Yet, as the image above makes clear, we also have extensive cross-references between books of the Old Testament (e.g., the Psalms or Prophets refer back to the Pentateuch or the Historical Books), as well as between books of the New Testament (e.g., at times there is an interrelationship between the Gospels and Acts and the rest of the New Testament, such as when the letters or Hebrews or Revelation refer to the events of Jesus’s life, ministry, passion, resurrection, and exaltation). For instance, there are approximately 350 quotations of the Old Testament in the New Testament and at least 2300 allusions, not to mention many places where an Old Testament person, place, or institution is mentioned without a particular passage in mind. The authors of Scripture received what had gone before them as foundational and as carrying authority. If the Bible’s development had been completely random, chaotic, purposeless in terms of going somewhere, I don’t think we would have the image before us. As Christians we believe in God’s superintending of the process. In the image above, notice not only the comprehensiveness of touch-points for the references (they fill the whole span), but also the clear symmetry and balance. In the face of such diversity, the unity and flow of the Bible’s meta-narrative is breathtaking. Consider the fact that the books of the Bible were written in 3 languages (Hebrew, Greek, and a bit of Aramaic), over a millennium and a half, in a variety of types of literature, by about 40 different people, who lived in sometimes radically different cultures and across a geographical chunk of the world that spans about 2,500 miles. The cross-references tell us that the Bible is a beautifully rendered tapestry rather than a chaotic patchwork quilt. So what does it tell us about how we should think about and engage Bible?ġ. Let me just say, I love this image (and, in true Bible nerd fashion, I am planning on displaying it soon on a wall in my home or office!)! The arc diagram is beautiful, symmetrical, powerful, and wonderfully descriptive. The various colors represent the distance between the verses in a particular cross-reference. The image, a digital rendering of all the cross-references in the Bible, has a bar graph along the bottom representing books, chapters, and verses. They produced the multi-colored arc diagram in the header of this post. A few years ago, Lutheran pastor Christoph Römhild emailed Chris Harrison, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, for help on coming up with a visual representation of the over 63,000 cross-references in the Bible.
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