| What makes the Bible unique in this context is that there are huge amount of resources that all reference the same basic structure. One of the things that makes KJV version useful for scholars is that since it's been the "standard" for hundreds of years a great deal of other work references its structure. People use it because of this. It's less to do with it being a fabulously accurate translation or whatever. It's just newer bibles don't have this wealth of history and documentation that references it and much of them are pretty expensive to license, while KJV is public domain. For example "Strong's Exhaustive Concordance". If you get a version of KJV with "Strong's Numbers" you can cross reference words and phrases in their original languages (greek/hewbrew/etc). This way students can understand some of the original meanings that go into difficult or disputed passages. Also there is a large number of commentaries of all sorts of different types that reference specific passages. Besides that KJV is just mostly valued in Protestant Christian dialects of Christianity. Other Christian religions such as various versions of Eastern Orthodox have different numbers of books or will arrange things in different orders. There have been different attempts to past scholars to arrange things in more chronological order, too. This makes the Bible fairly unique when it comes to literature. Each verse of text can have dozens of different "back links" and "references". so if somebody searches for the subject "Homosexuality" it will get hits in various commentaries. Those commentaries all directly reference verses in the Bible. So you could show the version found and why it was selected. That way a reader would be shown "These authors think this verse is has to do with homosexuality" and they could click through and find out the justification for this, different translations, what those translations are likely based on, what other Christian sects feel this verse means, and so on and so forth. I don't know if it would be useful for you, but there is a "Sword Project" that collects and cross references different Bibles and bible resources as well as tools. https://www.crosswire.org/sword/index.jsp |