ABOUT

Somehow, you found this site. You must be asking yourself "What is here that I should value?" and "Is there any reason to come back?". Right now, there isn't much here, but I invite you to bookmark this site and visit often.

I got the idea for the sitename by thinking of it as a large on-line filing cabinet for my personal graphical Bible study notes. "Biblefile" then naturally morphed into "Biblephile". I've generated a lot of content over the years while teaching Sunday School, but I've raised the bar for what I envision for this site, so it is largely empty.

I plan to add content regularly, starting with the complete book of Genesis (which is almost finished in my sketchpad), then adding one favorite chapter of each book of the Bible until every book has a single chapter seed. Then, I'll start adding content based on sermons I hear or hear about, subjects that interest me, or content donated by God's army at large, that is, pastoral assistants, Bible translators, Bible college professors or students, and/or those of you who, like me, are nobody from nowhere who just have an insatiable desire to know the Bible better and to share what you've learned with others.

Biblephile.org content is uniquely and exclusively graphical. The goal is to transform textual abstractions into more naturally comprehended and universally understood graphical symbols of people, their actions, thoughts, conversations, relationships, emotions, possessions, their places and times, and the wisdom that we can gain from it all.

The motto of this site is "Add nothing / Omit nothing". In that regard, even though I'll include a few specific sermon sequential scripture lists, there will be no place for sermon notes. That would be an impossible task for a layman like myself to police and would not serve the purpose of this site, which is to visually inventory and organize the facts intrinsic to the text, not to add or subtract from it.

As with other Bible study methods, this one answers the classical questions: Who? What? Where? When? Why? But just as splashing water on the side of a canoe doesn't necessarily result in forward motion, linguistic clutter may not always promote learning efficiency. This graphical method leaves no quarter for excess verbage. It distills the details into symbolic related objects which can be more easily assimilated into our memory.

Imagine a sports coach trying to instruct each member of a team what to do during a play using only words. It would take an anesthetizing quantity of words. Providentially, coaches discovered the medium of graphic play charts and now, massive sporting arenas circumscribe the globe!

August 26th, 1735 is the offical birthday of graph theory. This is when the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler published his solution to a logical puzzle asking if it was possible to cross all Seven Bridges of Königsberg in Prussia joining two islands in the Pregel River without crossing any twice. The graphs he drew contained all of the information needed to solve the problem, and not a red-herring iota more. Both sides of the river were reduced to two circles. The two islands were reduced to two identical circles. The bridges between them were distilled to lines joining the circles, just as the bridges connected the circumscribed land masses. This is exactly the technique I'm using to inventory and organize the content of scripture.

Though Leonhard chose not to follow his father Paul into the ministry, these charts are in a sense, his grandchildren. Incidentally, Euler was known to have a remarkable memory. Could it have been because of his ability to conceptualize information graphically?

Another example of how graphics can promote memorization: Daniel Tammet was born with a brain anomoly called synesthesia, in which ordinary numbers morphed into a parade of changing fonts with a fantastic gamut of textural, color, shape, and motion attributes. This condition enabled him to memorize Pi to 22,514 digits. It appears that a fabulous picture is easier to store in the architecture of our cerebral matter than a long, dull sequence of monochrome sans-serif characters.

I've organized my Bible chapter list as a regular matrix, to make use of another mnemonic device: spacial assignment. this is not unlike memorizing the locations of the keys of a QWERTY keyboard.

Other Great minds in history have invented similar tools to help them understand the physical world: chemistry, sciences, history, sports, language, business, and virtually everything that our Creator has organized in nature. Why not apply the same tools to decode his greatest work: His written Word? I am, and what I'm finding is too good to keep to myself, so I offer it as an oasis for strangers seeking their own epiphany, whose minds work like mine.