There is a lot of stress placed (rightly) on believing what the Bible teaches. But sometimes I get the feeling that after we have argued over the proper interpretation of one verse for hours and finally found out that it means what we thought it meant to start with, we sometimes are missing the forest for the leaf. The difficulty then is how to figure out how to properly emphasize different parts of the Bible:
perhaps the answer is to treat every word of the Bible with equal weight, and this seems at first like the best plan considering that it is all inspired of God. However it also seems ridiculous to say that 1 Chronicles 2:5 is of equal importance to John 3:16.
One strategy that I thought of would be to take an immense set of cross references and analize them the way Google analyzes hyper links to produce a "verse rank" (look up page rank if you don't know about this, it's pretty interesting) I would love to see this done, but don't know how to do it my self.
http://www.topverses.com/ uses popularity to determine its ranking of diferent Bible verses, there you can find all the verses of the Bible ranked by how often they are used, but this doesn't tell us which are the most important, merely which are believed to be most important.
So, what do you think? how do we determine what Bible passages are more or less important? or what am I missing in asking the question?
I love this idea! I just recently downloaded a couple large datasets of cross references. I'd love to try to make this happen. I'll let you know what I come up with.
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