I'm summarising the Bible on Twitter - one tweet per chapter, one chapter per day.
It's a three-and-a-half year project. I started on 8 August 2010 and I'm on course to finish on 8 November 2013.
The @biblesummary account has 23,928 followers.
Bible Summary has been featured in the news all over the world.
Find out about the project here, check out my progress, or feel free to get in contact.
That wraps up the Psalms!
These have been popular summaries, so I thought I would compile the Top 10 according to number of retweets. Without further ado..
Psalm 23 at number 1 is no surprise, but Psalm 121 was actually only one retweet behind.
Most of the Top 10 contain famous and quotable verses. The main surprise is Psalm 138 at Number 3.
On to Proverbs tomorrow...
One of the most frequently quoted bits of Bible trivia is that Psalm 118 is the central chapter of the Bible. The claim is usually accompanied by various elaborations of its significance - the shortest and longest chapters are on either side, the theme is central to the message of Scripture, etc.
But it turns out it's not true!
The Bible is 1,189 chapters long, so the middle chapter is the 595th.
I'll be posting my 595th summary this coming Saturday. I counted forward and realised to my initial bewilderment that Saturday will be Psalm 117, not Psalm 118. I thought I must have unwittingly posted a chapter twice or missed a day or something. But then I did some Googling...
Apparently the Psalm 118 thing is one of those Christian folk legends that gets passed around without any fact-checking. (I've done it myself!) Psalm 117 is indeed the middle chapter.
How have I not found this out before?
That wraps up the first book of Psalms! (I wonder why they're not numbered 1 Psalms, 2 Psalms etc.)
These have been some of my favourite summaries so far. I love posting straightforward praise of God each morning. And judging by the number of retweets, I'm not alone in that.
Psalm 23 has had 52 retweets, which puts it in the top 10 summaries overall. Psalms 1, 16, 25, 27, 31, 34, 37 and 40 have all had over 30 retweets.
I've still got three-and-a-half months to go before I get to Proverbs. So, I must say I'm relieved that it's Psalms (rather than, say, 2 Chronicles) that has 150 chapters!
When I was first planning Bible Summary, a friend said to me, "Perhaps you'll have ten- or twenty-thousand followers by the end." I can clearly remember how inconceivable either of those figures sounded.
As it turned out, I gained my first 10,000 followers in the space of five somewhat crazy days between Genesis 6 and Genesis 11.
The next 10,000 have taken a lot longer. I reached 19,500 followers a few months ago and then the numbers fell for several weeks. I'll admit to being disappointed at the thought of not reaching the milestone.
But who can tell the ways of Twitter?! The numbers started rising again, and with over two years still to go, my summary of Nehemiah 2 went out to 20,010 followers!
By way of geeky celebration, I've added the number of followers I had for each summary to the chapter pages.
Thanks for following!
I'm one third of the way through the project today!
It's only a couple of weeks since I posted my thoughts on completing my first year, so I don't feel the need to do much navel-gazing.
But I've recently added the number of retweets for each summary to my database, so here's the most popular chapter from each of the books I've completed:
A couple of observations...
If I posted the top 20 chapters overall it would be pretty much all Genesis, which undoubtedly reflects the amount of coverage the project had at that time as much as it does the popularity of Genesis.
I guess the book of Ruth is lowest because it's so short. But that does still seem a bit surprising.
People like:
You can now see the number of retweets for any summary by going to the page for that chapter. The retweet count is underneath the summary.
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