The Bible: What It Is and How to Read It

The Bible is the most read and most misread book in the world, and most people who own one were never shown how it works. This course starts at the beginning: the sixty-six books and why Catholic and Orthodox Bibles have more; the two testaments and the one story that runs from Genesis to Revelation; the different kinds of writing inside (story, law, poetry, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, letter, apocalyptic) and the rules for reading each one; how the collection formed, how the text was copied and what we can say about its reliability; how translations differ and how to choose one; and a way of reading that you can keep up. It is taught from within the Christian faith and says so. It also says plainly what history establishes, what scholars argue about, and what Christians hold by faith, and it presents the views it disagrees with in their own terms.

What you'll learn

• Find any book in the Bible, say which section and genre it belongs to, explain why the Jewish and Christian orders differ, and place it on the timeline of the one story from creation to new creation
• Identify the kind of writing in a passage and apply the reading rules for that kind, so that a story, a law, a psalm, a proverb, a prophecy, a parable, a letter, and a vision are each read as what they are and not as something else
• Explain the Old Testament law and the prophets as one covenant made and enforced, and compare the main Christian ways of reading them now in each view's own terms
• Explain, with dated evidence, how the canon formed, why Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Bibles differ, and what the Council of Nicaea did not do, giving each tradition's case as it would give it
• Describe how the text was copied and recovered, what the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Greek manuscripts show, read the three famous disputed passages in your own Bible, and state fairly what is established and what is still argued about reliability
• Sort any claim about the Bible as established by history, argued from evidence, or held by faith, and describe the inerrantist, Catholic, Orthodox, mainline, and critical-scholarly views of Scripture so their holders would recognise them
• Compare formal, functional, and free translations, explain why the KJV differs from modern versions, and choose a translation for reading and one for study with reasons you can defend
• Read a whole book of the Bible with a repeatable method and a plan you can keep, and write a short reading guide to it for someone else