’s old translation and update it. Since it’s out of copyright, there’s no fees for using it. You can go back to the oldest known sources. You can look at many translations from different areas and times throughout history.
Ultimately, the choices have a lot to do with what you plan on doing with it. Do you want it for easy reading? Do you need everything numbered so you can reference a specific verse? Do you want to have cross references noted? How about commentary to help you understand the context?
If time is money…
Now, the Bible has over 30,000 verses and the meaning isn’t something trivial, like my note. The process of translating old languages, especially this quantity, is an amazingly time intensive exercise. It’s a common practice for translations to be protected by copyright, because of the investment involved in making it. Under copy protection, there are restrictions on what you can do and how much of the text is available with and without permission.
And the point of my ramblings is
The Berean series of Bibles are free to use like the King James Version. They’re also current English like the New International Version or New Living Translation.
According to their website:
The following image, courtesy of https://bereanbibles.com/about-berean-study-bible/compare-translations/ shows the different use cases.
The four tiers of the Berean Bible are as follows:
Tier 1 An interlinear Bible to directly follow the Greek and Hebrew texts.
Tier 2 A literal translation to take the reader to the core of the Greek and Hebrew meanings.
Tier 3 A modern English study translation, effective for public reading, memorization, and evangelism.
Tier 4 An emphasized translation to bring out the full meaning and intensity of the original texts.
https://bereanbibles.com/about-berean-study-bible/translation-tiers/
The original point of this writing is to say that there is no audio version yet, but it’s in progress according to their website. There are multiple free Bibles and resources available from Berean.Bible and due to the generous permissions they offer, I have made an audiobook version of the Berean Reader’s Bible. I will post download links here from multiple sources, and I expect to have the files available to play directly from the site soon. If you made it all the way to the end, thank you for taking the time and I pray that this blessed you.
Download Text, WAV, MP3, & M4B
Google Drive https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1OCaqIYw9zz5gMbl-sswkoPUxrxvqXpcF
OneDrive https://1drv.ms/f/s!AkY0Sg5WiN6r1joTH1ib_FeFbffp
Mega https://mega.nz/folder/osFBVCaL#AbXlvkIS1ovp5RdPmRaYhw