Paul Caminiti (00:00)
Yeah, so I do have ⁓ a somewhat lengthy career in the Bible publishing industry. I pastored for about 12 years and then had a 10-year hiatus in business and ended up after that going to Zondervan and being ⁓
invited to be the Bible publisher. And, ⁓ you know, it was a fascinating experience. To be very frank, ⁓ I knew more about the Bible than I did about publishing at that point, and even, you know, the publishing industry. The person who had hired me,
liked that I thought freshly and and
about the Bible and so I was hired. But yeah, mean, the surprising thing for me, know, first of all, ⁓ when I took the position, was, Zondervan was far and away, you know, the largest Bible publisher in the world by about a factor of ⁓ three. ⁓ I was shocked to find out that we were selling about seven million Bibles a year.
It was about a sixty five million dollar a year ⁓ business because Harper Collins was owned by New York. Another surprise was that I did get a message from New York telling me that if I screwed up, that my ⁓ my tenure as a Bible publisher, you know, would be short lived. And. ⁓
Dru Johnson (01:50)
Yeah, maybe we could put some
details in there because I think even at this point people are already thinking, wait, what? That many millions of the Bibles, why would a big New York publisher be worried about little you? I I think that’s how we think of it is like, oh, there’s a little Bible department in these big publishing houses. Why would they be worried about you and telling you not to screw this up?
Paul Caminiti (02:17)
Yeah, well, some of it had to do with timing. This was about 2002. And it was when
You know, stores, mega stores like Costco and Walmart and others had discovered that there was lots of money to be made in selling and selling Bibles. So, you know, it’s not complicated. It’s a numbers game. If you sell a $30 book, you know, the margin is going to be X. But if you’re selling, you know, a $50 Bible,
Dru Johnson (02:34)
Hmm.
Paul Caminiti (02:58)
or ⁓ higher quality one, there’s a lot more margin. And so in many Christian publishers that do Bibles, the Bible is kind of the cash cow. And it’s what ⁓ keeps the company afloat in many ways. Book publishing is very dicey business. You pay a person a royalty,
the book doesn’t do well. so there’s a lot of eating of losses, if you will, within that sector. But in Bibles, there’s a lot of money to be made. And New York understood that.
Dru Johnson (03:44)
So this is a ⁓ steady, it almost becomes a passive ⁓ income for them because they don’t have to pay new authors. They’re really just retypesetting it and repackaging the Bible in different ways. ⁓ We’re saying the Bible, but what do we mean when we say the Bible is like what translation, ⁓ who owns these translations? do you license the Bible? How does all this work?
Paul Caminiti (04:07)
Thank you.
Yeah,
right. you know, Zondervan has the exclusive publishing rights to the NIV. And there is kind of a fascinating story behind that. won’t go into all the details, but ⁓ at that time, when there were a number of Christian organizations, ⁓
That felt like boy we are due for a new and a fresh you know translation. A lot of people were reading, you know the evangelicals were reading the NASB and mainline was still reading, you know the RSV and the likes, but there ⁓ there was a gathering in in Chicago. Amongst Bible publishers and Bible associations to talk about.
Dru Johnson (04:50)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Caminiti (05:06)
the possibility of a new translation. And it kind of went out for bid, if you will. And again, the NIV being it would be a huge risk. mean, the idea of creating a translation with hundreds of not just scholars, but linguists, know, people who
are trained in, you know, going from one language to another. But at the end of the day, there was a small ⁓ Bible organization called ⁓ Biblica Now, and it used to be the International Bible Society, and they raised their hand to do this. And ⁓ so they got started on it, and about halfway through the process, they ran out of money
And ⁓ they ⁓ had not estimated what the tower was cost would cost to build. ⁓ at that point, ⁓ the two Zondervan brothers ⁓ at this time, Zondervan is still a family owned business. They they had a heart for the NIV. They had a heart for the Bible. And they believed that we were at a point where we really did need a fresh translation.
And ⁓ so I think they both mortgaged their houses. ⁓ And they ended up, and what they did, the agreement was very interesting. They said, ⁓ give us the exclusive publishing rights ⁓ for the NIV, and we’re still going to pay you a royalty for every copy that we
Dru Johnson (06:43)
Wow.
Paul Caminiti (07:06)
we sold. you know, it was, it was wonderful in many ways. It was a win-win situation. And so Zondervan and the Zondervan brothers started down that road. And again, they ran out of cash very quickly. And so they ended up going public. So a lot of people ask that, you know, how come these, you know, these Christian publishers are selling out, you know, to the big New York
Publishers, well, in this particular situation, it was simply that they needed funding to be able to finish the NIV. And of course, it turned out to be a huge success story. And the NIV rose very quickly and for many decades now has been far and away the leading.
Dru Johnson (07:47)
Mm.
Paul Caminiti (08:04)
⁓ English translation in the world.
Dru Johnson (08:08)
Yeah, so you say they ran out of money twice and then they ⁓ got an influx of cash through a New York publisher. ⁓ What are they spending all their money on?
And when we talk about producing a translation, what cost so much?
Paul Caminiti (08:24)
Yeah, I mean, I think that the major cost is hiring ⁓ the linguists to do this. you ⁓ know, I, as the Bible publisher, was invited every year when the Committee on Bible Translation, which was the group of linguists that had been brought together by Zondervan
and by the International Bible Society to every year review where we are with the translation. And part of the covenant for the translation is that it would be evergreen. And this was baked in to the contract. And so during any given calendar year, there are other scholars ⁓ from a multiplicity of places.
Dru Johnson (09:08)
Mm.
Paul Caminiti (09:21)
that will stumble onto something about how a word was used at that particular period in the ancient world. And they’ll send that then to to that team that meets for a week every every summer. And so I was invited to sit in on those meetings. You know, I was on the outer perimeter, but it was a fascinating situation. And I still remember
you know, conversations that went 45 minutes about where a comma was going to go. And so, you know, thankfully these, these are very serious people with a very serious mission and they take it seriously and it takes a lot of time, you know, to do that.
Dru Johnson (09:57)
Yeah.
Yeah. It’s funny you say all of this and I do, maybe I’m, I have the wrong impression, but my impression is that, is that most people don’t think of the NIV as this really scholarly Bible. They think of it as just kind of like, this one’s easier. This is easy to read. And almost the implication is it must’ve been easy to translate as well.
Paul Caminiti (10:33)
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, that opens up, you know, the whole other discussion about how we measure translations, you know, and you can go to some bookstores and they actually have a scale for you. And, you know, on one side of the continuum, you know, is word for word and on the other side is thought for thought. And they use, you know, different different language for that.
Dru Johnson (10:56)
yeah, yeah.
Paul Caminiti (11:03)
And so I think the kind of the conventional wisdom is that people that are serious about the Bible, you know, they’re going to go for the word for word translations. know, Christian light, you know, you’re very happy, you know, with something that has, you you’re not going to find propitiation, you know, in that translation.
Dru Johnson (11:17)
Right.
Right. Which
I’m kind of a fan of not having that one in there.
Paul Caminiti (11:32)
Yeah,
yeah. But you know, I mean, in many ways, that is a very reductionistic approach, though, to, you know, Bible translations that are serious. And I still remember one of the scholars, Dr. Mark Strauss, who I think was at Bethel, would give a talk on Bible translations. And he used an example. I hope I can get this right.
But he said, you know, take, for example, the Spanish phrase, como se llama, ⁓ three words. And so suppose you were at ⁓ some sort of a party somewhere and there were a lot of Latinos there and you would go up to them and you would say como se llama. ⁓ They obviously would know what what that meant. But if you translated that word for word,
It’s something like how you call, right? How you, yeah, right, right. So, ⁓ you know, that’s not a very good translation, but it is a word for word, you know, translation. And, you know, so if we wanted to make some comparisons, ⁓ like so the NASB version ⁓ would be how do you call yourself?
Dru Johnson (12:36)
Yeah, how are you called or something like that?
Paul Caminiti (13:02)
they might add that next word for the sake of clarity. But really, the best translation is what is your name, right? And so, I mean, that is not a word-for-word translation. So in that situation, the word-for-word translation is not only clunky, but it’s not understandable.
Dru Johnson (13:05)
Hmm.
Paul Caminiti (13:31)
and moving to the English language, ⁓ it actually is just kind of garbled. And so I would argue then that in this situation, the thought for thought translation is not only the best translation, but also the most accurate translation.
Dru Johnson (13:53)
I would quibble hard with you there.
Paul Caminiti (13:52)
Would you agree I’m
talking to a scholar here and, no, he’s going to quibble with me. I should have stayed in my lane.
Dru Johnson (14:00)
Yeah. No,
⁓ I get it. I mean, I don’t think there is one, like people say, well, what’s the best translation I go. There’s lots of great translations out there. think having the thought for thought in the inner circle of ones that you want to always refer to will give you the best scholarly opinion on kind of what they thought it meant in that culture at that time and how we translate that over to our culture. But even on the word for word one, I mean,
we could, even if you say word for word, it’s actually never anywhere near word for word. ⁓ and B it’s not order for order. Right? So one of the things that most people will point out about Hebrew prose and certainly poetry, it would be true as well is that they often, ⁓ fronted certain words in order to show emphasis. So, so they put verb subject out of order a little bit. So you could
Paul Caminiti (14:34)
Right.
Dru Johnson (14:55)
You know almost like a litter if you were alliterating five sentences all with the same, know first word or something like that and also like English just doesn’t work the same as any of these non, you know, these Semitic languages or Greek and so, know Greek you can famously kind of put words in lots of different combinations But you can figure out what the order is By the the way, the the word is formed
Where for English word order is absolutely paramount to understanding what is being communicated So we have a very stratified language in which in a particular word order stratification ⁓ So I I still think there’s there’s got to be a Bible out there to be translated where they really do kind of try to show you what would be considered the brutal ugliness of a word-for-word translation
So you can kind of see what’s going on, but that wouldn’t be the one you read, right? And it certainly wouldn’t be the one you like casually read to try and understand what’s going on.
Paul Caminiti (15:47)
Mm-hmm.
Right, right. And you know that world better than I do. ⁓ I think what ⁓ Mark Strauss was trying to communicate, especially to a group of laypeople, many of them who probably thought, can’t we just get a computer to do this, If we’re gonna do word for word. Yeah, exactly. ⁓ But I think
Dru Johnson (16:16)
Right, right. And with AI right now, that’s the question.
Paul Caminiti (16:24)
He was pushing back on the idea in general, in general, that. ⁓
that the word for word translation for the grownups. And the NIV and the NLT and Bibles like that were just kind of loosey goosey. And that’s not the case. Yeah.
Dru Johnson (16:51)
Yeah. And in fact, I mean, just as somebody who’s written some books, both on the technical and the more popular side, I find that writing to the popular audience is the hard, like it is really hard to write things so that they are broadly understood by a wide, you know, when I’m writing hyper technical nerdy stuff, it’s not hard to write it because you know, everybody who’s reading it basically understands what you’re talking about and you’re just trying to point them to some, some facts of the case.
And so I’m always very impressed with scholars who can translate their work ⁓ to a more broad audience. And I feel like the NIV is doing that task with the biblical literature. It’s translated as best as you can to a broad, American English speaking audience. I take it that the target audience was Americans. Is that correct?
Paul Caminiti (17:22)
Yeah.
No, it was actually English speakers and readers all over the world. Thus the international version. Right. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓
Dru Johnson (17:50)
Okay.
yeah, that would be the I in the NIV. ⁓ Yeah,
actually now that you say that out loud, that makes a lot of sense. But it adds a whole layer onto, well, does this make sense in Kenyan English versus Canadian English? So it’s even a harder task at that point.
Paul Caminiti (18:15)
Right, right. So I was, you know, what made this most interesting and frankly painful for me though was that I was the Bible publisher during the Bible wars. And so ⁓ if you remember ⁓ the NIV, which actually has like a sister translation,
for a British translation, they launched a new translation that did try to represent pronouns in a proper way. so, all of this came by the way, people don’t know,
the kind of story that’s behind it. But I used to get like the letters from people who were working with Campus Crusade in, you know, in the Arab world somewhere teaching English as a second language. And they would, you know, send me letters like, hey, Mr. Caminiti, sorry, but we can no longer use your translation because it’s confusing. And so we’re we’re, you know, helping
Dru Johnson (19:25)
Hmm.
Paul Caminiti (19:42)
A student read a verse like, if any man come after him, after me and take up his cross and follow me, et cetera, et cetera, I will make you fishers of men. They take that quite literally. And so they say, well, Christianity is a lot like our religion, ⁓ that men have a place of priority. And so, sorry, but we can’t use your translation.
I’m anymore and then you know on the college university scene then too ⁓ if you used a pronoun like that improperly you you would get a big red X by that and you would your grade would reflect that you you were in sensor so all of that was going on. And ⁓ you know at that time due to pressure from certain groups.
within the United States that were trying to make sure that we held on to biblical manhood and womanhood. I won’t name the name of the group, in any way. Yeah, right, right. And there was one in Colorado Springs and basically they had a lot of clout and a lot of power.
Dru Johnson (20:50)
were these denominational groups? I can almost imagine a center where that would, yeah.
Paul Caminiti (21:06)
And they came to ⁓ Zondervan and they came to the International Bible Society and said, if you do that, if you play fast and loose with the pronouns, ⁓ then, you know, we’ll, we’ll deep-six you. ⁓ And so just, just so you’re, you’re aware and,
Dru Johnson (21:33)
And for all the kids out there, means they’ll
sink you.
Paul Caminiti (21:37)
Oh, okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that that was a dated analogy. So it was a very challenging time for us as a publisher, because again, we’re getting letters from people telling us that there’s confusion, right? There’s confusion about the character of God.
Dru Johnson (21:40)
Yeah, yeah. We gotta translate for Gen Z.
Paul Caminiti (22:06)
and the breadth of his love and so forth. ⁓ We would actually have people, laypeople that would write to us and say, my daughter the other day after church came up to me and said, daddy, why does God like little boys and not little girls? mean, these were real things that were happening. so
Dru Johnson (22:28)
Right.
Paul Caminiti (22:30)
If any of you remember the history, we kind of did an end around and we published something called the TNIV, which was today’s new international version. And so it was for a younger audience, but we said, we’ll leave the 1984 NIV intact and we won’t mess with that.
you know, first of all, that was a marketing nightmare to market both of those translations and not say that one of them was better, you know, than the other or even more accurate than the other. And it was ⁓ we went through a very fascinating experience. And I think I have time to tell it if I can if I can.
Dru Johnson (23:05)
I can imagine.
Yeah, please.
Paul Caminiti (23:31)
⁓ So when we published the TNIV, again, we positioned it as a translation for the younger audience. So Truth for a Younger Audience. And so we said, let’s actually put our money where our mouth is and let’s market it in places where those young people hang out. And so we did a
ad ⁓ in Modern Bride magazine. ⁓ And we did one on MTV and we did one on Rolling Stone. And so we had contracts with those. Yeah. And so ⁓ lo and behold, so that story got on the radar of a young ⁓ journalist at USA Today.
Dru Johnson (24:12)
Wow.
Paul Caminiti (24:29)
And she was fascinated by that, that this overtly Christian organization publishing a Bible was going to have an ad in Rolling Stone. So, you know, we’d say timeless truth for today’s generation. And so she wanted to interview me. so I had an interview with her. was terrific. And she was just fascinated.
And so that story was going to come out in about three days. Well, the day before the story was going to actually before the Rolling Stone magazine was going to come out, we got and our PR firm got a call from Rolling Stone saying, hey, we’ve changed our mind about the ad. And, you know, it was it was a shock. And so the question was, well, why? And they said, well, you talk about.
Dru Johnson (25:19)
⁓
Paul Caminiti (25:26)
timeless truth. We try not to take any one religion and put it into a place where we would say, this is true. Right. Well, of course, it was it was a lame excuse. But then our PR firm had to quickly call the journalist at USA Today and say, hey, hold the presses because Rolling Stone
Dru Johnson (25:53)
yeah.
Paul Caminiti (25:56)
just changed their mind.
Dru Johnson (25:56)
Which makes it a better story at that point.
Paul Caminiti (26:01)
and this this gal, she was ⁓ she was furious. She was furious that Rolling Stone that, you know, boasts about being broad minded and etc. ⁓ She says, ⁓ we’re going to write a story. All right. And ⁓ and and she did. And it was it was on the front page.
Dru Johnson (26:19)
Hmm.
Paul Caminiti (26:25)
And I mean, I was driving to work that day and my wife calls me and says, hey, we just got a call from the Dallas Morning News. Oh, wait a minute, here’s another call. And by the end of the day, we had interviewed.
Dru Johnson (26:25)
Wow.
Paul Caminiti (26:50)
with dozens of leading newspapers. And then you’ll like this one. And this is gonna date me too. ⁓ We got a call from Fox News and they had a show back at that time called Hannity and Combs. And for those of your viewers who are under 40 or something like that, know, Hannity was the conservative in Combs was the… ⁓
Dru Johnson (27:06)
⁓ yeah.
Paul Caminiti (27:18)
the token liberal and those two guys would get on and sharpen their wits with each other every night. And so they asked if I would be a live guest on their show that night. And ⁓ it was really remarkable. towards the end of the show, ⁓ they both kind of looked at each other and said, this is the first time that we’ve ever agreed on something.
And
Dru Johnson (27:48)
They both thought it was the wrong move, I assume.
Paul Caminiti (27:51)
we thought it was the wrong move. So Dru what was really remarkable, and I believe to this day that it was providential, then, like four or five days later, when the TNIV actually released these other organizations that were loaded for bear, that were wanting to have newspapers talk about how
this money grubbing company, you know, is being unfaithful to the Bible and what have you. And so when they made those calls, ⁓ all of the major networks, all of the New York Times, the Washington Post, they all said, we did that story two days ago. And it was the story that had happened because of USA.
Dru Johnson (28:17)
I
⁓ okay.
Paul Caminiti (28:46)
⁓ today.
Dru Johnson (28:49)
I think most people are gonna hear that and say, why are we, like, why are people fighting over the Bible? And again, I can understand Rolling Stone, like, I can get in my head in, like, an editorial room at Rolling Stone and they think that that makes perfect sense. You know, like, we don’t wanna…
for any particular view of truth and I can see how they can justify that in their own world. ⁓ But you gave us some tidbits, some insider baseball that you kind of scooped over ⁓ politely, but Christian organizations coming after Bible publishers ⁓ with real, I assume they were not veiled threats, they were just direct real threats that we will. ⁓
we’ll put an end to this. I mean, I know you don’t think that’s appropriate behavior, but step out of your shoes for a second. ⁓ Do you think that that’s justifiable for someone who’s worried about the Word of God being misconstrued or contorted in some way? By the way, would also say most of these are where it says something like, brothers, then you shall do this, or and you’re saying brothers and sisters, right? That was a lot of it. ⁓
If you were in church in a Sunday school class with kids and they said, why does it say brothers? And you would just say, it means brothers and sisters, of course, right? So it’s not like you’re doing anything that any pastor wouldn’t be doing as they explained it, right? So why, is it right for them to come after you in some way? Like, is that a justifiable move?
Paul Caminiti (30:17)
Okay.
Right.
Well, and I think you can you can probably speak to this, Dru I mean, there’s another factor here that that linguists understand fully that I don’t. And that is that in other languages, ⁓ there are, you know, feminine connotations and masculine connotations that have nothing to do with with male or female. Right. So, you know, Spanish.
table is maybe feminine or something like that. In Spanish, a ballpoint pen is masculine. And since we don’t have those same dynamics in the English language, people don’t understand that. That when you’re translating, you may come across a word that technically in that particular language.
Dru Johnson (31:04)
Right.
Paul Caminiti (31:25)
is female and it has nothing to do with gender. So how do you explain that to lay people though, right? I mean, this just is gonna go right over their head. And that’s why I thought, again, the simple example of the Como se llama was really useful in explaining that to people.
It was unbelievable. At times it was cruel. mean, someone’s shaking their finger in your face and say, I fear for the damnation of your soul and the soul of every person, you know, at Zondervan. And I still remember being really snarky and said, you know, even the guys in the warehouse, you know, I mean, they’re, you’re,
Dru Johnson (32:18)
that’s what I love about you, Paul.
a well-placed snark. There’s some proverb about a well-placed snark.
Paul Caminiti (32:23)
I do come from
Italian roots where many things are settled in the back alley.
Dru Johnson (32:34)
You
yeah. And it’s, so, I feel like it’s a, it’s a really lazy move to go hyper fundamentalist and say you’re monkeying with the word of God and therefore, ⁓ and I think there are maybe some examples, none of these would convince anybody like a, like every single lay person, but you know, if I’m in a room full of people and I say, guys, listen up, right. We use, we’re using guys there obviously to address everybody in the room. Right.
or we used to talk about ships and nations as ⁓ she’s, right? Israel will get her recompense or something like that, right? So we have this kind of baked, as they say, we do have gender in English. It’s just so washed over that we don’t really use it anymore. And it is, you know, this is just a free flowing thought, but it is fascinating to me on the TNIV front how…
almost every language in the world is gendered. ⁓ so there’s like, like this is a unique problem in some ways to the English language, not entirely, but there’s certainly some uniqueness because we just do not think in terms of gendered language. But if we’re in any romance language, we would absolutely, if we’re in Hebrew or Greek, we would absolutely be thinking in terms of gendered language. ⁓ Okay, so. ⁓
Paul Caminiti (34:01)
you
Dru Johnson (34:06)
big level questions. ⁓ A, ⁓ confirm or deny. You know, this truism that ⁓ if the Bible were on the New York Times bestselling list, it would be number one every week. Is that true?
Paul Caminiti (34:21)
what is true is that.
Let’s see who who is the. It was Gallup. Gallup started measuring ⁓ both ⁓ Bible reading and Bible sales ⁓ as a comparative study back in 1985. And. ⁓ And this was actually something that when I became the Bible publisher that prompted me
to and actually really kind of messed with my conscience was that Bible sales were skyrocketing. And at that time, the average household in North America owned four and a half Bibles. This is households in the aggregate. Christian households owned more than that.
especially if you threw in like Bible storybooks and stuff. But when
Dru Johnson (35:28)
this is the average American
household, regardless of religion, would have. Okay. Wow.
Paul Caminiti (35:32)
Yes, yeah, right. But then
looking at the Bible reading scales ⁓ and the stats for that, ⁓ we began to do under the tutelage of a consultant that we had hired to come in and help us think realistically about what was going on. Because as he said,
You guys will never get to the truth because you’re so busy patting yourselves on the back for being, you know, for the number of Bibles that you sell. But what we discovered was that Bible reading was truly in free fall. And that really has not changed since 1985. So you have two divergent lines, right? You have access and then you have… ⁓
you know, actual reading, but it is is true. ⁓ And I don’t know that I could say this definitively, every single year, but on average in North America, we still sell 25 million Bibles a year. And that doesn’t count the number of Bibles that like Bible agencies like American Bible Society and others would give.
Dru Johnson (36:46)
Sheesh.
Paul Caminiti (36:55)
So this actually came up in a story that I did. think it was with the Atlantic where they were the writer. The journalists wanted to write a story on the Bible business, you know, the profitability in some of the same questions that you’ve asked. And ⁓ so then I gave him that number of the 25, 25 million and so forth. And he stopped in the interview and he says, you know, if that’s
true, then I think that would mean that the Bible is not only the bestselling book of all times, it’s the bestselling book every single year. And that’s true. you know, Bible publishers, and this was one of the things that started to bother my conscience, know, vanity Bibles or niche Bibles.
⁓ Most publishers have learned to do that. And my team, you know, ⁓ when I first came, they said, here’s the secret sauce. You create, you know, a women’s study Bible, and then you tweak the notes, and it becomes the women’s devotional Bible. And then you tweak the notes again, and it becomes the busy mom’s devotional Bible. And then you put an Italian duotone cover on it, you know, that matches somebody’s purse. And so now, you know, and people…
people flock to buy them. so, ⁓ and that was, then when I saw the data about how many Bibles were sold, and then the Bible reading, I was having trouble sleeping at night. And I began to ask the question, is this what the spirit had in mind when gifting us with the scriptures? ⁓
Dru Johnson (38:40)
Mm.
Paul Caminiti (38:51)
Even to the point of.
Does, do females need like a special set of notes or a special lens in order to read the Bible? And then you add to that, you know, something that happens to every Bible publisher, ⁓ the team, the, you know, the editors and then the design team that are working on the interior design, they design a page and then it comes to your desk and you look at it and the way that that page is laid out and designed.
is for your eye to be drawn to the notes, the prayers, the devotionals. And then the text is oftentimes like, know, squeegeed in there in two columns, small print. And, you know, and I, at one point, yes, yes, yeah.
Dru Johnson (39:39)
Right.
It’s almost Talmudic. In the sense of the page
of the Talmud, it’s just the actual scripture is just there for reference, but you’re supposed to read all the notes about it.
Paul Caminiti (39:55)
Yes, yeah. And so that that. ⁓
Those numbers led me to commission a survey. And so we gathered a lot of people who had bought our study Bibles or our devotional Bibles. And we asked them a series of questions, including how much time did they spend reading?
the extra biblical material versus the text itself. And it was stunning how many people were just reading around the text. And at that point, ⁓ I knew I had to do something.
Dru Johnson (40:35)
Mmm.
So ⁓ to conflate a lot of your personal history, this led you down a long road to joining with a team and an organization where you actually produced your own, I almost say version of the Bible, but Bible just means, Biblos just means book. You actually produced a series of books that capture all of scripture called Immersed. Why don’t you describe to us what the Immersed Bible is, physically and ⁓ emotionally.
Paul Caminiti (41:11)
Yeah.
Mm hmm. Well, the concepts behind immerse came before we just got into a room and said, hey, let’s let’s come up with a cool, trendy new product because it does come in in six volumes. And this was part of the work that we did with the consultant, who at that time was still beating us royally.
He at one point said, you know, if you were doctors, I’d sue you for malpractice. He said, because you’re, yeah, yeah. He did not know what we call here West Michigan nice. But he, ⁓
Dru Johnson (41:48)
Wow, I like this person.
He sounds like a needed ointment. ⁓
Paul Caminiti (42:06)
He was, he was, he did us a world ⁓ of good. ⁓ But we ended up doing some research about the divergent trend lines, access, skyrocketing, reading, and free fall. And I took about two years ⁓ meeting with scholars and Christian thought leaders and leading pastors to ask that question, you know, what’s causing this?
After a couple of years, we began a kind of a point of view began to emerge. And at one point we then went public with it that at that point, which is like around 2004, 2005, we felt that there were three primary barriers. One was that people read the Bible in fragments. And, you know, as one scholar said, you’re soft peddling at Paul, the modern church actually created an entire culture of Bible McNuggets.
and thought they were nutritious. You use the word microdosing, I think, in some of the articles that you’ve written. But one of the, you know, what came out of that first barrier that we read the Bible in fragments ⁓ came in time, the understanding that people read in fragments because we fragmented the text, right? And, you know, starting
Dru Johnson (43:06)
Yeah.
Paul Caminiti (43:34)
I in the 12th century with…
Stephen Langdon, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was writing Old Testament commentaries and was frustrated that people couldn’t follow him. He was the one that was able to bring about the chapter system that we have today. There were others that had been involved in something else. But the really shocking ⁓ change came in
in the 1600s when a French Huguenot scholar by the name of Robert Estienne came up with the idea of a resource that we know of today as a concordance. And as he thought through that, he realized, you know, chapters are like zip codes, but that isn’t going to help me identify words or phrases. I need street addresses.
And so he came up with the idea of versifying the Bible. it was he and he alone that came up with the idea. And he was a Huguenot and was on the run on his horse all the time. He actually did the verse system for the New Testament in a single week.
Dru Johnson (44:42)
Hmm.
Paul Caminiti (44:58)
And it stuck. And then, of course, the perfect storm was that was about the same time that the Gutenberg press was invented. And so for the first time in history, ⁓ Bibles were made available to the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker. ⁓ And so the first Bibles that they saw had chapters and verses and the verse numbers were each indented.
Dru Johnson (44:58)
Wow.
Paul Caminiti (45:27)
so that they were like a separate paragraph, right? And there were other scholars at that time that, you know.
Dru Johnson (45:32)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Caminiti (45:38)
that screamed and hollered and said, you can’t do that. If you change the form of something, you’ll change the essence of it. And it was John Locke, the British philosopher, you know, who said, you know, the, the text, yeah, yeah. The text is now so minced and chopped. And, if you see the spelling, it’s like British spelling that the average person, you know, can only see the Bible as a
Dru Johnson (45:48)
Really? ⁓ of course. Yeah.
Paul Caminiti (46:06)
series of separate aphorisms, and even the scholarly people today cannot tell the difference. And indeed, was true. It was like ⁓ an exoskeleton, a skeleton outside the body that was placed over the text. And in very quick order then, it opened Pandora’s box, and then people were piling other things. ⁓
on to the text, but specifically with the chapters and verses, it influenced everything about how we thought of the Bible, as Locke said, as individual standalone statements that we could take from any part of the Bible, some, you know, something from a narrative text, something from a law text, something from wisdom, put them together, put them in a package in a bone, because they all shared a word, then we would turn around and say, this is biblical.
And this has been going on now for, you know, the last the last 400 years. And, ⁓ you know, it’s the modern Bible does us a lot of good, right? It helps on Sunday mornings when the pastor can tell you to turn to Joshua two four or something like that. And I think it helps people in your field, right, to be able to reference, you know, each other’s work and and. ⁓
Dru Johnson (47:26)
Mm-hmm.
Paul Caminiti (47:31)
argue with one another and things like that. But I would say that, you know,
Dru Johnson (47:34)
But isn’t, yeah, I was gonna say.
Sorry, I wanna come back to your butt. ⁓ That’s your first indication though. So in scholarship when you’re looking at Homer’s Odyssey or Plato’s dialogues or Socratic dialogues, because as scholars you need to point at exact phrases and sentences, we have these very precise ⁓ categorization systems. ⁓ And the question is, you really need that with scripture? ⁓ And.
What did people do before the system? You just had to say, that part in John where he says, I’m the good shepherd, right? And that’s a very different understanding of John’s gospel than saying, where in John’s gospel does Jesus say he’s the good shepherd, right? ⁓ OK, sorry. So what was your big but there?
Paul Caminiti (48:28)
Yeah.
was just, you know, going on and on though about how, how many things this did change. And, I’m trying to think of the scholar’s name. it Yarzloff Pelican who wrote the Reformed Bible and the Bible of the Reformation?
Dru Johnson (48:46)
yeah, Yaroslav Pelikan, yeah.
Paul Caminiti (48:49)
Yeah. I mean, he makes a strong point in that book that proof texting as we know it today did not exist before chapters and verses. Chapters and verses opened the door for that kind of thing. And it’s the way we talk about the Bible in our study group, you know, I believe this because 1 John 1.9 says this.
I was listening to a podcast the other day and somebody was arguing about something and they said, you know, that’s a Matthew 14. Is that Matthew 14? Or is it 17 that talks about, you know, if you have some sort of beef with your neighbor, go to your neighbor. But this person didn’t even use that. just threw out the chapter as though.
Dru Johnson (49:21)
yeah.
Oh, 18, yeah.
Paul Caminiti (49:47)
That covers it all,
We’re coming full circle now to your question about the immersed Bible. Thank you. I’m glad to talk about that. But so when we ⁓ when we sat in a room and we began to talk about a Bible that would promote bigger readings, ⁓
a Bible that would allow people to read the Bible kind of like a narrative. ⁓ And I don’t just mean the narrative parts either. mean, these numbers, they’re like speed bumps on the superhighway, right? We may not even be aware of it. We read one and we hit a number and then we pause. And I think probably our mind pauses. ⁓
as well. So that was kind of a no-brainer. We were going to do that. And then we were going to do it in a single column so that we could represent Hebrew poetry as two lines instead of four, five, or six lines, which is what you get in a double-column Bible. And then we decided that we were going to do our best to put the books in a better historical order. you know,
knowing that knowing that there were not going to be any perfect answers, but also knowing that, you know, with the modern Bible, Paul’s letters, I think I’ve read somewhere that at the time, you know, when the printing press, when Gutenberg printing press came, some decisions had to be made, right, about what that order was going to be, that we were going to have a standardized order.
And so Paul’s letters, unfortunately, are represented from longest to shortest, Romans being the longest and then first and second Corinthians. And so our New Testament has first and second Thessalonians that are first. And we did the same thing ⁓ in the prophets. There’s like four distinct periods.
within those prophetic books. And in the modern Bible, we do the big ones first and the little ones second. And there wasn’t even an attempt to put them in a historic order. And yet one of the most fulfilling things then, Dru is when people have started using the Immersed Bible, ⁓ they come to us and said, ⁓ there are things that I saw that I never saw before just in the course.
Dru Johnson (52:10)
Right.
Paul Caminiti (52:39)
You a reading my young college girl who had made a statement to her group. think she was we called her a pre -liever ⁓ But she wanted to be in this group ⁓ which which is kind of the second part of our ⁓ value system is that we’re trying to pivot from a Bible study model to a book club model because we believe that the Bible is a communal.
communal transformation book. But anyhow, this young lady was in one of those groups and they’d read, we start out Messiah with Luke and Acts and then Paul’s letters in a better historical order. so they’ve read Luke and Acts and they’ve read a little bit of Paul’s writings. And she said, I don’t mean to be offensive because this is all like brand new to me. But she says, I have to tell you this Paul guy, I’m not much of a fan.
Dru Johnson (53:36)
Yeah.
Paul Caminiti (53:37)
He
he seems like a bullet, a bully to me. And the guy, the people that were leaving that said it was it was amazing conversation, you know, that they had. But then they they continued through Paul’s letters in a better historic ordering and obviously ended with Paul in prison. And she again, it said, you know, I said I didn’t like him. I liked him better at the end. He seemed to soften. And.
Dru Johnson (54:04)
Hmm
Paul Caminiti (54:05)
That’s
a beautiful thing, right? And simply from reading in a different order.
Dru Johnson (54:15)
Yeah, that’s wonderful. It’s called the Immersed Bible. Again, it’s a collection of ⁓ six, seven books. hey, there you go. So for the YouTube watchers,
Paul Caminiti (54:20)
Yeah, I brought it. I brought it. I brought it set right here so that everyone can at least.
Yeah, for for Vanna White and anybody else out there. Messiah is the New Testament beginnings is is the Torah kingdoms is Samuel through the Kings prophets in a better historic order. Poets is wisdom, literature and song lyrics. And we segmented them that way.
Dru Johnson (54:31)
Yeah.
Paul Caminiti (54:49)
And then Chronicles were the books that were written to Israel after the Babylonian captivity. ⁓ you know, first and second Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and we put Daniel in there as well. So that’s that’s Messiah or that that’s a Immerse right?
Dru Johnson (55:09)
Well, Paul, think, ⁓ and I have talked to you for hours and hours and hours before, and I feel like we could go on forever, but maybe we’ll just have you on to talk again sometime. Thank you for your wisdom. Thanks for sharing the story, giving us the insider insights into what’s going on behind our Bibles. My catchphrase coming out of this is, ⁓ you didn’t buy that Bible by yourself, right? Like there’s a whole machinery that gets…
that particular, like the life application Bible into that person’s hand of that color and that kind of cover. ⁓ But despite all of that, there are actually really good ways to go about creating Bibles that are, what did you call it, communal transformation books, right? I think that’s a great way to put it.
Paul Caminiti (55:55)
Yeah, yeah,
yeah. That’s kind of our dream that the new normal would be that ⁓ people would kind of covenant together that we’re all gonna read the same thing for our morning devotions or whenever you read, but then once a week we’re gonna come together. And the conversation will be around, you know, more Socratic questions like what stood out to you in your reading this week, which really opens
Dru Johnson (56:22)
Right.
Paul Caminiti (56:25)
And when people start reading with that question in mind, they start paying attention to things that they normally wouldn’t have, which I know you’re a big ⁓ fan of saying that ⁓ just simply having the text and reading it, not through a lens of thinking, what’s the theology behind this, but simply reading the text that we can get a long way down the road.
Dru Johnson (56:54)
very long way, especially in community.
Paul Caminiti (56:55)
just doing that.
Yeah, and a merch will help you do that.
Dru Johnson (57:01)
All right. ⁓ There’s the sales pitch. All right, Paul Caminiti thanks for your wisdom.
Paul Caminiti (57:07)
Yeah, Dru, thank you. You’re a good friend and thanks for this opportunity.
