Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Scripture Memorization

I have been thinking quite a bit lately about the subject of Scripture memorization. Maybe my own inconsistent efforts with Philippians have something to do with this, but I am not certain that is the only reason.

More specifically, I was interested in hearing of documented cases of scholars who have either the Hebrew Bible/ NT (entirety or portions of it) committed to memory. In the case of the NT, there was a post I did on F.F. Bruce a couple of years ago and a post Dan Wallace did on C.F.D. Moule where Wallace states:

I believe that Moule had memorized the Greek New Testament, just as his predecessor at Cambridge, C. H. Dodd, had done. After one of his visits to Cambridge a few years ago, on the train ride home, Charlie’s only copy of the Greek New Testament was stolen, a copy that he had had for decades. Yet one could almost see the smile on his face as he wrote to me, "I hope that the thief will come to see the real value of his new treasure!" My Advanced Greek Grammar class at Dallas Seminary pooled their resources and we purchased a Biblia Sacra for him (a one-volume Hebrew Old Testament with the Greek New Testament), a gift for which he was exceedingly grateful. In the interim, when he had no Greek New Testament, he continued to write to me. He made many helpful comments about the NET Bible (of which I am the senior New Testament editor). In several places, he commented on the Greek text and our translation of it. Yet his comments on the Greek text were all from memory.

That leads me to a question: Do any of you know of scholars who have accomplished this amazing feat? And, how many of you practice memorizing Scripture?

I think the implications of this discipline are imporant in that memory is how we tell the story of our crucified and risen Lord and how our story fits into His.

I'm wondering what you think...

2 comments:

Brett said...

Wow, that's intense! I've really felt stirred by the Lord to start memorizing again this year. I built a website in January to help myself and others memorize verses and track our progress. http://scripturetyper.com lets you enter your own verses and memorize them by typing them; first while looking, then you can do it with part or all of the verse hidden. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if it will support the Greek text :)

Also, I just built a blogger widget this week that will show either a random verse, or the most recent verse you memorized in your blog's side-panel. I'm super excited about this, b/c I think it will encourage others to get on board with scripture memorization. Here's a link to the blog widget:
http://scripturetyper.com/blog/index.php/widget/

Thanks for this challenging post!

-Brett

roy7 said...

memverse.com is a great tool for this. :)