Phonics and the Bible

Phonics and the Bible is a program for learning to read, or improving one's reading or vocabulary, with a structured approach to reading the Bible, beginning with the New Testament.

There are 5,420 distinct words in the New Testament, the vast majority of which are phonetic when translated into English. Of these, almost 2,000 appear only once ("hapax legomena" is the Greek term for that), many of which are names and some are medical terms. Only about 25 words appear only in the New Testament and have not yet been found anywhere else, while 400 such words exist in the Old Testament.

Roughly 172 words are repeated at least 100 times in the New Testament, and an additional 138 words exist 50 to 100 times there."

Order

The Gospel of Mark is a superb way to begin for reading instruction, due to its straightforward writing style with helpful repetition.

The Epistle to the Hebrews, which is one of the finest writings in all of Greek literature, is an excellent second book for reading at least in its first two chapters. This book includes modern concepts of mathematics (infinity) and physics (entropy) of interest to learners today. It also contains a remarkable 154 hapax legomena, which are words founds nowhere else in the Bible. The epistle contains 1,028 lexically different words and a total of 6,897 words overall. This is slightly less than half the 14,949 words in the Gospel of Mark.

John Chapter 10, in the Gospel of John, has three elements that makes it terrific reading material for a young learner:

• a high density of multi-syllable phonetic words;
• a comparison to a wolf attacking sheep, which a young learner finds interesting; and
• an encouraging message of how much Jesus loves and protects his "sheep" (those who have faith in him)

Mastering pronunciations

Some famous biblical terms are commonly mispronounced. Learning the Bible phonetically helps improve spelling and pronunciation of its terms.

See also

• grade level 10 commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews