BibleGateway.com is a website designed to allow easy searching of the Christian Bible in many different versions and translations, including Spanish, French, and other non-English languages (see below). The website is free for anyone to use. It is currently owned by Zondervan.[1]
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Started by Nick Hengeveld in 1993[2] at Calvin College, the Bible Gateway was initially planned as a static HTML presentation of the Bible.[3] In 1995, the gateway moved to the new Gospel Communications Network (a part of Gospel Communications International). The Bible Gateway is written as a CGI script in Perl.
The Bible Gateway gradually expanded its database by acquiring the rights to more English translations and translations into more languages. Among the groups tendering the rights to disseminate their different versions of the Bible include the International Bible Society and The Lockman Foundation.
In late 2008, Zondervan (the Evangelical Christian publisher of the NIV and TNIV Bible and a wholly owned subsidiary of HarperCollins) acquired the Bible Gateway from Gospel Communications.[4] The sale of the site came after two years of continued financial difficulties on the part of the donation-driven GospelCom ministry.[5]
Bible Gateway news feed updates are now able to do a quick search for a Scriptures, supports a tab for any translation version. The website also gives a daily new verse to read and new translations to keep you up to date. They also created a blog spot on which to have questions answered and discuss the Bible. The website also has an online book store at which to buy Christian books. The books are sponsored by Christianbook.com. The purpose for this update was to syndicate their contents from other website or users' email addresses.[6]
In June 2009, Joseph Park was hired as president of BibleGateway.com.[7][8] Park was co-founder and former CEO of Kozmo.com,[9] which was the subject of the documentary film e-Dreams. He was also co-founder and former CEO of Askville,[10] which is now owned by Amazon.com.[10] In November 2010, Bible Gateway expanded more by opening its new BETA website version. You can see the new website version by going to http://beta.biblegateway.com.