Project Begins to Create the Arabic Study Bible Program
Greater openness to the gospel in the Arabic speaking world will result in more believers and churches. It is critical that emerging church leaders in the region have more access to Bible study tools and Christian books for training. In many countries where the need for Arabic Christian materials is already great, it is difficult to get books into the country. Bible resources on CDROMs enable easier distribution and greater protection for believers in sensitive areas.
Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary (J.E.T.S.) and Mission Aviation Fellowship (M.A.F.) have formed a joint project to produce these much-needed materials on CDROM. We will use the experience and software development from the MAF managed Russian Bibliologia Christian Library project to produce a similar product for Arabic speakers. These CDROMs will provide an effective way to distribute needed Christian training materials in a media that is easily duplicated and transported to the places they are needed.
JETS and MAF will work together to produce non-commercial CDs that will contain Bibles, Bible reference study aids, training courses and Christian books to fill a crucial need in the region. JETS will work mainly in the area of text permissions, digital preparation and formatting and MAF will work in preparing the software needed for search, display and printing of the materials. MAF will also provide technical training for text digital preparation and formatting.
Project Goals
This project will follow the example of the Russian Bibliologia project described in the History section. The goal of the project is to provide Bible study tools including various Bible translations in Arabic, French, English, Hebrew and Greek on a easily transportable and usable CDROM format. A special Bible software program called Inter-Bible will allow searching, selecting, wordprocessing and printing of this information as needed.
The project will also provide support Bible resources including dictionaries, commentaries, cross references, and lexicons to enable indepth study of the Holy Scriptures. Christian books, references, study materials and courses will be in digital format on the CDROMs for direct usage on computer when they are available. The digital file formats used for storage will also lend themselves to easy printing so that those without access to computers can still benefit from the resources and courses when they are printed at the location where they are needed. Books are in short supply and having these materials in digital format will be a vital resource on many fronts.
In the seminaries and Bible schools they can be put on the computer learning center networks and used as course resource materials. This usually would not be possible if the schools had to depend on printed resources. Students who cannot afford to own a copy of course resources can now bring them back home with them on CDROM. These resources will also be available for use by other leaders when the students return to their place of ministry.
MAF's experience and software development from leading a similar project for the development of Russian resources will allow this Arabic project to be done more efficiently. Many of the software tools and also the methods and standards have already been developed. There will still be a sizable effort required to accommodate the Arabic script and right to left pagination.
