LaParola 7.04.1: A Free Computer Program to Study the Bible

Why another Bible study program?

There are already many free Bible study programs available. LaParola has a few characteristics that few or no others have, that may make it worth trying.

Not only is it free, but it is open source and the file format is open (see the help file), making it easier for others to help develop it.
There are four different Greek texts of the New Testament, as well as a listing of the manuscript support for all the major variants (useful for textual criticism).
It automatically updates itself and its components, and finds new components that can be installed.
It can import ThML, OSIS and e-Sword files. That means for example that there are over 700 files at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library that can be imported into the program.
It can perform search in the Bible not only for words, but also for all forms of the same word. So for example you can search for "love" if you want to, but also for all the forms of that word: love, loved, loves, loving, etcetera. Not just in English, but also in other languages.
Links to external sites give extra information on Bible verses or words, for example extra Bible translations, readings in manuscripts like Aleppo, Sinaiticus and Bezae, sermons, definitions and Internet searchs of words.
You can create personal bookmarks, external links, parallel passages, daily reading scheme, and distribute them to others.
You can create personal notes on verses and themes, which are automatically fully searchable just like the components distributed along with the program.
The program can create a concordance of any passage of any Bible or collection of notes.
The program can look up all the installed resources (Bibles, notes, pictures, parallel passages, external links, ...) to find all the information in the program on a certain passage or word.
The same program and data files work in both Windows and Linux.

Installation

The program requires Windows 98 or later, or Linux.

Windows

For Windows, the .NET framework (version 2.0 or later) is required. Windows Vista has this framework already. For the other versions of Windows, the easiest way to obtain it is with Microsoft Update in Windows. Otherwise, it can be downloaded from Microsoft's site.

When the .NET framework has been installed, you can download the program from this site or from Download.com:

It is an installation program; run it and follow the instructions to install LaParola. You can then run the Bible program.

Linux

For Linux, the latest version of Mono is required, which runs .NET application in Linux. Mono might already by installed on your copy of Linux, but it may not be a recent enough version (at least the version 1.2.5 is required, that was released in August 2007). Mono for many different distributions can be downloaded from Mono's site; if your distribution is not listed then click on the link "unsupported downloads".

You can then install the program in one of two ways:

If you have already installed the Windows version, you can copy the program and data files to Linux. You have to copy the contents of the directory in which you installed the the program (usually c:\program files\LaParola\) to any directory of Linux. Then you need to copy the contents of the data directory (usually c:\users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\LaParola\ in Windows Vista; c:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\LaParola\ in Windows XP) to the directory /home/<user nome>/.config/LaParola/ of Linux.
Otherwise, you can download the version for Linux. The files are exactly the same as those for Windows, but in a tar.gz archive rather than an installation program. You can then use the command tar xzvf LaParola.tar.gz or a graphical program to unpack the file into any directory.

In both cases, to open the program you need to use the command mono /path/to/program/LaParola.exe

Note however that Mono is not yet a complete substitute for NET and has some errors, and so the program in Mono is not yet perfect. I am still improving this version of the program.

There is however one error that can be fixed immediately. In some distributions of Linux, there is an error message about codepage 1252. If that is the case, it can be fixed by installing the file libmono-i18n2.0-cil using the usual way of downloading extra components in your distribution.

Post installation

The first time that the program is run, it checks the availability of updates and other components on Internet. In fact the downloaded file contains only one Bible translation (the American Standard Version). The program, if you are connected to Internet, will list many others; you just have to select which ones you want and they will be downloaded and installed automatically. If you use a proxy to connect to Internet, you will have to first enter the details of the proxy in the Options. The program as checks regularly if there are updates to the program itself or the components, so you will never have to download it again. The frequency of the checks can be set in the Options of the program.

List of all the available extra components

It is also suggested to read the How Do I... section of the Help file to get an idea of the main tasks that you can do with the program.

Another way to learn about the program is to watch the video tutorials. The same videos can be watched inside the program (if they are downloaded with the Update command) from the Help menu.

Click on the image to enlarge this example of the use of the program.

Source code

For programmers, not only is the source code available here, but also the development environment is free, namely Visual C# Express.

This site

Most of the rest of this site contains resources to study the Bible in Italian. If you are interested in what else is available, see this page. There is however one bilingual section which might interested you, that on the Greek New Testament.

For information about the site or the program, write to info at this domain.