Richard Littledale's
Views on the News: June 2010

What would Jesus tweet?

Last month saw the launch of a brand new experiment in interactive Bible study on social networking site Twitter. Founded by Richard Littledale and Mark Leong (a UCCF Relay worker in Birmingham) Chatbible, though still in its infancy, has seen a steady string of followers in its early days. Each week the site encourages followers to exchange views, questions and resources about a given passage of scripture. Owing to the restrictions of Twitter itself, this must all be done in messages (or 'tweets') of 140 characters or less. To date, participants have joined in from their homes, their workplaces, and even from a station platform! Some of the more memorable contributions have included the description of the beatitudes as phrases which "bend your attitudes into shape" and the description of the prologue to John's Gospel as "a tune played on a lyre - where the instrument would have been familiar but the melody strange to John's Jewish readers"

This initiative originally drew its inspiration from a similar venture in America One Book One Twitter - where thousands are currently involved in a discussion of Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods. Richard and Mark both saw that the same technology could be used to facilitate a Bible discussion - not least for those who could not necessarily be physically present at a small group meeting. Furthermore, the restriction to 140 characters means that people do not feel the obligation to be unduly weighty or worthy, but just to 'chip in' to the discussion. The value of half-formed thoughts when discussing a book as profound as the Bible should not be readily dismissed.

Of course the question still remains about whether or not Jesus would Tweet. Given that there are in excess of 5 million people using this site to exchange their views on everything from politics and religion to the latest trends in fashion and music, the answer is probably yes. In general, Jesus was more often to be found out in the marketplace of ideas than he was in the cloisters of the temple. Furthermore, his ability to pour the most profound truths into the small containers of parables means that he would probably have had little trouble with the 140 character limit.

Many people have attempted to summarize great works of literature into 140 word tweets, with varying success. Tim Collins take on the Bible (published in his Little Book of Twitter) is certainly interesting:

God: I created the universe, sent my carpenter son to earth, you killed him, but he's coming back soon. I've got 2 billion followers.