If you are an atheist, agnostic, secularist, or liberal Christian and you often find yourself in discussions with Evangelicals/fundamentalists about the Bible, then I want to recommend you download the E-Sword Bible Study Program. The program is free. There are additional modules you can buy, but I think you’ll find the free program is sufficient for looking up Bible verses, reading commentaries, and looking at the Hebrew/Greek text.
The free version includes (not a complete list):
- King James Version with Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance numbers
- American Standard Version
- English Standard Version
- Contemporary English Version
- Revised Standard Version
- German, French, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian translations of the Bible (along with a number of other languages)
- Hebrew New Testament
- Hebrew Old Testament with Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance numbers
- Greek New Testament Majority Text
- Greek New Testament with Variants
- Greek Old Testament, Septuagint with Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance numbers
- Westcott-Hort Greek New Testament with Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance numbers
- Commentaries by Albert Barnes, John Gill, Matthew Henry, Jamieson Fausett Brown, Keil & Delitzsch
- Brown-Driver-Briggs’ Hebrew Definitions
- Thayer’s Greek Definitions
- Ante-Nicene Fathers-9 Volumes
- Creeds of Christendom-3 Volumes
- Josephus
- John Calvin- Institutes of the Christian Religion
- Bible Maps
- Fox’s Book of Martyrs
You can download the program here.
There is also an iPad ($4.99) and iPhone ($1.99) version. I use the iPad version quite often when I need to look up a verse or study a particular passage of Scripture. Right now, the program is Windows only, but a Mac version is in the works.
I’ve used this program for a lot of years, since way back when I was a believer. It’s excellent. And, of course, the price is right.
I love e-Sword and have used it since I was a fundamentalist Christian (though, not being religious, I do not use it nearly as often as before). I also recommend for the #2 silver medal in this unofficial contest the Bible program called Xiphos (at Xiphos dot org) which runs on both Windows and Linux (though not on Mac as far as I know). With some of the third-party FTP libraries it has access to, there are some materials not available for e-Sword that it has (and what they are specifically, I do not remember right off the top of my head).