Scripture Direct

I’ve recently been introduced to a new smartphone app called Scripture Direct. Essentially, it is a interlinear, Greek-English Bible. It has the Greek text with a word for word English translation underneath. It is a simple concept and it works pretty well.

Pros

• The screen (I can only speak for the iPhone version) is clear without any bells and whistles complicating things.
• Clicking on a word in either Greek or English, highlights the word and its equivalent in the other language.
• Double clicking a word brings up a lexicon which gives you a brief meaning and grammatical structure of the word. Further clicking brings up the Louw-Nida dictionary entry for the word.

Cons

• Navigation to passages is not straight forward. It’s easy enough, but it is long winded.
• The only English translation available is the word for word one. It would be nice to have a sentence for sentence translation or even a full translation – but that would probably have cost implications.

I’ve got a rather rusty, working knowledge of NT Greek which I try half-heartedly to keep current. I’ve found using Scripture-Direct to be a helpful way of working through the Greek text and would recommend it to students or others who, like me, no longer use their Greek on a regular basis. To be honest, if you don’t actually have some background in Greek, this probably won’t help you much.

It is available for Android, IOS and Kindle Fire.

The app cost me about  £6, which wasn’t a bad price at all. You can get more complete tools for handling the text of Scripture, but they tend to be (much) more expensive and I’m far from convinced that they work on a small screen – or perhaps my eyes are just getting old. Scripture-Direct only does one thing, but it does it well and may be worth a look.