A Brief Intro to the Bible
Part 1 | Return to Who is Jesus
The book you have seen called “the bible” is actually more like a library of books–a collection of ancient literature that interconnects to tell a unified story. You’ll discover everything from narratives, to songs, to letters, to poetry, and to genres we aren’t used to interacting with.
Christians see the bible’s origins as both divine and human. There are many authors of these books and they were written over a thousand year period. The biblical authors saw themselves as writing words that communicated God’s message and carried God’s divine authority.
This library of books emerged out of the history of the people of ancient Israel. The bible you have before is broken up into two major sections: the Old Testament and New Testament. The Old Testament begins the story by showing human beings in loving relationship with each other and God, charged with caring for God’s creation. Their turn away from God vandalizes everything, but God has a plan to restore all that went wrong. God’s plan came to a man in what is modern-day Iraq to Abraham, through whom all people of the world would be blessed. From Abraham comes who we now call ancient Israel, through whom the person of Jesus–through whom Christians believe God came and changed everything. In the New Testament, Jesus enters the story.
If what you’re reading doesn’t completely make sense to you at first, that’s normal! The bible is not something we read once and understand, neither is it a book that we rush through quickly. Though Christians believe that the bible was written for all humans, it is not written to us–which means we do the work of honoring and contextualizing the text to discern God’s wisdom.
For this resource, we will be looking at what is referred to as the “gospels” (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John). These books tell accounts of the life of Jesus.