The Original Blank Bible

Recently, the ESV blog and ThinkChristian.net both featured my efforts to build a blank Bible, and I have gotten a lot of hits (relatively speaking). I thought it might be a good idea to explain where this idea originated.

Many of you are quite familiar with Jonathan Edwards, but some of my readers may have never heard of this figure from Church history. Jonathan Edwards was a preacher, missionary, and theologian in the early to mid-18th century, and he was directly involved in the Great Awakening that began in the 1730s.

Around 1730, Edwards apparently made a "blank Bible" by removing the binding of a Bible and adding blank pages between each page of text. He then rebound it and began writing. He wrote over five thousand notes in his Bible, and Yale University Press has recently published his notes in a $200, 1500-page volume. Of course, Amazon has it on sale for $185. The publisher has provided Edwards' notes on Galatians as a sample.

So hopefully now you understand better how and why this note-taking Bible is called a "blank Bible."

I wonder if my dad will end up with 5,000 notes in his blank Bible?

Todd