However, other projects and responsibilities soon pushed the New Testament work to the back-burner.

With the adult Sunday school curriculum in the LDS church shifting to study the New Testament during 2011, I made an extra effort to get something finished by the end of 2010.

While the update to add the New Testament to the Scripturelog plugin for WordPress might not be available for another week or two,  the outline of the New Testament is available for download immediately in PDF format so it can be used and printed by anyone:

An Outline of the New Testament

As with the other outlines, I spent a great deal of time reading commentaries and articles about the New Testament, about the individual books in it, and prayerfully going through the text itself chapter by chapter, and page by page, to try to identify ways to organize the parts.

Rather than attempt a comprehensive outline, I aimed to produce an outline that would help illuminate some of the traditional divisions and relationships in the text, as well as changes in theme, narrative, or focus, by placing structural sign posts to help readers orient themselves as they study.

As with my other efforts to outline scriptures, I came away from this project with a renewed love, and improved understanding of the New Testament, which made the whole endeavor well worth it.

I hope it can also be helpful to others as they prepare for the upcoming 2011 curriculum.

There also have been some minor revisions to my outlines for the Old Testament and The Book of Mormon, including the addition of some PDF bookmarks to make navigating the PDF documents much easier.  You can find links to download the newest revisions of any of the outlines on the ScriptureLog Website.

Happy New Year!

Then in November, we released an update to add the Old Testament.

When we released the Book of Mormon, I had taken the time to develop a Book of Mormon outline, and I wanted to outline the Old Testament as well.

I started looking online for some good Old Testament outlines to use as a reference, and while I found a number, none were really what I wanted.

So, I began to review numerous articles on the Old Testament to help me understand each book better, and I went through the entire Old Testament chapter by chapter, and often page by page, comparing what I was reading to the articles and identifying ways to group and relate the parts.

In addition to study, I prayed frequently that Heavenly Father would help me to understand and organize an outline that would be useful for me and others; simple enough to make the book more understandable and approachable without  oversimplifying.

The resulting outline was built into the plugin, but I quickly realized that I needed to create a printable version.

So, here’s the final outline in PDF format that can be downloaded and printed by anyone who finds it useful.

An Outline of The Old Testament

[Edit 01/03/2011 - you can find the most recent revision of the outline, as well as outlines for other books of scripture, at http://scripturelog.com/outlines .]

I’ve learned a great deal through this process and have grown to both understand and love the Old Testament more than I ever have before.  Even if in the end the outline is only really useful to me, it’s been worth it.

(There is also a revised and simplified version of my Outline of the Textual Structure of the Book of Mormon for those interested)

Book-of-Mormon-Outline.pdf

[Edit 01/03/2011 - you can find the most recent revision of the outline, as well as outlines for other books of scripture, at http://scripturelog.com/outlines .]

I compiled the outline as a way to help me understand the Book of Mormon better by identifying some of the organizational boundaries, voices, and structure of the text.

The chapter boundaries of the original 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon were different than our modern version and it was not divided into verses.  Apostle Orson Pratt divided the book into new chapters and added the verse divisions in the 1838 Liverpool edition of the book. One objective of the outline was to easily see the different boundaries between the chapters both in the original translation and our modern version.

The Book of Mormon itself is translated from multiple different sets of records which create natural boundaries in the structure between source materials and authors. Some of these divisions and groups are identified by headings in the original text itself, which I have colored blue. The original translation did not identify the range of chapters over which the headings extended, but in the 1920 edition of the Book of Mormon, text was added to identify which chapters comprised each section identified by the headings.

In addition to the headings from the original record, based on my own reading I have added my own sections with their own headings and boundaries, colored green, whenever possible using words from the actual text.

Many of the boundaries I have made organize chapters of the text where the primary voice changes from the principal author or editor of the plates (Nephi, Mormon, Moroni) to one of their sources for an extensive section, or when the editors (Mormon for the Large Plates of Nephi and Moroni for the Plates of Ether) interrupt their narrative to offer extensive editorial commentary. Additionally, I have marked a few sections where the author makes a significant shift in focus extending for multiple chapters, notably Nephi when he recounts his dream.

The outline is not comprehensive, and there are a few places where making the original chapter boundaries match up with the 1920 chapter ranges doesn’t quite work out. Also there are numerous places where the
editors voice is so intermixed with the speakers, for instance in Alma chapters 9 through 13, that I have not tried to group them under individual headings other than the original heading from the text.

This effort has certainly helped me understand and appreciate the Book of Mormon far more than I did previous to this effort, and building the outline has strengthened my testimony that the Book is true and was translated by the gift and power of the Holy Spirit.

This is my first version so if you find any errors or typos please let me know and I will make corrected versions of the outline available.

Please feel free to copy and distribute it if you find it useful.