32: Bible Study Magazine
Interview with Associate Editor John D. Barry, April 2009
Play audio (approximately 30 minutes)
The topic of this installment of Periodical Radio is Bible Study Magazine, a new bi-monthly periodical by the publishers of Logos Bible Software. It’s a colorful and readable magazine that draws from the serious scholarship of professors of religious studies, history, and archeology. The editors’ statement of faith is the Apostle’s Creed, and the magazine is intended to be non-denominational. Joining me today is Bible Study Magazine’s Associate Editor, John D. Barry.
Steve: John Barry, welcome to Periodical Radio.
John: Thank you.
Steve: John, to address the vision and purpose of Bible Study Magazine, I’d like to begin with your publisher, Logos Bible Software. Please tell us a little about the company and why they chose to launch a magazine.
John: Logos Bible Software is a digital publishing company, so what we do is we take books from I believe around 120 publishers, and we publish them electronically. Basically our goal is to not just do e-books, but to do something that’s linkable, fully searchable, connects with the whole rest of your library and everything. It’s pretty exciting. It’s an amazing tool. On top of it all we have Bible search tools within that. You can enter a passage, click go, and all these things will be pulled up from your library that give you information on that. So it essentially searches your entire library for you as if was your own research assistant. It’s really incredible. So I was using the software before I came to work here, just because I love it. Then there’s a second thing, which is Bible Study Magazine, of course. We launched Bible Study Magazine because we don’t just have tools, we have users who want to know how to use those tools. So we can show them how to use the tools within the software, but they also have the question then, “Well how do I determine what’s best? How do I know how to go about Bible study? How do I do a word study beyond there?” If I want to be able to filter all those results and know different things about them and where they’re coming from different angles, and things like that. They have all these how-to questions about Bible study, and Bible Study Magazine is our answer to that. It explains how to approach Bible studies, how you go from just reading the text to actually studying your Bible. We’ve offered them the tools already, but now we’re trying to offer them the methods to go along with those. So we’re taking good, sound Biblical scholarship, and we’re conveying it in a way that anyone can understand. We’re trying to translate, essentially, what Biblical scholars do into anyone’s terms. So our goal is to see people study the Bible as a company all together. Our vision is, we want people to know the Bible. To do that, we’ve already created the tools I’ve mentioned, but now the magazine is offering that next step, that step to being in your Bible every day and having both the ability, if somebody is a print user who’s not a user of the software how to do it in the print books, and if they are users of the software they can do that as well. So everything we do somehow involves the step of actually doing the Bible study. So it doesn’t just go through a passage. For example, I do Hebrews in my article in the magazine in my ongoing section. We do an ongoing Bible study eight weeks with Hebrews. We don’t just go through Hebrews, we talk about how to actually do the study. So instead of offering answers, I’m offering questions. I’m trying to help people inductively go through a study, and then say, “Okay, now what can I use as tools to help them do this as well.” So instead of saying, like, okay here’s the basic doctrines the author is talking about and here’s the answers to what he means, go search it for yourself, go find out, and this is how you do it. So we’re trying to do both the tools and the how-to. That’s our general perspective as a company.
Steve: How would you define your target audience? You pretty well just described the sort of enquiring person who would be interested in this. But demographically, how large is the audience, who are you trying to reach?
John: We have 11,000 paid subscribers. A good 9,000 plus of those are individual one year subscriptions, and the rest of those are buying in bulk copies, to do with their groups or whatnot. Most of these people are actively engaged in church. A lot of them are ministers, but most of the ministers are trying to get it for their community instead, now. It’s coming to a point where a lot of these ministers are realizing they can’t offer the whole gamut, they’re just too busy, right? So what they’re doing is they are starting to pick up our tools as they did before, but now adding our magazine, which is only $14.95, right? It’s a really cheap way for them to get their community into the Bible. So it’s all sorts of people from all different walks of life, as far as the spectrum goes. Most of our readers are probably evangelicals. We’re actually doing a reader survey right now so we can determine all that. We know who our readers or users are of our software, but now since we have a brand new publication we’re doing a reader survey with our next issue, and it will be an online survey readers can take. Then we’ll know exact facts on who these people are. That’s really helpful for us, of course, because then we can write articles even more to them. We have a general idea who the person is, and we try to always write to someone who has no background in Bible or Bible studies. We don’t assume a knowledge base. So if we use a definition, we define it. We try to take the lowest common denominator as far as understanding, and work from there. But we try to do in depth study at the same time, so if we do something really in depth that may be perceived as something not anybody could get, we’ll define things all along the way, and use steps to get them to where they need to be so then they can work with us. We’re trying to make sure everybody can understand, that’s the goal, that everybody can get it. So as far as who the actual people are, likely Christian, almost definitely Christian, evangelical. But that doesn’t characterize us, because we trying to be non-denominational in our publications, so we try to take on various perspectives. We even have a Jewish writer who works with us. We’re recruiting Catholic and Orthodox writers. We’re trying to get a whole gamut of perspectives on the Bible, and trying to get an interdenominational thing going as far as Bible study goes. So far we’ve covered people who are from all sorts of different walks as far as teachers and speakers and writers. We’re trying to make sure everybody’s getting their viewpoint in, but at the same time, trying to make sure those are as unbiased as possible. So we can hit every single one of the people in our target zone. Our goal is if you like the Bible, then Bible Study Magazine is for you. That’s what we’re trying to be. That’s a tough goal, reaching a demographic that wide. But the way we do that is we ask the question always, “If this was somebody who has never read the Bible, who had just come to decide to read it, whether that be through faith or other reasons, and they want to understand it, can we reach them? Is this article for them?” If the answer to that is yes, then we’ve done our job. If it’s no, we change it.
Steve: One of the questions I wanted to ask was whether you have or are planning to have authors from a Jewish or a Catholic perspective, and you just answered that. The answer is yes.
John: Yeah, definitely.
Steve: Why is that important? I mean . . .. Let me back up a little bit. When someone first looks at your magazine, they might have a presumption about it being of a particular viewpoint. They might have to get into the magazine and read a little bit to understand that your goal is to be non-denominational and bring in various perspectives. Why is that important as part of your vision?
John: It’s important because for us, we want to have the most unbiased Biblical interpretation possible. Now, you know, Boltzmann a long time ago said there is not interpretation possible without biases. We all know that’s not possible, because everybody has their own perspective. But as part of doing that, as you mention, as I was referring to earlier too is having writers from different denominations. That helps to vary the perspective. So everyone’s going to have their perspective, and we don’t want to take that away from our writers. That’s what makes them who they are. But at the same time we want to be able to make sure they’re covering all the ground of Biblical scholarship. Are they addressing the historical issues? Is this really what the text meant? So to get beyond those denominational perspectives, what we’re trying to do is talk about what the text means for its context. The application we allow to be however they want it. The application is kind of a separate process that’s based on who the person is as far as an author goes. For us, we want to make sure that the perspective is varied. If it’s not, then we’re missing out on something. We’re missing out on what we can learn. I’m a Protestant, for example. I go to a Baptist church. But one of my favorite authors is Luke Timothy Johnson and Leonard Greenspoon, who actually writes for us now. Leonard Greenspoon is Jewish and Luke Timothy Johnson is Catholic. For me, I’ve found in my scholarship how much it helps me to have a perspective from a different denomination. Both Leonard Greenspoon and Luke Timothy Johnson have the ability to look at a text in way that’s different than me, simply because they’ve been raised differently, they understand things differently, they have a different perspective. That is hugely important, because it changes our worldview. It helps us to understand number one, how we fit together as denominations. But number two, it helps us all realize we have something in common, and that’s the Bible. No matter where we come from, we have the bible in common. In our first issue we even had a Canon chart showing all the different Canons and how different denominations put together their Bibles, including different books in some that other ones don’t. Part of our point in doing that was to say, “Hey, yeah, we differ a lot.” We have a lot of books that each of us includes as sacred that others don’t. But there’s a set of books we all agree upon, and on top of it all, for those of us who don’t have those other books, maybe we should look at them. Maybe we should see them in a new light, and maybe we should think about them. Even if we don’t see them as sacred necessarily, they’re going to shed light on the Bible for us, on what we consider Bible. For those who consider them sacred, well that’s great, then we’re talking about them. So it goes both ways. It becomes a conversation basically within our magazine, and a way to see things together. On top of it all, it becomes something that says, hey, this is the Bible, raw, uncooked, it’s the way it its. Let’s look at the Bible for what the Bible is, and let’s deal with that. That’s something we can all agree upon, because no matter where we come from, we all agree on Bible study. Studying the Bible is important. So that’s what we’re trying to offer, and that’s part of our larger vision as a company as well. We’re trying to offer a perspective of the Bible in all gamuts. Our CEO Bob Pritchett has multiple times said, you know, there’s something in our library to make everybody happy, and to offend everybody, too. Our digital library has nearly 9,000 books, or maybe even more now. We have everything. You can love it, you can hate it. There’s multiple things within that library, so you choose what works for you. That’s part of our policy as a company and likewise as a magazine. If there’s an article that doesn’t work for somebody, we hope they’ll see other articles that do work for them. You can’t ever please anybody wholly. You can do all you can to help them and to lead them, but nobody’s going to be happy with everything, you know. The only people who are happy with everything are the editors, and even they aren’t sometimes. It all depends on where you’re coming from. We shouldn’t be too worried about where they’re at, and offer them what we can, and offer them a varied perspective.
Steve: One of the things I noticed about that Bible Study Magazine is that is includes some mildly provocative features like “What They Don’t Tell You in Church.” What would you say to readers who may experience some shock or dismay by what they read in the magazine?
John: Oh, um, I’d say keep on reading, because the point of “What They Don’t Tell You in Church,” which is even the one with the Canon chart or we dealt with the Magi in that section, or does the author of Ecclesiastes need Prozac? There are all articles we have had in that section, and in the next one we have stuff about David and Goliath and Goliath’s height. How tall was he really, and who really killed him? Things like that. We ask these questions and they’re provocative, but these are the questions that the Bible and our denominational views are asking. The reason we call that “What They Don’t Tell You in Church” is because these are things you really will not hear in church, unless you have an extremely well educated pastor or leader in church or minister, whoever it is, leading you along to ask these questions. These are questions we think a lot of people ask, but they never get answered in their church. What we do in this section is say, you know, growing up or whatnot, or even in my church now, and we ask our writers the same question, what question do you have that people have never answered? When you ask it, they kind of look shocked, or like you shouldn’t be asking that here. Then what we do is we then try to answer it. The point of those provocative sections is to answer the deep questions. What we find is that sometimes they present more questions than answers even, like the Canon chart. But there are other ones like the Magi or Ecclesiastes that present answers that oftentimes have never been presented. These are new scholastic views we’re presenting in our magazine, like our view of the Magi or our view of Ecclesiastes. It’s exciting for people, because they’re hearing something that’s not only fresh to them, in fact it’s fresh to Biblical scholarship. So we’re trying to say hey, this is something you wouldn’t hear anywhere else. You heard it here, right from the horse’s mouth at Bible Study Magazine. That’s what we’re trying to offer. We also have a section that’s pretty provocative called “I Dare You Not to Bore me with the Bible.” They guy who runs the magazine beside me, Michael Heiser, writes that section. The point of that is he said, you know, when I walk into Sunday school classes, and I begin to teach, I feel like people look at me thinking, I dare you not to bore me with the Bible. They’re bored a lot of times. It becomes this dry thing, but we think no, it’s not dry, it’s exciting. The weird stuff is actually important. We’re trying to say hey, all that stuff in the Bible that seems dry, it’s really not. You’re just not getting it yet. So then once we offer what it means to get it, to understand it, then all of sudden it becomes exciting. Like who took John 5:4 out of my Bible, and that’s one of our passages there we dealt with. It’s dealing with deeper issues of scholarship that answer the deep questions people have. It’s just not offered, because it never makes the leap from scholarship into church. There are exceptions of course to that rule. I say that as a generality. Of course there are exceptions, but it often doesn’t. We’re trying to offer it in a way that will make people excited and want to read.
Steve: Scholars of the Bible know very well there are plenty of contradictions and ambiguities among sources and translations, and folks new to reading the Bible as you said you want to reach that audience, don’t necessarily know that. You’re kind alluding to that there’s sort of a leap there, an aha moment perhaps of realizing that the version of the Bible they have in their hands didn’t just magically appear?
John: I think that’s probably part of it. Part of it is the aha moment of realizing it didn’t just magically appear, it was a process, and that’s part of the beauty of the Bible, it’s being a process, as it being something that worked through communities of God who were trying to follow after Him and who were writing texts and editing texts, and then canonizing texts and putting them in the Bible. That’s part of it, the aha moment of realizing that’s what actually happened, and also realizing that of course translations differ. Everyone knows that, but realizing why, I mean our example there earlier of the John passage, of what’s in there, and why is this verse missing. Well we show that through English translations, even though it’s based on the Greek manuscripts. We were able to show that different English translations base their texts on different manuscripts. We were able to get to what’s actually going on there without having to go into the Greek. When we do go into the Greek, we of course define it all through the English standpoint. There are things like that, where they are going to get this aha moment using the Greek or Hebrew or understanding where the original text came from, or seeing where the translation came from. We want that for our audience, because we’ve experienced that ourselves. Michael Heiser and I have both had a long road of getting into the Bible and questioning things, and in fact having a hard time sometimes in churches, because we question too much according to some people. But we’ve done it in faith. We’ve done it in belief. We were faith seeking understanding. That’s the quote there, and we were doing that. We had a hard time oftentimes, because of that. So now we’re trying to help the people who are in the position we were, but also help the people who are on the other side of the fence, the people who are opposed to it, and gently show them what is actually going on there, and it’s okay. That’s God’s diverse perspective, and God is like that. God’s amazing, he’s powerful, he’s different from us, so we’re trying to show it’s okay to view the Bible that way, and it’s okay to ask questions. In fact, you’ll be better off for it, and know more, and be able to answer more questions from other people, and it’s going to teach you, and you’re going to learn. In the end, you’re going to be happy about it. It may be a road getting there, but it will change your life. That’s what we’re trying to do, to change people’s perspectives because it doesn’t just better them, it betters their community. It creates a stronger feeling of accomplishment and understanding among the whole community, all the way around.
Steve: Is it a goal of yours as an editor to promote religious tolerance through this sort of understanding?
John: No, it’s not necessarily a goal. Obviously it’s hugely important to realize the differences in religions and to realize the differences in denominational perspectives and to not want to beat each other up over those things. It’s hugely important. Our goal is Bible study. That’s just kind of a secondary thing that happens when you’re honest with the text. It’s almost inevitable that the text will lead you places you didn’t expect it to, and show you things you didn’t expect to find. We’re not trying to promote religious tolerance necessarily. I think it may be a secondary outcome of what we do. Of course that’s good. It’s good that we understand each other better, but it’s not our goal. Our goal is to help people to study the Bible, that’s our ultimate focus.
Steve: I’d like to switch gears just a little bit now and ask a couple of questions about the running of the magazine, and pick up on something you’ve alluded to already about who your authors are. Along those lines, I wanted to ask, does Bible Study Magazine welcome unsolicited manuscripts, or are all of the articles ones that the editors either write or seek out.
John: We welcome unsolicited manuscripts, but we’re a short magazine. We’re 48 pages, 52 with cover, and so we’re a short magazine. The reason is we don’t want to overwhelm people. We want them to be able to read everything we produce. We keep our magazine short for that reason, and we keep everything succinct. That’s one of our big goals as writers and editors, to keep everything succinct and to the point. We get a lot of unsolicited manuscripts. We look at them, we always read them, either I do or Mike does, or someone else around here, but usually it’s one of us. So far we haven’t actually published anything unsolicited, but that’s mainly because we haven’t gotten anything really good yet. I’m sure we will, and I’m looking forward to the day. It’s great as an editor to get an article that you didn’t expect that you love, it’s wonderful. It’s a lot less work for me for that to happen, so I appreciate it of course. So we do welcome unsolicited manuscripts, but we usually ask people for a resume and samples of their other work, just to see where they’re coming from and how they write in general. It helps to see more than one sample, more than just what they submitted. Of course if someone submitted something absolutely outstanding that I was blown away by it and wanted to publish right away, I wouldn’t worry about seeing anything else. But so far that hasn’t happened.
Steve: What efforts do you expect you’ll need to make over time to make sure that you maintain a non-denominational perspective, to keep from sliding predominantly into one denominational perspective or another.
John: It’s multiple factors there, of course. The first factor is going to be finding more really good writers who are from various perspectives. That’s something we really want, and we’re working on. The second thing is going to be of course like Michael Heiser and myself continuing to engage in Biblical scholarship. We’re both members of the Society of Biblical Literature, which is of course a non-denominational organization that’s about the study of the Bible and other literature related to it. So we’re both exposed to that regularly as far as a group that’s definitely not from a Christian or any type of religious perspective. They try to be as unreligious in their approach as possible, and just deal with the text. The other factor for us is to always ask the question, “What’s really going on here? Is this person interpreting the text for what the text is, or are they interpreting out of another motivation? Sometimes it’s not even religious, the other motivation, sometimes it’s just wanting to make a point. We have to be really careful with those. We have a very extensive editorial process. It takes a huge amount of depth and rewriting when necessary, and all sorts of things as far as going back and forth with writers and dealing with issues. We spend a lot of time putting together an issue, an immense amount of time. The reason is because we want to make sure that things are not coming from that perspective as far as actually saying, you know, here’s this particular denominational view on this. Instead we want to say, “Here’s the Biblical view.” Here’s what the Bible says. For us it always comes back to is this what the Bible says, or is this what your doctrine says. Those are oftentimes two separate things, sometimes they’re the same. My hope for all communities is that those two will be the same, but obviously there’s a lot of extra-Biblical doctrines people have, too. I happy for them to affirm them, I just don’t allow that in our publication. It’s something that not everyone is going to hold, and that’s presenting a view that more reserved for a magazine that’s made for that. For us, ours is not made for that. Ours is for dealing with the Bible. We try to do that from as varied a perspective as possible.
Steve: So far, have you gone beyond your editorial board and talked to outside experts, in a way similar to what a scholarly journal would do in the peer review process?
John: Oh, absolutely, yes. Recently we were writing an article, in our next issue we have this David and Goliath special edition section, and it’s a good example. We were wondering about the height of people in the ancient world. Michael Heiser being a great expert on all sorts of very ancient things had a good idea, but we wanted to talk to somebody who was an archeologist who had dealt with lots of skeletal remains. What would David’s height actually have been? What was the average height of a male in Israel at that time? We found four or five different scholars, and we talked to them. We said, you know, what do you know about this? We got various perspectives, and we found they were all agreeing, so we were like okay, this is the way to go. We do that with multiple things. We have a lot of scholars who work directly for us, as well. They do some of the things on their end. They don’t work directly for us, they’re freelance writers, that’s the way I should put it. We have these various friends and colleagues all over that we ask stuff of—“What about this? What do you know about this various thing?” What do you know about skeletal remains, or sheparding, or whatever it would be. We of course have tons of scholarly resources at our fingertips from working for Logos Bible Software and having these 9,000 books at our fingertips. But we also go beyond that when we need to. We’ll go look it up, and we’ll also ask people for an opinion. We’re hoping to expand that even more in the future. Micheal Heiser is a Ph.D., so he’s part of our peer review process, of course.
Steve: John, launching any magazine carries significant financial risk. What will success look like for Bible Study Magazine?
John: Well Bible Study Magazine is a success, actually. That’s part of what’s amazing about us, is that we are a publication that’s in our third issue, we’re about to launch our fourth on Monday, and we are already successful. We’re actually a profitable publication, which is amazing for a brand new publication. You know, with having upwards of 11,000 subscribers here, and it’s something we had hoped for and worked towards. We wanted to see it happen. To me, though, success will be when we’re really big. That’s my goal. I want to see us be a 100,000 subscriber magazine, and that’s what I work towards. I spend a lot of time working with partners and whatnot to try to get us out there and get exposure, and get people interested in us.
Steve: And how’s your web site going fit into there? Many magazines’ web sites have interactive features and whatnot. Do you have plans in that regard?
John: Yeah, we actually do have interactive features on our web site, a lot of interactive features. Biblestudymagazine.com is our web site. In fact, we do all of our subscriptions through Biblestudymagazine.com. Most magazines send out business reply cards and things like that, but that’s an extremely expensive process. We knew our audience was tech-savvy. A lot of people we were reaching right away because they own Logos Bible Software, but there’s this whole other group of people that were like, “Well let’s see how it goes with them.” We started to get exposure there, and it’s worked. Doing subscriptions through Biblestudymagazine.com and just that alone, or calling our 1-800 number here at Logos, that’s where we’ve done our subscriptions. It’s been primarily through the web site. To do that, we have a lot of interactive features, and two hopes. One is we want to offer more to the world, as far as Bible study goes. So we have the Canon chart I was mentioning is completely interactive online. You can hover your mouse over it, you see these cool little pop-ups that give you the notes, pop-ups in the sense of a mouse hover, not a pop-up screen. Then we also have our Ten Commandments chart. We’ve recently launched one on Sennacherib’s invasion of Judea in 701 B.C., which was an ongoing three-part article in our magazine by Dr. Craig Broyles. So we offer all these cool interactive things online, and part of what that does is get people to our web site, it gets people looking. We also do a lot of online promos, which has really been successful for us. Mark Driscoll, who was our cover story in the March/April issue, we did a promo with his book Vintage Church. We did a promo with Cutlass, we gave away a free mp3 of their new song, the Christian rock band Cutlass. So we do lots of stuff like that, as well, to get web traffic going. For us, our marketing end of it has been focused on the internet. Biblestudymagazine.com will continue to be a better web site. We’re working on redesigns and adding things to it all the time. It’s something we focus as much time as we can on it. Obviously, we’re very busy with other things, too. But we spend as much time as we can there, trying to get good stuff up there for people, and trying to allow a broader focus.
Steve: Well John Barry, thank you very much for being my guest today. I’m afraid we’re out of time. It’s been great having you as my guest today on Periodical Radio.
John: Okay, well I appreciate it, and just so everyone can know, you can subscribe at Biblestudymagazine.com if you’re interested.
Steve: Very good. It’s $14.95 a year, correct?
John: $14.95 a year, almost 50% off the cover price.
Steve: Thank you for listening to Periodical Radio. I’m your host, Steve Black.