Pink-Letter Bibles

My wife has a pink KJV Bible. When you look at it, you think, "Could anything be more pink?" and you think, "No. It surpasses all known degrees of pinkitude." A friend got it for her years ago. My wife dare not take it out in public, because then people will think she's the sort of person who likes very pink KJV Bibles. Be it nature, be it nurture, there seems something counterintuitively wrong about God's revealing His eternal qualities and divine attributes in pink.

Just as my wife is torn by being stereotyped as a pink bible kind of woman, I have some fears of being identified as a red-letter Bible kind of guy. Growing up, I had found a red-letter Bible rather handy as an organizational tool--for instance, if I wanted to find out where in the book of Acts Jesus appeared to Paul, I just looked for the red letters in the book of Acts. You can’t miss it. It's a helpful way of separating dialogue from narrative. I always assumed that the red letters were intended to serve this precise pragmatic function.

Well, that’s not why red-letter Bibles were invented. In 1899, Louis Klopsch read Luke 22:20, “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.” With the epiphany that all blood is red, he asked himself, “why not a red letter Bible with the red words to be those of our Lord?” and asked Bible scholars to tell him which bits were probably spoken by Jesus. I don’t mean to demean the reverence for Jesus’s words, for His blood shed on the cross. Just like my wife does not mean to demean pink. But I am not a blood-stained letters kind of guy. I’m just there for the organizational color-coding. I have color folders, but that does not mean my red folders symbolize the blood of the parties represented within.

Problematic as the red-letter Bible may be, I think there is some usefulness in experimentation with typesetting, colors, etc. We typically underline passages of Scripture not to say, “Those other parts suck!” but to say, “Hey, think about this,” or “This part is important for some reason—guess why!” I think it’d be pretty nifty if, when printing a passage in the OT that will later show up in the NT, the printer would put the words in a funky font to say, “Hey, pay attention to this part, it shows up later in a different context.” Sure, when you’re reading the NT passage that quotes an OT passage, it’s possible to go back, but how many of us do so? It would interrupt the flow of our reading. So why can’t we have a “Blue-letter OT quotes” edition?

Further, I know most of us like to mark up our own Bibles, but … why not buy Bibles that are already marked up? Just hear me out: the drawback of underlining favorite passages, when we’re left on our own, is that the meditative passages end up rather selective. For instance, a Protestant underlines Ephesians 2:8-9, “for it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” A Catholic may underline the very next verse, 2:10, “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Different sects within Christianity inevitably have different “top 40 Bible verse hits.” I’ve often found talking with Catholics that they tend to value certain Bible verses that I initially fail to recognize because they’re off my radar, such as I Cor. 3:13. Now, it would perhaps not be a good idea to color-code some passages of Scripture as “Catholic,” some as “Protestant,” some as “Eastern Orthodox,” etc.—it’s not as if one group gets to say, “Ha hah, this verse belongs to me, you cannot have it!”—but it would be very helpful if we at least knew what other groups’ “top 40” verses were. It might cause you to meditate on a verse you wouldn’t have considered otherwise, but which has held special devotional or theological significance in the history of God’s people thousands of years back. It might enable you to recognize Biblical cadences in the speech of denominations you disagree with—even if I do not endorse the phrase “Baptism saves you,” I must grudgingly admit Peter seems to employ it in I Peter 3:21. It also enables a sola scriptura type not to have to sound stupid if someone asks, “But what about I Cor. 3:13?” and have to reply, “Uh … what’s it say?”