Wikipedia—and it army of public scholars—is a nifty tool for those moments when you just need some quick clarification of your now-faded high school education. Who again was that Pascal dude? How do you spell DNA’s full name? How many Brady Bunch kids took drugs? But as many of us know, Wikipedia is not the best source for precise truth. Too many engineers have been tinkering with the steel beams, if you know what I mean—which is fine if you’re just taking pictures of the stadium, but not so good if you’re planning on sitting on the top row during an earthquake.

Long before Wikipedia sprang from the public’s loins in 2001, Christians have been treating the Bible like open-source software.  My grandmother didn’t need a mouse to make her King James interpretations available, nor did the many churches I attended. At Bible studies and youth meetings, spontaneous chats and dorm-room discussions, the American public eschewed the experts and weighed in on their interpretations of scripture. Interpretation-by-public-opinion, at least for me, became the way I absorbed the truth about the Bible in my early years.