The history of communications technology can be fascinating. Gutenberg's Bible is famously known as the first printed book; of course anit-establishment works and smut were among the first uses of the printing press too. Sex and death often drive technology development; the spread of the VCR was fueled by the porn market and the Internet was initiall funded by U.S. defense research funds (and of course porn plays a role there too). But if you look into the history of popular hypertext, i.e. the World Wide Web, you will find many paths that lead to Robin Cover's bibliography, and if you trace that back before the days of corporate sponsorship, you will find that the previous host was SIL International, which was founded to promote Bible translation. Much of the hypertext technology, and indeed much of the techniques of literary analysis, have their roots in the search to understand the written word of God.
Once, in the heat of an argument about web architecture, Tim Bray took me to task for quoting TimBL's writings "chapter and verse" without justification, as if they were divinely revealed truth, not to be questioned. He was quite right that this is a counter-productive tactic in technical discussions, but the parallel between web addresses and scripture citations has stuck with me. To some, "John 3:16" is perhaps recognizeable as a reference to scripture but means little more; to others it's a deeply meaningful symbol about the relationship between God and man. A link to that verse it makes the text of the verse available in a second or two to anybody who cares to follow the link. (The whole story about the relationship between God and man might take a little longer to appreciate ;-) BibleVerse:John+3:16 is something in-between; it's InterWiki? notation, which is a little easier to write than the other link.
The word "bible" is Greek for "book"; at one point, "the book" was an unambiguous reference to the bible. Jesus used to say "it is written..." and the Jews understood that to mean "it is written in scripture." Modern bibles have footnotes and such that make the connection between, say, BibleVerse:Matt+1:23 and BibleVerse:Isaiah+7:14 explicit, but at that time the scholars could make the connection by memory (and the others accepted it on authority, I suppose). As far as I can tell, these are the oldest surviving hypertext links. The bible is clearly not one linear text; its structure is much richer.
The forward references are perhaps the most interesting. Citing earlier works is clearly something mere mortals can do, but when the pslamist writes, hundreds of years before Jesus is born, before crucifixion was perfected by the Romans, that the messiah would be "pierced for his transgressions," that seems divinely inspired. (See Medical Aspects of the Crucifixion for a full account.)
The history of transportation technology plays an interesting role as well; the roman persecution of the early church prompted Chrisitians to spread out, and the roman roads facilitated the spread of copies of the new testament over much of the empire, resulting in an unprecedented number of copies of a text from that time.
Thoughts on Annotations
I'd like to use annotea to connect my to an online copy of the bible... e.g. songs related to scripture versus, audio recordings of sermons that I've attended... presentation materials too.
For now, let's use InterWiki?: BibleGateway, BibleBook, BibleVerse
Church Webmaster
I started maintaing the church web site in 2003, after a few years of wondering things like: do they keep the presentation materials around? Are they interested in publishing them? How about online copies of the sermons? I researched open source audio publishing tools (ogg vorbis, VCD, esd etc.) around 2Jan2002.
There's such a huge gap between the Microsoft-dominated IT world and the world of open source and open standards that I'm used to working in; it's a struggle to bridge the gap.
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