Type Setting and Bible Publishing, Update Q2 2018

Hey everyone,

RB May here with some new info and updates. The first thing is we are hard at work on the translation and set up of the Bible. Part of the process is choosing the right typeface (or font) for the project. We had chosen a font and were fairly happy with the results until we printed out some test pages in a much smaller size. The “regular” weight of our font (and the lightest weight available in our font) was rather bold. You can see this in the PDFs of the books we have available already.

This made the smaller size of the text on the test pages rather hard to read. The boldness made the letters start to run together and made it hard to distinguish some words. So, we started looking for a different typeface which would allow us to have lighter strokes for printing in small size and heavier strokes for putting our PDFs together for the website. We considered creating a typeface (and may still do so) but for now we found some great fonts which come in a multiplicity of weights. (One, in fact, comes in 18 different weights.)

We have settled on a font for now and are going through the process of typesetting the Bible into this new font. It is really a chore as it the font size is just slightly different (this is common which is why it is very rare to change a font when one is chosen). We are going to use Colossians as our example. We have retypeset the book for both small print and normal print. You can see the new PDFs by clicking here for Normal Print or here for Small Print. (Please Note: You will need Adobe Acrobat or another PDF reader to view these documents.) Both of these are set on 8.5×11 Letter so you can print them out and view them.

We look forward to your feedback. We love what we are doing and hope you enjoy our hard work.

Update – July 2017

Hey everyone, RB May here to give you a brief update as to what is going on with Breath of God Ministries. The biggest news we’ve have earlier this year was Breath of God Ministries coming under the administration of Believe Better Ministries. BOG Ministries will be looking at changing some of its mission statement as far our admin is concerned. We look forward to the time when we have the whole Bible translated and are working hard on getting the New Testament finished.

We finished 2 Peter not to long after the previous post went live and it is up on the Bible Page. We have been working on the Gospel of John most recently. With it being a longer book it is taking longer for us to finish it. This will most likely be the first book we actually publish as well, as Believe Better Ministries is planning on using it to put out an outreach edition. We hope you are looking forward to seeing the BOGV Gospel of John in print as much as we are.

This is where some of things have changed. With BOG now under the head of Believe Better Ministries it means they are the lead and may decide the order in which we translate the Bible. BOG is being allowed to be an autonomous section of Believe Better Ministries, but in the future when we finish the translation of the Bible, this aspect could change.

As always, thank you for the support you are giving to BOG Ministries. We look forward to completing our goal and finishing this new translation of the Bible.

Updates – 1 Peter & Colossians

Well hey everyone,

We are pleased to announce you can now see links to several books on the BOGV’s Page. We are trying to get everything finished by the end of this year to have a full New Testament out by mid-year next year. so far we are on track to accomplish our goal. We are hard at work trying to make it happen.

The biggest news however is we have come under the leadership if Believe Better Ministries. This does not mean there will be any changes to the BOGV or our mission, it simply means the day to day tasks, funding, and publishing will be left to them, we will continue our work on the Bible.

This move actually frees up some of our members to be more involved in the translation process rather than have to put so much effort into administration. We also have a new e-mail address because of it: Bible@BelieveBetterMinistries.com. You can now send e-mails to this address and get a hold of us.

Any questions on getting involved in the ministry should now placed before the Believe Better Ministries Administration (whom you can reach at contact@believebetterministries.com).

Thank you so much for your support and we look forward to having the entire New Testament available soon! Thank you so much!

Update – December 2016

Hey everyone,

Well we hope this year has been good for you, that you’ve seen the Lord’s presence in your lives. This year a lot of effort was put into the translation. Last year we finished the Jude Example Volume and much of the year was spent putting finishing what we wanted in the Old Testament version of the Example Volume and then finishing the Obadiah Example Volume. We have made progress in the translation of the New Testament (which as of right now is our primary goal) while all this was going on.

You can see this progress in the fact we have translated 1-3 John, Philemon and 1 Thessalonians. We are a prayerful group. I say this not in boast, but to point out how slow our progress has been. We take every word placed on the page in the translation process to the Lord. It is a heavy responsibility translating the Lord’s word and we treat it as such. You can see all of our translated work on the Bible Page.

We are looking (as always) for more volunteers to take part in the ministry. If you feel suited to do so or feel the Lord has called you to do so please e-mail us.

We look forward to hearing from all of you, and Merry Christmas everyone!

—
Jared J. Evans
for the BOG Ministries Team

The Breath of God Project Part 2

Click Here to Download the Breath of God Project Part 1: Jude
Click Here to Download the Breath of God Project Part 2: Obadiah

Hello All,

We are proud to finally give you the second part of the Breath of God Project. This two part project has a book from the New Testament (Jude) and a book from the Old Testament (Obadiah) available in all planned formats for the Testament from which it came.

For the Old Testament we are planning three distinct versions of the text available.

Before we discuss the parts of this project which will be published first we would like to discuss a part which will not. We have announced this in previous updates, but we will not be publishing the Hebrew in any way shape or form. This is for two reasons. The first and largest reason is we have chosen the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia which is a copyrighted text and we do not have the rights to publish it. It is available online and if you would like to read it or see it you may click here. The second reason we are choosing not to publish the Hebrew is our current publishing program cannot handle a language written right to left. In this volume we do have the Breath of God Literal Translation which is and interlinear without the original language present. This literal translation however will not be going to print. It will only be glimpsed in this volume.

1. The Holy Bible: Breath of God Version (or BOGV – Breath of God Version; which is really the second item in the example volume but the first one which will actually be published) gives us a view of how this book will look when it is published. This is the fully translated Old Testament book. This is a new translation of the Bible that is available in Modern English for free. We started with the World English Bible as a base for our translation. This is partly due to the fact that is in the public domain and already is an update to the American Standard Version. This takes a lot of the work of updating the ASV out of the equation and allows us to simply look at the words on the page. This does NOT make the BOGV simply a word for word copy of the WEB (as you can see if you read it) it simply means the WEB was our starting point and we have since diverged with their translation.
   1. There is another project which grows out of the finished BOGV and it is The Holy Bible: Breath of God Reader’s Edition. This is a special edition of the BOGV without Chapter Numbers, Verse Numbers, or footnotes. It is laid out to look as if it were simply a book to read. This is done because of the love of books that a few of our editors have and their wish for the Bible to return to being a book that people want to read.
2. For the next item we have the reason this whole project got started. While one translational/editorial team was working on the above projects, another was working on The Breath of God: the Bible Paraphrased. This is the beginning of this project and it has not been forgotten. This project dealt with comparing and contrasting as many versions of the book as humanly possible in order to take that information and make a paraphrase of the English Bible. This is not a paraphrase of a version of the Bible, but of as many as we could get our hands on (and thanks to sites like You Version, Bible Gateway, and Bible Hub this was a lot of versions).
3. The fifth and final version of this project is the Breath of God Study Bible. This is a study bible to rival those put out by Crossways, Zondervan and Holman. Our goal with this is not to compete in the study bible market but to give a study bible to the world that is available for free and easy to use. In the Breath of God Study Bible there are comprehensive and in depth introductions to each book as well as two types of study notes: General Study Notes which refer to the passage on the page, and Accent Notes which refer to a theme, idea, or interesting information that is presented in the text. This Study Bible also has the Breath of God Version and the Breath of God Paraphrase in parallel on the page so that you can refer from to the other. This is there to hopefully give easy access to difficult passages. We are also pleased to announce that we have partnered with Believe Better Ministries on the Study Bible and they have gracious provided the study notes.

This is the breath of God Project Part 2. With this we have finished our example volumes and will resume work on the New Testament (as you have seen in a few previous posts we have already done this). We hope you enjoy getting to see what we are planning to accomplish, but not only that, but how we are going about it as well.

Now there has been a lot of talk about doing things on this website but not many results. So we are pleased to announce we now have an example volume for Parts 1 and 2 of this project. This means we have examples from the Old and New Testament for the versions we plan to publish. Now we can show you what our plans are.

We hope that you enjoy this example and we would like for you to note that it is laid out for duplex printing. There are blank pages in the document. We apologize if this is an inconvenience, but this was an editorial decision. Thank you.

Click Here to Download the Breath of God Project Part 2: Obadiah

The Epistles of John

Well, with the translation of Obadiah finished, it freed up our translation team to return to work on the New Testament (which is our priority for translation) while our Executive Editor Ray B. May  IV (head of Believe Better Ministries) prepares the study notes for BOG Study Bible portion of the Obadiah Example Volume we have returned to work on the translation of the Bible.  This being said we are excited to announce First, Second and Third John are finished with translation. They are going through their final round of editing and should be up on the Bible Page later on today or early tomorrow.

This is exciting as we are four books down of the 27 total of the New Testament, this leaves us with 23 books left. We are fairly certain we will have Philemon translated within the next two weeks which gives you more to look forward to.

The BOG Ministries Team would like to say a big thank you everyone who has patiently waited for us to get our acts together over the past two years and finally make it to this point. We are looking forward to what will be accomplished over the next two years!

—
Jared J. Evans
for the BOG Ministries Team

Obadiah

The Ministry Team at BOG Ministries would like to clarify why we have changed out plan from Ruth to Obadiah.

The reason for this comes in two:

1. The First reason is that Editorial & Translational Staff had already chosen Obadiah as the project that they would be working on to use as an example of the Old Testament and there was a communication breakdown as far as which book had been chosen.
2. Obadiah is more comparable in length of Jude than Ruth is.

For these two reasons we have had to redact which book we will be putting forth as our example.

We also want to put out some boiler plate information as far as translation of the Old Testament is concerned. Where in the New Testament we are planning on publishing the complete Greek text and an Interlinear of that Greek text we are not doing this with the Hebrew Old Testament text. This is for a few reasons but mostly because the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) is under copyright. We also do not have the capability – at this time at least – to handle texts which read from right to left rather than left to right. We have chosen the BHS as it is the most authoritative Hebrew Text currently available.

To that end we have done the same work with the Hebrew as with Greek and in the Obadiah Example Volume you will see what we are labeling our BOG Literal Translation. This literal translation will only be available in this example volume and we will not be publishing it as a standalone, but you will be able to see the work we have done with Obadiah as far as our literal translation is concerned.

Major Update

The first thing that needs to be announced is that we have changed which Old Testament Book we are using for our example. We had originally picked the book of Ruth and have now changed to use the book of Obadiah. We have finished the initial and secondary rounds of translation and it has gone through the first three rounds of editing which means that we are ready to produce the Breath of God Version of Obadiah.

We are excited to announce that our first book in the Old Testament that we have translated is finished and we are ready to put it up here for you all to see. You can download a copy of Obadiah from our Bible Page. It should be available on that page later today.

We also want to make announcement on the issue of copyright. The copyright of the Breath of God Bible – in all its forms (the Breath of God Version, the Breath of God: the Bible Paraphrased, the Breath of God Study Bible, the Breath of God Reader’s Edition, and any others) – is held by Breath of God Ministries. This copyright is not to stop you from using the Breath of God Bible – in any of its forms – but it is to make sure that there is not another version of the BOG floating around out there or another version masquerading as the BOG. We plan on putting the BOG out for use in an easy way.

We will be working this as we continue to work on the BOG.

The Breath of God Project Part 1

Click Here to Download the Breath of God Project Part 1: Jude

Hello all,

We are proud to unveil the first part of the Breath of God Project. This is a two part project that will have a book from the New Testament (Jude) and a book from the Old Testament (Ruth) available in all planned formats for that book.

For the New Testament we are planning on having five distinct versions of the text available:

1. The first is the original Greek text. This Greek text is the Robinson and Pierpont, The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform, 2005 (Chilton Book Publishing, 2005). This 2005 edition of the RP Majority text has been released into the public domain by its editors and we have prayerfully decided to use it as our Greek Text.
2. The second version that will be available for the New Testament is and interlinear translation we are entitling the Breath of God Interlinear New Testament. This is the RP Majority text with a literal word for word translation directly below the Greek Text. This shows the translation process of the Breath of God Version and makes an interlinear available for those that would like one.
3. The third version of the New Testament is the fully translated and readable Holy Bible: Breath of God Version ( or BOGV – Breath Of God Version). This is a new translation of the Bible that is available in Modern English for free. We started with the World English Bible as a base for our translation. This is partly due to the fact that is in the public domain and is already an update to the American Standard Version. This takes a lot of the work of updating the ASV out of the equation and allows us to simply look at the words on the page. This does NOT make the BOGV simply a word for word copy of the WEB (as you can see if you read it) it simply means that the WEB was our starting point and we have since diverged with their translation.
   There are two projects that come out of the BOGV and the Greek Text both being finished:
   1. The Breath of God Greek/English New Testament: This is a the RP Majority Text and BOGV presented side by side for comparison. The Greek Text is placed on the left hand page without any change from the formatting present in its own publication, and the English BOGV is placed on the right hand page, again, with the only change being that it is present in a single column.
   2. The Holy Bible: Breath of God Reader’s Edition: This is a special edition of the BOGV without Chapter Numbers, Verse Numbers or footnotes. It is laid out to look as if it were simply a book to read. This is done because of the love of books that a few of our editors have and their wish for the Bible to return to being a book that people want to read.
4. The fourth we have the reason this whole project got started. While one translational/editorial team was working on the above projects, another was working on The Breath of God: the Bible Paraphrased. This is the beginning of this project and it has not been forgotten. This project dealt with comparing and contrasting as many versions of the book as humanly possible in order to take that information and make a paraphrase of the English Bible. This is not a paraphrase of a version of the Bible, but of as many as we could get our hands on (and thanks to sites like You Version, Bible Gateway, and Bible Hub this was a lot of versions).
5. The fifth and final version of this project is the Breath of God Study Bible. This is a study bible to rival those put out by Crossways, Zondervan and Holman. Our goal with this is not to compete in the study bible market but to give a study bible to the world that is available for free and easy to use. In the Breath of God Study Bible there are comprehensive and in depth introductions to each book as well as two types of study notes: General Study Notes which refer to the passage on the page, and Accent Notes which refer to a theme, idea, or interesting information that is presented in the text. This Study Bible also has the Breath of God Version and the Breath of God Paraphrase in parallel on the page so that you can refer from to the other. This is there to hopefully give easy access to difficult passages. We are also pleased to announce that we have partnered with Believe Better Ministries on the Study Bible and they have gracious provided the study notes.

This is the breath of God Project Part 1. We have started with the New Testament and have to translate the Old Testament in the same manner (Keep an eye out for a “Part 2” to this post).

Now there has been a lot of talk on doing things on this website but not many results. So we are pleased to announce the that we now have an example volume for Part 1 of this project. This is the Epistle of Jude in the Versions that we plan on having available.

We hope that you enjoy this example and we would like for you to note that it is laid out for duplex printing. There are blank pages in the document. We apologize if this is an inconvenience, but this was an editorial decision. Thank you.

Click Here to Download the Breath of God Project Part 1: Jude

Important News and Updates

We are excited to announce the launch of the first book of The Breath of God: The Bible Paraphrased. The page for that project has been launched as has the new page for the Breath of God Version of the Bible. You can see them by clicking on the Bible page above.

We are launching Jude in both the BOG and the BOGV (Breath Of God (paraphrase) and the Breath Of God Version). We are also launching 1 John in the BOGV.  We hope that you enjoy these.

That is all for now we hope you enjoy the materials. If you have any comments always feel free to e-mail us at thebogministries@gmail.com. If you would like to get involved in this ministry please e-mail us as well.