Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Last week marked the end of our first Bible giveaway, and we want to share a little bit of our experience.

The idea came from Justin Taylor, who suggested in an email that we give away Bibles to jumpstart interest in our new blog.

We debated which Bible to give away; the Life Discovery Edition, a $9.99 paperback, led the pack for a while. Instead, we decided to do something special and give away Compact TruTones and TruGrips. These Bibles feature a unique design and unusual cover. We hoped that the Bibles would intrigue the recipients (and that they’d tell their friends about them).

At 10:00 AM EDT on April 19, 2005, we launched the giveaway. We only told two blogs about it in advance because we wanted to see how word of the promotion would spread organically across the blogosphere.

Below you can see the number of Bibles we gave away at every half-hour. The curve follows a more linear progression than we expected. We gave away the 100th Bible just before 11:30 AM on April 20.

The top four Bibles, accounting for 59 requests, were:

1. Royal Blue (Celtic Cross) Compact TruTone (21 copies)
2. Olive (Celtic Cross) Compact TruTone (15 copies)
3. Chestnut (Diamond) Compact TruTone (12 copies)
4. Charcoal (Crown) Compact TruTone (11 copies)

We had 83 requests from the US, 8 from the UK, 6 from Australia, and 3 from Canada.

Our most unusual finding was that 22 of the requests came from just two metropolitan areas. We didn’t expect that geography would play such a big part in an online promotion.

Additionally, fully 24 of the people making requests used @gmail.com email addresses.

We met quite a few interesting people by email and got to visit a number of fascinating blogs. Thanks again to everyone who participated.

Update at 11:30 AM EDT (April 20): We don’t have any free Bibles left. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Do you:

• Have a blog with a blogroll?
• Live in the US, Canada, the UK, or Australia?
• Want a free ESV Bible?

We’re giving away a free ESV Bible to the first 100 people who add the ESV Bible Blog to their blogroll.

What to do to claim your free Bible:

1. Add our link (http://www.esv.org/blog) to your blogroll.
2. Choose which Bible you’d like free. You can have any Compact TruTone or Compact TruGrip edition published by Crossway.
3. Send an email to blog@esv.org containing the url of your blog, your postal mailing address, and the color/design of the Bible you would like.

We will visit your blog to double-check your blogroll, email you to inform you that you’ve been accepted, and then we’ll ship you a free Bible. No strings attached.

We ask that you keep us on your blogroll at least until your Bible arrives (2-3 weeks), but your blogroll is yours–you’re free to remove us at any time. We hope, though, that if you enjoy the ESV, we’ll earn a permanent place on your blogroll.

Legal info: This offer is open to bloggers in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. Only blogs that link directly to the ESV blog in their blogrolls qualify. A “blogroll” is a list of links that appears on most pages in a blog. Limit one free Bible per blog and per household. We will not use your email address for any purpose beyond communicating with you about this offer.

Here’s an example email:

Subject: Blogroll Bible request

Hello, my blog is at http://example.com/blog

My address is:
John Doe
123 Main St
Wheaton, IL 60187

I would like an Olive (Celtic Cross Design) Compact TruTone.

Adrian Warnock, a blogger whom we linked to earlier, in three posts finds and links to much of the online conversation going on right now about the ESV. We’ll be linking soon to some of the pages he mentions, but if you don’t want to wait for us, head over to Adrian’s blog for details.

• A meme in the making: is an ESV wave sweeping the blogosphere
  
• The blogosphere is converting to the English Standard Version
• English Standard Version Update

Adrian Warnock, a preacher/blogger from the UK, writes about the ESV:

It is my primary translation and the one I read from almost every time I preach….

The ESV is as close to being word for word as it is reasonable to be without compromising on both readability and the accurate conveying of the sense of the words. As a preacher I feel that other translations often tend to do a little bit of my work for me, which can be fine and certainly I love referring to them, but if I want to get as close as possible to the original word of God I reach for the ESV every time.

Using the ESV I quickly realised that on almost every occasion where a commentator said “what the original really means here is….” the ESV had got there already. It is almost enough to stop a man reading commentaries!

The whole post has more praise for the ESV.

Update: fixed Adrian’s job description.

Listen to why John Piper uses the ESV Bible.

I’m using–when I’m not reading the Greek and Hebrew, which I try to do in preparation for messages and in my study–I’m reading the English Standard Version. It’s a newer version–about five years old now. And I’m reading it–and will, I think, read it for the rest of my life–for several reasons:

One, it’s in a direct lineage with the King James and the Revised Version of 1900 and the Revised Standard Version of 1952, and so you can hear the echoes of the cadences and familiarity of the language that goes back to the King James. And yet, it’s a modern version that doesn’t suffer from some of the deficiencies of the King James. And so it’s that connection with that history that makes me at home with it–because I grew up on the King James, and then I spent thirty years, roughly, with the Revised Standard Version, memorizing it, and I don’t want to abandon all that memory. And the ESV is a lightly edited Revised Standard Version with the theological problems fixed. So that’s one reason.

Here’s another reason. I am so thankful for the ESV because I think it strikes the best balance I know of between excessively literal and paraphrase. I think the most familiar NIV tends to be more paraphrasing than I can preach from and want people to be memorizing. But the New American Standard Bible, which I preached from for years, is more literal than most people will use because of its more difficult phraseology for children memorizing.

So if you want a Bible that children and teenagers and adults can get together on and memorize, that has the dignity and nobility of the more historic stream and has contemporary language where that’s appropriate and necessary, I find the ESV, English Standard Version, as the best balance right now for me personally and for our church as a whole. So we’re building our memory program around it, as well as my preaching, as well as our study and meditation.

Learn more about why John Piper’s church uses the ESV at “Good English with Minimal Interpretation: Why Bethlehem Uses the ESV.”