Biblical References in Baha'i Writings

by Marian Lippitt

About: Among the huge collection of documents left by Marian Lippitt was a set of hand written and typed 3x5 cards of a very complete (for the time) English-language index of the Bible and Bahá'í scripture. The Index was stored in various formats, beginning I think with something called Alpha 4, and ending up in Excel (see below). The digital conversion project originated with the National Reference Library Committee of the NSA-USA. The cards were typed into a database by me. Then they were transferred into another database by Michael Kafes.

Bahá'í students of the Bible will find this Index useful, particularly for its reference to pilgrim notes. James Heggie's book Bahá'í References to Judaism, Christianity and Islam is another good resource.

My 1999 biography of Lippitt notes that, around 1952-1953, Mrs. Gene Crist was appointed to head up a team charged with preparing two indexes to the Bible and Bahá'í Writings, one organized by subject, and the other by Biblical verse. Due to illness, Mrs. Crist was not able to continue as director of this project, so Marian took over for her. These indexes were completed in 1955, and an incomplete version of the verse index was typed, duplicated and found its way into various Bahá'í libraries and the Western pilgrim house in Haifa. Both indexes were entered into a data base in 1995-1996 and then updated and corrected by volunteers.

The U.S. National Spiritual Assembly gave permission to the Foundation for the Science of Reality (later the Foundation for the Investigation of Reality) to use and publish the materials of the National Reference Library Committee. I asked for permission to use it for Wilmette Institute courses and was given that permission formally by the Foundation. — Peter Terry, 2016