Okay, I admit it! I'm a bit of a skeptic when it comes to information I receive over the internet. In my mind, forwarded e-mails and social media posts which relate exciting, interesting, or shocking "truths" are always guilty until proven innocent by a little fact-checking. I regularly turn to snopes.com to uncover internet hoaxes, and if I'm sent some fact about the Bible, I try to verify it using Accordance. Such was the case the other day when a friend posted something to Facebook which claimed that the phrase "Do not be afraid" appears 365 times in the Bible: a "daily reminder from God to live every day fearless."

While this is a nice sentiment, I couldn't help but switch to Accordance to see if it was true. I searched my default Bible, the HCSB, for "do not be afraid" and got just 29 hits! That didn't bode well for the internet meme.

Okay, so maybe the HCSB translates this phrase in other ways, such as "don't be afraid" or "do not fear". I added the OR command by using the keyboard shortcut shift-command-O and entered "don't be afraid." Then I added another OR command and typed "do not fear." While I was at it, I also added "don't fear," "be not afraid," and "fear not." Because Accordance accepts any group of words as a phrase, there is no need to enter quotation marks for this search, which now looks like this:

As you can see, even with all these different variations, the HCSB only returned 119 occurrences—far less than the 365 claimed by the internet meme.

Yet before I was ready to declare this myth "busted," I decided to search all my other English Bibles to see if some other translation actually had 365 occurrences of "do not be afraid." The easiest way to do this is simply to right-click (or control-click) the search entry field, then choose the group of modules you want to search from the Search All submenu. I've already predefined a custom group of modules containing my English Bibles, but if you haven't done this, you can simply choose [All Texts].

A Search All window will then open showing each English Bible and the number of times these phrases appear.

As you can see, none of them even comes close to the claimed number of 365 occurrences. I'd say the myth is busted, which either means we can only "live fearless" for about a third of the year, or, as I prefer to think, we don't need the Bible to say it 365 times in order to heed the message every day.

Before I leave this post, however, I want you to notice something about the results of my Search All: many popular translations, such as the KJV, NRSV, and NASB, are not represented at all! I have those Bibles installed, and surely they contain at least one instance of one of these phrases, so why weren't they found by my search?

I'll give you the answer in my next blog post, but in the meantime, I'll award a ten dollar Accordance credit to the first person who leaves a comment correctly explaining why the search failed for these Bibles. Be sure to include your first and last name and e-mail address when you post your comment so we can award you your credit. (Your e-mail address will not be seen by anyone but us.) Good luck, and have a great (dare I say "fearless"?) weekend!