The Colors of the Voices

All through these pages, certain words are lit in color. The Father's speech glows gold; the Son's words are a luminous purple; the Spirit's are blue. This is not a translation choice and it is not a doctrine. It is a reading aid, and it asks for one thing only: that the eye be able to tell, at a glance, who is speaking. The color marks the speaker. It never touches the text. Not a letter is added, removed, or recast; the same King James words stand exactly as they always have, only tinted, the way a red-letter Bible tints the words of Christ. You can read straight past the color and lose nothing. But if you let it work, the page begins to do what the chapter divisions and the verse numbers can never do: it shows you the voices.

That is the whole rule, and it is worth saying plainly because it guards everything else. Color is about the speaker, not the meaning. It does not interpret a hard verse, it does not settle a debate, it does not make a word holier than it was. It answers the smallest and oldest question a reader asks: is this the narrator, or is this God? And when it is God, which of the three? Scripture does not always stop to label the voice, and a reader can drift through a whole oracle without noticing the moment the prophet stops speaking and the LORD begins. The color is there to catch that moment, and only that moment.

The Father, gold

Gold is the oldest color the church reserved for God. In Byzantine icons and in the illuminated manuscripts of the West, the gold ground (the leaf laid behind the sacred figures) was never meant as a pretty backdrop. It was read as heaven, as a light that does not belong to this world. Gold "came to be regarded as very suitable for representing Christian religious figures, highlighting them against a plain but glistering background that might be read as representing heaven, or a less specific spiritual plane," and the medieval gold ground "was always interpreted as a symbol of transcendental light." The scribes carried the same instinct into the lettering itself. Chrysography, writing in gold, gilded the holiest words on the page. When you gild the Name, you are saying, without a word of commentary, that this light is uncreated.

So the Father's speech is gold here, and it comes in two weights. When God speaks in person, in the narrative itself, the words blaze: the old-Bible blackletter, gilt and rising, as in the first command of creation, Let there be light (Genesis 1:3). When God's word comes reported through a prophet, the same gold shines but does not blaze; it keeps the normal reading serif and is gilded letter by letter, as when the LORD says through Isaiah, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine (Isaiah 43:1). In person it blazes; through a prophet it shines. Same gold, two intensities, one Speaker.

The Son, purple

Purple is the color of kings, and it was that long before it was Christ's. Tyrian purple, the dye drawn drop by drop from sea snails, was so costly that "items coloured with it became associated with power and wealth," and by the fourth century Roman law had narrowed it so far that "only the Roman emperor was permitted to wear Tyrian purple." It was the color of the throne. Which is exactly why the soldiers reached for it on the morning they meant to mock Him: "they clothed him with purple" (Mark 15:17), and led Him out wearing "the purple robe" (John 19:5). They draped a King in the color of kings to make a joke of His kingship, and told the truth without knowing it. The purple was never the lie. The mockery was.

The color we use for His words is the younger tradition, and an honest one. The red-letter Bible is barely more than a century old. Louis Klopsch, editor of The Christian Herald, conceived it on June 19, 1899; the red-letter New Testament followed that year and the first complete red-letter Bible in 1901. The idea was simply to let the reader see the Lord's own voice on the page. We keep the impulse and shift the hue toward His royalty, so the Son's words carry the king's color: I am the true vine (John 15:1).

And His color does not begin at Bethlehem. The Son is the visible God, the One the Father sends to be seen and heard, and the oldest readers of Scripture found Him already walking the Old Testament: the Angel of the LORD who speaks as God and is named God, the Man who wrestles Jacob, the fourth figure in the fire. Where the text leaves the door open that the One who appears is the Son, His purple can reach back across the whole canon. That older reading has its own page; it is the subject of Christ Before Bethlehem.

The Spirit, blue

Here honesty requires a confession. There is no ancient tradition of blue for the Holy Spirit, and we will not invent one. The historic liturgical color of the Spirit is red, the red of Pentecost, "the fire of the Holy Spirit," when red banners "symbolize the blowing of the 'mighty wind'" and the tongues "as of fire" of Acts 2. If we were following the church calendar, the Spirit's words would be red, not blue.

Blue is our own choice, and we make it openly. We chose it because red was already spoken for by Christ's blood and the red-letter tradition, and because blue gathers up the Spirit's own pictures: the sky He descended out of, the dove that came down at the Jordan, the living water He is called, the wind that blows where it lists. It is a reading convenience dressed in the Spirit's quieter symbols, not a claim about what the church has always done. So the Spirit's words are blue, plainly and admittedly by our hand: And the Spirit and the bride say, Come (Revelation 22:17).

Where the Voices Blur

If color marks the speaker, then the color is only as sure as our reading of the speaker, and there are places where the speaker is the very thing in question. The Angel of the LORD is the great one. He speaks as God, accepts worship, gives the divine Name, and yet is called an angel; and the church has never been of one mind about who He is.

The older and broader reading, the one Justin Martyr argued to a rabbi in the second century, takes Him to be the pre-incarnate Son. Justin says there is "another God and Lord subject to the Maker of all things; who is also called an Angel, because He announces to men whatsoever the Maker of all things… wishes to announce to them," and that "He who is said to have appeared to Abraham, and to Jacob, and to Moses, and who is called God, is distinct from Him who made all things, numerically, I mean, not [distinct] in will" (Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 56). The Latin Fathers held the same, and the reading endured: "the view propounded by the Latin Fathers was destined to live in the Church, and the Scholastics reduced it to a system."

But Augustine demurred, and his caution is worth as much as the confidence. In On the Trinity he holds that the essence of God, "since it is in no way changeable, can in no way in its proper self be visible," so the appearances to the fathers were "wrought through the creature," through angelic or material means, and a mortal should not rashly assert which person of the Trinity stood in any given theophany. He leaves the question where he thinks Scripture leaves it: open.

And the mystery is real, because the Names overlap. "I AM THAT I AM" (Exodus 3:14) is the Father's Name spoken from the bush, the Name above every name. Then the Son takes it onto His own lips: "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58). The same Name, claimed by the Son, in a single sentence that nearly got Him stoned. When the gold of the Father and the purple of the Son both have a claim on the same words, the color does not have to choose, and it should not. That blur is not a flaw in the reading. It is the doctrine peeking through: that the LORD is one, and that the one LORD is Father, Son, and Spirit. We color by what the text says, and we let the tension stand, because the tension is telling the truth.

Study the passages

Read them in context. Links go to BibleHub.

• Genesis 1:3 — God speaks in person: let there be light
• Isaiah 43:1 — the LORD's word through a prophet
• Mark 15:17; John 19:2, 19:5 — the purple robe
• John 15:1 — the Son speaks: the true vine
• Revelation 22:17 — the Spirit and the bride say, Come
• Exodus 3:14; John 8:58 — the Name, and the Son who claims it

Scripture quotations from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the color and font are a reading aid only and alter no letter of the text. Historical sources, all public domain: on gold grounds and chrysography, the descriptions of medieval gold as "transcendental light" and a ground "read as representing heaven" follow standard art-historical reference. On Tyrian purple as the imperial color reserved by the fourth century for the Roman emperor, standard classical reference. On the red-letter Bible: Louis Klopsch of The Christian Herald conceived it June 19, 1899, with the red-letter New Testament in 1899 and the first complete red-letter Bible in 1901. On red as the liturgical color of Pentecost and the fire of the Spirit, standard liturgical reference. Patristic quotations verbatim: Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho ch. 56, and Augustine, On the Trinity Book III (Ante-Nicene and Nicene Fathers, public domain); the line that the Latin Fathers' reading "was destined to live in the Church, and the Scholastics reduced it to a system" is from the Catholic Encyclopedia, "Angels." Related: Christ Before Bethlehem, The Names of God, and John 8: I Am.