Road Trip

In the words of a friend, “It’s a lot,” this Bible. It’s a big book, a big bite to get one’s mouth around. However, if you are brand new to the Bible, you do not have to sit down and try to read it cover to cover. If you understand what the Bible is, and what it contains, you can target certain portions for your first reading, and it will be a much less intimidating, much more approachable challenge. Perhaps, even, enticing. To help you do that, I’m going to approach reading it a bit like taking a road trip across the United States. Ours is a huge country, with more to see than you could see in a lifetime. So, how do you plan your first road-trip? What are the important highlights, the main sights to see, on your first coast-to-coast drive? In short, the ones that give you the best sense of what America is and how she is laid out from East to West, so that by the end you have a good feel for her, and you can go back in the future to see the places you missed, and you will know where they fit in the overall geography and history of the nation. We’re going to do the same thing with the Bible.

This article is for a person who is new to Christianity, or who is not new to Christianity but is new to the idea, the challenge, of personally consuming and understanding the Bible, or for a person who is looking for a way to help such a newcomer.

Overview

What are we calling the Bible?

First, let’s talk about what the Bible is, and how it is organized. The Bible–a proper, reputable version of it–is a collection of ancient works which together form the “canon” of two religions: Judaism and Christianity. Here, we are concerned ultimately with Christianity, but the relationship between the latter and the former is not what most people think it is. More on that in a moment. For now, think of the two really as a single faith system, with the older part, Judaism, feeding into the newer part, Christianity, in an absolutely vital way. For this reason, the Jewish canon cannot be separated from the Christian canon. It is a vital subcomponent, a vital preface.

When we say “canon,” we mean those texts which are regarded as authoritative and defining the core orthodoxy, the core tenets, of the religion. There are a great many conspiracy theories about how the canonical works were selected, and by whom, but do not fear; they are conspiracy theories only. Generally, you may regard the canonical works as having come to be so regarded organically, properly, justifiably, and without any nefarious manipulation by shadowy cabals or secret councils. No, the early Catholic church did not just arbitrarily or for political reasons “decide” which books would be included in the Bible. The books that form your Bible are the ones that circulated because they were known to be true by the people who were there, very early after the events they describe, or which had proven themselves over centuries (in the case of the Old Testament). Of these there are 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 books in the New Testament, for a total of 66 which make up the one and only Christian Bible.

And this brings us to an important point: the book precedes the religion, for our purposes.  Yes, the theology of Christianity was spreading orally before these works were penned, but it was the same content, and the content, the same accounts recorded in these books, defined the religion even for those earliest faithful.  Christianity, for them and for us, is defined as the religion you get if you study the Bible. So, you have the works that were known to the early Christians to be true, and these works encapsulated and propagated the doctrine which became known as Christianity–as opposed to the idea that there was a Christianity and a Christian church which then selected the works. The Bible first; and then Christianity is the religion you get from the Bible. By this definition, certain sects or cults, including such outliers as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons and such mainstream organizations as Roman Catholicism, are not Christianity. They are organizations which came into existence and then established their canon by decree, selecting books to include and not include. As a result, they have expanded collections, going so far as to canonize recognizably false translations of the 66 core books, to include additional books into the Bible (as the Roman Catholic Church does), or to canonize entirely new and recognizably outlandish volumes such as the Book of Mormon. You can study these if you want, but study the Bible first, the 66, and really learn them. Learn why they are regarded as true, how they are verified in terms of textual criticism, historical criticism, and theological criticism, so that you can bring the same critical eye to other works. If you do, I am confident you will see why the core 66 so quickly became accepted in an egalitarian way by the earliest Christians under a spirit of skepticism and testing, while the rest, the apocryphal and heretical texts, had to be forced into use amongst their respective sects by religious authority figures who forbade criticism and questioning.

So, a globally and historically recognized list of 66 specific books make up the Bible. But what are these 66 books? Is it the supposed direct Word of God, like the Quran claims to be? Or a history book? Are these 66 books like 66 chapters?

In fact, if I had to liken the Bible to something else in literature, I would liken it to a NATOPS manual. Naval Aviators will know what I’m talking about, and other aviators will know it as a Flight Manual or Pilot’s/Owner’s Handbook (POH). In the world of aviation, such a manual is the be-all, end-all, one-stop-shop for information about a particular aircraft, and includes a variety of sections with different functions. It has a section describing the history and overall design and purpose of the aircraft, another section with in-depth descriptions of its mechanical and electronic systems, another section describing its specific limitations (such as how much fuel it can carry per tank, or what the proper pressure should be in the hydraulic system, or how long the engine can operate at a certain temperature), a section describing normal flight procedures for takeoff, en-route flight, and landing, and yet another section listing specific step-by-step procedures for each of various emergency situations which might arise while flying. Some of these sections are meant to be read through like a narrative, for general understanding and background knowledge. Others, such as the EPs (emergency procedures) and limits, the pilot should or must memorize, perhaps even verbatim.

The Bible is like this. The 66 books are a collection of individual works written over a period of nearly two thousand years. Some of them recount historical events (as understood by the descendants of those who lived them), some record laws and practices or significant genealogies, some represent the testimony of the religious experiences of their authors (sometimes even in the first person), some collect songs and sayings which people deemed of religious importance, and some record first-hand, eye-witness accounts of religiously significant events. Across these genres, you will find a variety of voices, including prose, poetry, and even lists. Some books are meant to be read through, as a story. Some are meant to be consulted at need for nuggets of wisdom. Some passages are meant to be memorized and recited. And others are simply there for the deep scholarship of posterity, as supporting information for very detailed theological analysis.

What this means for you is that, on your first go through the Bible, you don’t have to read it all, just like you don’t have to visit every town in the United States on one road trip, nor every battle site of the Civil War to understand its basic arc and import. As I said before, what we’re going to do here is lay out the highlights, the important sights to see, on your first journey through it, which will give you what you need to know to understand in a thorough and accurate way this “Christianity” people keep talking about, and give you enough knowledge then to go back and target any specific book which you had previously passed over, when you have a purpose for doing so. In this guide, I’m going to walk you through the books of the Bible and tell you what most of them do, which ones you should check out on your first pass, and most importantly how they relate to each other to form a coherent picture.

The Old Testament and the New, a Summary

Now we get to your first practical guidance: what’s up with this “Old Testament, New Testament” business? To describe this, let me describe in brief the religion of Yahweh:

A very, very long time ago, according to a very, very old book, a man–a cave man, essentially–realized that there was something more going on in the world than just eat, sleep, defecate, repeat. At the same time, God created that man. (“Wait, did God create him, or did he discover God? Which was it?” Yes. It’s complicated. This here is not the book. This is just a guide for reading the book. You can read the book and see what you want to think about what it is saying, and then you can read many great, scholarly explorations of its content, analyzing original language in historical context, to see what its authors most likely intended.) In that moment, higher thought and language began amongst human beings, and from that moment forth, God had a special relationship with that particular man and his offspring, his lineage. That relationship took the form of, or was characterized by, a series of “covenants”–agreements of the form, “I am your sovereign God, and if you do x, y, and z which I command you, I will make sure that a, b, and c happen for you,” where a, b, and c are specific, desirable things–and the repeated utter failure of the humans to live up to the covenants after agreeing to them. The first such covenant was very simple (Adam and Eve in the garden), the next (Noah) and the next (Abraham) progressively more sophisticated, with more sophisticated and specific rewards promised in each case as well (and progressively more terribly betrayed by the humans involved), and the last, the covenant with Moses, being the most sophisticated and “final” covenant, intended to last for the remainder of the human story (at least as it was understood by Moses and those with him at the time). Note, in each case, that the covenant is made not with all mankind, but with a specific man and his family line, or in the case of Moses, a new covenant with him and the descendants of his forefather, Abraham. Until you get to the New Testament, the covenant is always specific to a certain bloodline of people.

All this while, God is working on a secret plan which he does not make obvious to the men with whom he is making his agreements. While they focus on what they will get from God in terms of land, prosperity, and progeny, and He is happy to provide them their promised reward when they earn it, His focus is on a longer-term goal at which he only hints to them in their dreams. As the supposed final covenant, the Mosaic covenant, plays out over hundreds of years, the people of that covenant, Moses’s people and their descendants, gather more and more clues from their dreams about that long-term plan and God’s long-term promise to them. Very early on they are promised a land of their own to call home, and in fact very early on they receive it, only to lose it, regain it, and lose it again, as they keep the Mosaic covenant with more or less fidelity in cycles. But in their struggles, they also come to recognize a second, hinted dimension of God’s promise to them: that some day he will cause to be born among them a leader who will help them put an end to their struggle to keep their covenant. This leader will rise up from their bloodline, unite the people of God, perfect them in their ability to keep the covenant of God, lead them to regain their promised land once and for all, and establish in that land the seat of a final kingdom, from which God’s rule will spread across the whole world, ushering in a final age of everlasting peace and joy. In other words, they come to realize that what God is telling them in their dreams is that they will have not only a homeland and a future, but eventually a savior who will help them make that homeland and future permanent and perfect, and make it a destination not just for them but for all people. Heaven on Earth.

The Old Testament is everything I said above. Very quickly it tells the story of the creation of the universe, the Earth, and that first man, and zips through the first few covenants, all in the first book, Genesis. It gets down to detail with the life and times of Moses and how Moses comes to be God’s chosen leader for his people in the second book, Exodus, and then gets into extreme nitty-gritty minutia with respect to the final covenant made with Moses, interspersed with anecdotes from their travels, all of which takes up the next three books: Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. At the end of these five books, God’s people finally come to their promised land. What follows, the entirety of the rest of the Old Testament, is the thousand-year story of that people-group struggling to live in and out of the promised land and in and out of obedience to the covenant which God made with Moses on their behalf. Over that span, from about 1400 B.C. to about 400 B.C., throughout their tortured relationship, God continues to speak to His people in dreams and by other means, building in their collective consciousness a growing understanding of the second, hidden dimension of his promise. Then, about 400 years B.C., He goes silent.

He goes silent, and they are left alone, living in their promised land for now, but with prophecies to tell them that it won’t last, that history is coming at them like the waves of the sea, great empires that will wash over them and eventually overwhelm their nation and scatter them. Among these prophecies, though, remain the hints of that future savior, and especially one very specific timetable, a countdown to the savior’s arrival.

We Christians called it the Old Testament, but it is also called the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, and it contains all of the sacred canon of the Jewish faith. The Christian Old Testament and Jewish Bible are nothing more than the same collected 39 works, just printed in a different order. The critical first five, which I mentioned above, what you might call the Pentateuch, are what the Jewish tradition calls the Torah. Original Judaism is, truly is, this story of the relationship between God and the people with whom he made the Mosaic covenant, and their struggle to live according to His law and to have faith in His promises to them. And it ends, does the Tanakh, as I described above: fading out to silence, and a pause, and a held breath, like a phone line that goes dead, a radio channel that falls silent. There you sit, listening, after the last word fades, holding the headphone to your ear, and all you hear is that faint hiss of the carrier wave, a pile of promises and unfulfilled prophecies in your notebook, and the silence stretches out, and out, and out. But the book is done. No grand finale, no climax. It is closed, and you are waiting for the next thing, but there is no next thing.

Until one day, four hundred years later, just as all the prophetic timers are running out, just as the years calculated by the wisest rabbis from deep analysis of the prophetic texts are about to expire, and the Jews are about to give up listening for any more sound on that frequency and turn off the radio forever, there comes, very quietly, a voice crying in the wilderness.

So begin the strange, wonderful, and utterly divisive events of the life of Joshua of Nazareth, which change the course of the future not just for the expectant Jews but for the entire human species. So wild is this three year period that it is captured not in the sweeping style of the ancient Hebrew narratives but in a collection of eye-witness accounts, taken from letters and journal entries of the day. So Earth-shattering and revolutionary are the events and their implications that they are simply called “the good news.” (In Greek, something like “euangelion;” in Latin, “evangelium;” in Old English, “godspel” or “gospel,” meaning literally good-speak; and in modern English, “good news.”) The three most complete and reliable observer-accounts of this gospel, respected for their mutual consistency and authenticity, come to be known as the synoptic gospels, synoptic meaning they have the “same view,” they agree with each other and tell the same story. A fourth also makes the rounds, though, a few years later, written by a close personal friend of the the infamous preacher and providing unique, almost mystical insight into his teachings, along with additional authoritative detail.

The preaching of Jesus of Nazareth–which is to say, Joshua of Nazareth. He was a Jew, but a Roman Jew born and raised in Roman Palestine, so his parents gave him the Romanized (Latin) version of the traditional Jewish name “Joshua.” In either form it is the same name, literally meaning “God saves” or “God rescues.” The preaching of Jesus struck the Jewish community of that area around the Sea of Galilee like a hammer and chisel. In three years, he amassed a tremendous following and reputation, expectations that he was the One, that he was fulfilling all of the Messianic prophecies in the Tanukh, and that he might be about to usher in the promised age. Heaven, they thought, was coming to Earth. It was happening. If a few things he did gave them pause, if a few things he said reminded them of some of the more challenging elements in the old Messianic verses–conflicting implications that the savior would lead and reign forever yet also would come and be rejected and suffer and die–they convinced themselves not to worry about it. God’s kingdom was nigh.

Then, just as suddenly as he had arisen, he died. Which is to say, he gave himself up suddenly to the Jewish authorities whom he had steadily and ever more directly offended with his teachings, and they turned him over to the Roman government to suffer the most torturous and degrading death sentence the Empire had devised, suitable not just to punish a man with unbearable torments but to ensure that amongst all who knew him he would be utterly humiliated. It was a sentence and method of execution reserved for the lowest of the low, rebels and rapists, people not only guilty but gross, people to be mocked to the extent they would be remembered at all. It was meant not just to torture you to death but to turn you into a symbol of nothingness, less than nothing in death, your tattered body left aloft as an ironic banner of the Empire’s invincible might and your inevitable insignificance. It was meant to kill your memory and legacy along with your person. So he hung on this cross (literally, in Roman vernacular, a “post” or “tree,” though his probably did include the cross-member affixed as we commonly depict it today) and died, and so utter was his defeat at the hands of the Jewish leadership and the Roman government that every one of his followers abandoned him that very night. To the last man, his closest disciples renounced him and fled from the sight of his execution, devastated, broken, and empty.

His body had to be taken down that night by a stranger, a wealthy Jewish man who had heard his teachings, and who still had some respect for him and for the ancient law that a Jew should not hang dead on a tree overnight. This random stranger had the preacher’s body temporarily entombed on his own property until he could see to it that the appropriate embalming rituals could be done two days later, after the Sabbath had passed. (Jews did not perform work, even embalming, on the Sabbath.) Hopefully, once that was done, someone who knew him might come forward to provide the customary long-term resting places (a year for the body to lie and be mourned, followed by a permanent ossuary for the bones that remained).

A funny thing happened in the meantime, though. The preacher’s body disappeared.

No one believed it, at first. The ones who discovered the absence were women–at that time, it would have been said, “mere women,” not considered in that culture reliable witnesses, and these women were reporting not just that his body had vanished, but other things besides. Crazy things. They were telling his disciples (the ones who had abandoned him as yet another failed, false messiah) that they had been given a message: Jesus would meet them in Galilee.

A little while later, he did just that.

Scholars to this day are at a loss to explain it, but the historical record is clear. Jesus of Nazareth preached for three years in a small region in Roman Palestine, and then was executed by crucifixion by Roman governor Pontias Pilate at the behest of the Jewish leadership of that area. He absolutely died, and was buried in a tomb owned by a wealthy Jewish gentleman by the name of Joseph of Arimathea. And then, several days later, the tomb was found empty, and several days after that, Jesus began appearing to people. At first it was just a few of his followers, here and there, but then he appeared to entire groups at once. In once instance, a crowd of over five hundred. And these were not just a few isolated sightings. For days and weeks he appeared, over and over, mingling closely with his followers for extended periods. Finally, as a seeming last straw, he appeared to a select few even of those who had despised him and fought against him in his ministry, and these men, once revilers of Christianity, were so affected by his visitation that they joined the ranks of his most devoted followers, sacrificing in some cases great wealth, privilege, societal standing, or even their lives to do so.

All of this, of course, beginning with John the Baptizer, is recounted in what we call the New Testament, the story of the life of Jesus of Nazareth and the immediate aftermath of his death and resurrection. It begins with the three synoptic gospels and the fourth, the Gospel of John, and continues with accounts and letters of everything that happened after, including lessons for the new followers of Jesus and a final set of prophecies about the end of the world, the famous book of Revelations.

Was Jesus of Nazareth the fulfilment of the Tanakh’s Messianic hints and promises? Was he the Messiah, and if the Messiah, was he truly the Son of God, the Incarnate Word of God, “God With Us?” While he preached they began to hope as much. When he died, they were convinced it had all be a lie. And when he returned, they became utterly convinced, even unto their own deaths, and the world changed. Read their accounts, and see what you think.

Roadmap

All of that is a pretty good summary of the story, if I may say so. To use the modern parlance, it gives you a sense of the “arc” of the tome, from beginning to end, and helps you understand whence comes this sense of the Bible being two books, and Old and a New. Understand, though, that you cannot have the New Testament without the Old. A lot of people like to think of the New Testament and Christianity as a New Religion, wiping away the fire-and-brimstone, sword-and-storm God of the Old Testament with the love-and-harmony God of Jesus. This is wrong, quite wrong, as you will see when you really study it. The question of Jesus, the one most important and central question, is a question of the Old Testament: Is Jesus the One who was foretold? If he is not, then everything else is moot. If he is, then the entire history of the Jews, the tribes of Israel, was about him the entire time. This is the fundamental claim which you must investigate by reading the canon for yourself.

So, let’s get to it! All you need now is a basic guide through the individual books, and that’s what follows.

Now, there’s no law that says you have to attack the story in chronological order. There is a strong case to be made that you don’t have to start with the Bible at all. The strongest attestation to the identity of Jesus is his proposed resurrection, so many people actually begin there. They investigate the truth of that claim, often from extra-biblical angles. They perform textual criticism on the New Testament, assessing the veracity of the writer Paul, and using his writings along with non-Christian and non-Jewish histories to verify the accounts of the gospels. (See the works of Drs. Gary Habermas, Lydia McGrew, and Johnathan McLatchie among others on this subject.) Once satisfied that Jesus did live, was crucified, did die on the cross, was buried, and must have, unimaginable as it sounds, come back from the dead, they take that as verification that this remarkable book is true. Then they read the rest of the New Testament, and then they read the Old Testament to put the New in context (and to get the references; the Apostles of Jesus and Jesus himself were scholars of the Tanukh, and their preaching is littered with quotes from and references to the Hebrew bible, such that you can’t fully understand their messages unless you can listen from a Jewish religious framework).

However, starting from the beginning is a sensible place to start for purposes of a map, so that’s what we’ll do. What follows is NOT necessarily the path you should take through the Bible, but rather an outline which you can use to plan your path. Since the Bible is words and not lands, my map will be given in words as well, a kind of user-friendly description. I will begin at the beginning and work my way through to the end, so that by the time you have read through this, you’ll be able to look at the table of contents of your Bible and know exactly what you’re looking at, what’s to be gained by reading any particular book, and which ones you want to read for your purposes.

Two notes about Translation

Most modern mainstream English translations are pretty darn good. ESV, NASB, New King James. For those fearing that they would have to read Ye Olde King James to get the real deal, that’s just not true. In fact, the new translations benefit from another hundred years or more of improvement in scholarly work and recently discovered ancient manuscripts, which have improved our understanding of ancient languages, so the New King James, in addition to being much more legible to a modern reader than the original King James, is actually a more accurate translation, better in the details, and others like the ESV and NASB are just as good or better. In fact, the flagship translations are so good that, not only are they accurate enough for study, but they’re accurate to a nitpicky, detailed linguistic level. If there is something to be gleaned from a particular choice of word, or tense, or choice of plural vs singular, or to which object a modifier applies in a complex sentence, you may rest assured that the English of these translations accurately reflects the same fine distinctions in the original Hebrew or Greek. (For instance, in Genesis 3:15, is God speaking of Eve’s offspring collectively, or of a singular descendent? “He shall bruise your head” is translated in the singular to reflect that the subject of this clause is singular in the original, implying a single, particular descendant.) So, pick your favorite from among these flagship translations and run with it. Only at one point in the summary below will I direct you away from one of those translations, the ESV, as it misses a critical mark in translating a particular prophecy of Daniel. For that, the NKJV, NIV, and the NASB all do it right. I like stepbible.org for my Bible study, as it allows me to compare multiple translations side-by-side and see translation notes in-line, but biblegateway.com is better suited to simply reading, and it includes some translations that the STEP Bible site does not.

You may also look at something like the New Living Translation, which borders on being a paraphrase rather than a translation. It is focused on making the text very approachable and legible to a non-scholar, while still conveying the doctrinal points, if not the grammatical details, correctly. Something like that is only for a first pass, though. My suggestion would be to use a flagship translation for the Old Testament, use NLT for the New Testament on your first pass only, and then return to the flagship translations for any further study of the New Testament. The only thing you must avoid, in all of this, are versions which go off the doctrinal reservation. Plenty of people have written “translations” which sound good and feel good but aren’t actually translations in any true sense, and end up teach things that aren’t in the Bible at all. Actual heresy or just silliness. The “Passion Translation” is an example of this kind of fraud. If you’re not sure, the translations I’ve mentioned above are the place to start.

(I say “avoid them,” but I don’t mean forever, really. I direct you to the flagship translations, or a reputable paraphrase such as the NLT, because the scholarship behind these is available for you to verify. You can confirm, using available scholarly resources or even just an interlinear resource like the STEP Bible, that these accurately reflect the ancient texts, and you can compare between them to see how consistently they do so. Read them, familiarize yourself with the doctrines and canon, and then, by all means, check out the heretical documents and the shoddy snake-oil which passes for scholarship underpinning them. Prepare to be astounded. People will believe anything.)

One last thing: The name of God is YHWH, which most people today pronounce “Yahweh.” Among the Ten Commandments is a commandment not to use God’s name “in vain,” meaning “in an empty way,” and ancient Jewish tradition took that so far as to mean that the name of God should not be spoken at all, if it could be helped. (That’s a human interpretation of the commandment, not the commandment itself.) The result of this tradition was that in recitations of the Hebrew Bible, especially the Pentateuch, wherever the original text of the Bible from which they were reading contained the word YHWH, they would, instead of pronouncing “Yahweh,” rather say, “Adonai,” meaning in English “THE LORD.” So, even if the text said, “I am YHWH your God,” they would recite it as, “I am Adonai your God,” or “I am THE LORD your God.” Honoring this tradition, English written translations would, wherever the original Hebrew contained the letters YHWH, replace them with an all-caps “THE LORD” in English. You can see an illustrative example of this in Psalm 110, in the first line which says, “THE LORD says to my Lord…” Hover your mouse over the various words of this text at the STEP Bible site, and you can see the original Hebrew words: “Yahweh says to my adon….” So, in your English translation, wherever you see that all-caps “THE LORD,” you should mentally (or verbally, if reading aloud) replace that with “Yahweh” if you want to have a real sense of how the original Hebrew read. (Don’t worry, Jewish tradition aside, there is no Biblical proscription on reading the Bible accurately, with God’s name included, as long as you’re not being disrespectful. The actual rule is against doing what you probably do every day: exclaiming or texting “Oh my God!” just because you’re excited about something. That would be an empty use of the name of God.)

Now, let’s begin.

Old Testament, Narrative

Genesis – Creation, and the beginning of Covenant

The beginning of the relationship between Man and God, the advance of the covenants, and the story of the first Patriarch, Abraham

Begin in the beginning, with the story of the world’s creation and the beginning of God’s relationship with mankind, covenant by covenant, down to Abraham, his son Isaac, and his grandson Jacob, who was called “Israel,” and the children of Jacob who end up fleeing the Fertile Crescent during a famine and seeking refuge in Egypt. Read it like an impossibly ancient, possibly somewhat mythical or poetic, narrative.

Note, here, that it is not a story about Jews. It is one of the foundational works of the Jewish faith, but Jews ancient and modern will be clear with you that the men and women described in Genesis were ancient forebears of the Jews and did not practice Judaism at all. What we call Judaism is that way of life defined by the Law of Moses and the covenant with Moses, which does not appear until the second book, Exodus, thousands of years after the events of Genesis. Jewish tradition recognizes that the earlier patriarchs were men who made earlier covenants with the same singular God, before they even knew His proper name, and who lived by many very ancient practices which would not even be allowed under the Law of Moses. Nor does anyone claim they were good men. Better than others, in some cases, but all fell short of expectations, and their progeny likewise. Genesis, like the later books, is meant to be a Jewish historical account, warts and all, of the progenitors without whom Judaism (the Mosaic covenant and everything that came after) could not have come about.

Note also that I say “possibly mythical.” While elements of Genesis read and feel like myth, certain internal textual clues, in combination with very recent archaeological and paleontological evidence, suggest that it may be more historically accurate than we commonly believe today, if read the way a very ancient Sumerian or Egyptian would have read it, with proper fidelity to their language and cultural context in the Middle Bronze Age or earlier.

Exodus – Out of Egypt

The greatest of all Jewish prophets, Moses, the plagues of Egypt, the final and everlasting covenant between God and the people, and the birth of the Hebrew nation

After Genesis, we pick up the story 400 years later, around 1500 B.C. The descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob (Israel) are now a nation of people living in bondage, and one among them, a descendant of Jacob’s third son (Levi), abandons a life of privilege amongst the Egyptian royal house, flees, and takes up a humble life as a shepherd in the Sinai wilderness. As an old man, he is called back to Egypt by God to lead the tribes of Israel to freedom. Moses is his name, and Exodus is his story. Read it like a story. It ends with the whole nation of Israel, the Hebrew people, freed from Egypt and left wandering in the wilderness of Sinai, homeless.

Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – the Struggle with Law, and the Journey to the Promised Land

The Ten Commandments, the first struggles of the people against the law (the Golden Calf and other incidents), the prophecies of Moses, and his death

The next three books are pretty dense, and I won’t ask you to read them word for word. God hands down to the tribes of Israel, through Moses, His law and His structure for their new society under the Mosaic covenant. Part of that structure is that the third tribe, the descendants of Levi (thus called the Levites) would be a tribe of priests. While the other eleven tribes lived normal, working lives as ancient Hebrews, the sons of the tribe of Levi would be destined to live and work as priests, at least one for every community of Hebrews once the nation comes to be established in the promised land. In this they follow their forefather, Aaron, Moses’s brother. who will become the first High Priest. The covenant and law for which the Levitic priests would be responsible, which they would carry and teach to the rest of the Israelites, would be called the Levitic law, and it is laid out in the book of the same name. (For our purposes, Levitic law is synonymous with Mosaic law. “Levitic” refers to the book of Leviticus in which the law is laid out, but that book is held traditionally to have been recorded by Moses himself.) Skim through the law, checking out a few of the highlights given below to challenge your brain. Does this mean you will never study Leviticus in detail? No. I’m just saying you don’t have to do so right now, on your first journey through the bible. Do check out these few chapters, though.

• 10: death of Nadab and Abihu
• 11: unclean animals
• 13-14: leprosy
• 17: the blood is the life, God has given it
• 18: sex
• 19: love your neighbor
• 20: child sacrifice and sexual immorality
• 25: jubilee
• 27: insurance values

Numbers, meanwhile, gives precise accounting of the twelve tribes, with what they came away from Egypt, and what becomes of them, and especially of Moses’s brother Aaron and sister Miriam in their priestly roles during those first few years in the wilderness. Again, you may skim, and I have recommended a few highlights. Some of these events are pretty cryptic, so don’t expect to understand them yet. Some symbols make sense only once you can see what they are symbolizing.

• 9: smoke and fire lead them
• 11: manna getting boring
• 12: Miriam and Aaron oppose moses
• 14: people lose faith, rebel, are defeated in battle
• 20: lack of water, Moses strikes the rock twice (refer to Exodus 17)
• 21: bronze serpent
• 33: journey’s account

Deuteronomy is the final book of the Pentateuch, the Torah. It is, essentially, Moses’s final sermon to his beloved Hebrew people, for whom he has given his entire life. We learn in Numbers that, due to one very small but apparently significant mistake, Moses and his generation are cursed never to set foot into the promised land. Having given his life to lead his people there, he must die on its doorstep. He knows this, and he knows his time is coming, so he gives one final sermon. Most of it is a reiteration of the law and a deepening of the same, but a few important passages are highlighted below, including Moses’s hints as to the future of God’s plan, including the first explicit Messianic prophecy. So dies Moses, alone with the Lord he served, on a mountain overlooking the land which he will never enter.

• 5 – 10: The commandments reiterated, morality vs law
• 6: the greatest commandment
• 14: unclean food
• 15: jubilee reiterated
• 17: levitical judges, aided by priests
• 17: how to have a king, if you must
• 18: abominable practices
• 18: a new prophet like Moses (M), and testing prophets
• 19: cities of refuge and witnesses
• 21: marrying female captives
• 21: hanging a man on a tree
• 22: more laws on sex and rape
• 23: saving the runaway slave
• 24: divorce, collecting loans, not punishing one for another’s sin
• 24: leaving some for the poor
• 31: Joshua succeeds Moses
• 32: Song of Moses
• 34: Death of Moses, and none like him has arisen

Joshua – Establishing Israel in the Promised Land

According to God’s prescription, the Hebrew people were to be ruled by a system of Judges and Priests. The Priests would be the Levitic Priests, interpreting the law and teaching it to the people, and assisting the Judge. At any one time there would be a single Judge, anointed by God, sitting in judgement over the entire Hebrew nation. This Judge was not a king. The only sovereign King of these people would be God himself. The Judge would have no special house, no special privileges, no special wealth. The Judge would have two special responsibilities, though: He would lead the Hebrew people in battle when necessary, and otherwise would “judge” (make rulings or final decisions, with advice and input from the priesthood) in those disputes which could not be settled at a lower level, by village or tribal leadership. Joshua, Moses’s assistant, though not a Levite himself, is appointed by God as Moses’s successor in leadership and becomes a model for future Judges. With the Levitic priests to assist him, he leads the Hebrew people into the holy land and struggles with them to establish their new nation according to all the dictates of the Levitic law. He also leads them in their conquest of their new home and the driving out or destruction of other peoples from the land. Read his story to learn of the Conquest of Joshua, and of the formative years of the Hebrew people in their new home and their new marriage to their God.

Judges – the Age of Israel under the rule of the Judges

Exactly what you might expect: the book of Judges tells the story of the Judges after Joshua, until the last of them, when the system of Judges is finally (as foretold by Moses) rejected by an unwise people, who demand to have a king as other nations have. Skim the stories of the various Judges, including such famous stories as Samson and Delilah, and note the pattern: the people are wicked, they become oppressed by foreign forces, they repent, God gives them a Judge to lead them back to him, after which they immediately, in their newfound safety, become wicked again.

Ruth – the Grandmother of Israel’s most famous King

This short book tells the interesting story of Ruth, a girl not of Hebrew ancestry who shows great devotion to her mistress and adopts a Hebrew identity, finds love, gets married, and eventually becomes the revered grandmother of David.

1st and 2nd Samuel – the Story of King David

The first (disastrous) king of Israel, and the life under King Saul of the One Who Should Have Been King, a young shepherd named David

In the 1st Book of Samuel, having rejected God’s mandated system of government by Judges, the Israelites demand a king, and God gives them what they’re asking for, kingship in all its flaws, in the person of King Saul. Initially brilliant, Saul quickly loses his luster and God’s favor and descends into paranoia. Meanwhile, a boy named David wins renown and Saul’s favor, followed by Saul’s jealousy. Anointed in secret as the true king of Israel, David eventually goes on the run from Saul with his loyal men, traveling the countryside, staying a step ahead of Saul’s army while defending the innocent from bandits and invaders, and all the while demonstrating his steadfast love for God. In case you’re wondering, the “Samuel” in the book’s title is the prophet Samuel, Saul’s chief advisor. Samuel dies early on in the story, but these two books remain named after him.

In the 2nd Book of Samuel, David is finally, officially coronated after the death of Saul, and his reign begins. His term is a mix of zealous religious devotion, heroic acts, and terrible crimes as the temptations of royalty overcome him. Despite his admitted flaws, David remains to this day the quintessential king of Israel, and the Messiah is referred to as the coming Son of David.

Read 1st and 2nd Samuel like a story, and then continue into 1st and 2nd Kings.

1st and 2nd Kings – the Age of Israel under the rule of the Kings

The story of King Solomon (third King of Israel and David’s son) followed by the remaining kings, ending in the destruction of Jerusalem and eviction of Israel from the promised land

David’s successor and known to posterity as the wisest of all kings, King Solomon has a long and profitable rule, acquires great wealth (and a lot of women) and begins construction of the first Temple, the first permanent structure to replace the Tabernacle as the center of Jewish worship. Solomon’s story is the story of a man with enough wisdom to know the right answer, but often not enough strength to live according to the right answer. Like so many before and after, he starts off well but ends tragically.

After Solomon, these books tell the stories of the remaining kings of Israel until the last comes under siege by the competing empire of Babylon and is finally overthrown. Babylon takes Jerusalem, destroys the Temple, and scatters the people of Israel. So ends the time of God’s people in their promised land with the first “Babylonian Exile,” which will last 70 years, until Babylon is overthrown by the Medo-Persian Empire.

1st and 2nd Chronicles – Another take on the Age of Kings

Another perspective on the events of the books of Samuel and Kings, ending in the victory of Babylon over the Jews, the 70 years’ Babylonian Exile, and the eventual return to Jerusalem

1st and 2nd Chronicles are records of many of the same events told in 1st Samuel through 2nd Kings, as compiled by a different author. They add some detail, but aren’t crucial for a first reading through the Bible.

Daniel – a Prophet among strangers

The story of Daniel and his companions under the Babylonian emperor, and Daniel’s mind-boggling prophecies

During the first Babylonian Exile, Daniel and his companions come into the service of the king of Babylon when Daniel proves that he is able to interpret prophetic dreams (his own and others’). He and his companions escape numerous attempts on their lives while he continues to give powerful people very bad news about their futures. Read this book to see the archetypical example of Biblical prophecy (specifically, telling of the future), and compare Daniel’s visions of the kings and empires to come to the actual history of Babylon, the Medo-Persian Empire, and the Greek Empire of Alexander the Great.

Then check out Daniel’s prediction of the 70 weeks in Daniel chapter 9. In it, he describes a timeline. (For this, I recommend against the ESV translation. Look to the NIV, NASB, or New King James for the best English renderings of this prophecy.) It begins with an order to rebuild the city of Jerusalem (specifically an effective order which leads to the city, not just the Temple, actually being rebuilt), after which “seven weeks” and “sixty-two weeks” will pass, and then the Messiah will come, and he will also be “cut off,” a Jewish idiom for a judicial death penalty. The word we translate as “week” was, in their language, a more general word for any set of seven, and is acknowledged in this context to mean a set of seven years. Specifically, the ancient Jews interpreted this prophecy to mean they could expect the Messiah about 483 years after an effective order goes out to rebuild the city of Jerusalem. In the years after the return from Babylon, Jewish scholars observe the rebuilding of the city (which apparently took about 49 years), and they make calculations from the best-matching royal decree which began the process (issued by Artaxerxes Longimanus in 444 B.C.), and this leads to a very tense feeling of expectation among Jewish communities and the Jewish diaspora, about the years A.D. 30 to 40 by our modern reckoning, of the imminent appearance of Messiah.

• (M) 2:36 (and 2:44)
• (M) 7:13: the Son of Man
• 7: the vision of the four beasts
• 8: more visions of the coming empires
• (M) 9: 70 weeks (7+62+1)

Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther

The return to Israel, the rebuilding of the Temple, the rebuilding of Jerusalem

Stories of the Jewish people once again established in their land under the authority of the Medo-Persian empire. These books essentially comprise the end of the Old Testament’s narrative. During this period, the last of the prophecies are given, and then… there’s just nothing more.

Old Testament, Other

Psalms

Psalms are songs, like hymns, those songs collected by the ancient Jews as being of particular religious significance. Half of them were written by King David. He was a prolific musician. The story of David’s adultery with Bathsheba, his attempt to buy the silence of her husband, and his eventual murder of her husband, go by quickly, and little is told of how David regards these events in the books of Samuel. Read Psalm 51 to see the song he wrote as a prayer begging God for forgiveness after this particular transgression. You can also read Psalm 32 for further insight into his feelings about guilt, repentance, and forgiveness.

• (M) 22
• 32: Repentance
• 51: David’s repentance for Bathsheba and Uriah
• (M) 110: David’s Messianic inferences in the prediction of 2 Samuel 7 (David believed that a part of the prediction was about his son Solomon, but that part of it was about a more distant descendant who would be Messiah; he writes as much in this song.)

Proverbs

These are collected wise sayings, most of them regarded as the Proverbs of Solomon–i.e., proverbs which King Solomon, in his wisdom, either wrote down or collected. Read this book if you want plenty of bite-sized nuggets of real wisdom (specifically as opposed to modern pop bumper-sticker “wisdom”). Also famous in Proverbs are the wise sayings of the mother of one “King Lemuel,” captured in chapter 31.

• 1 – 9: Solomon’s messages to his sons
• 10 – 30: Collected proverbs
• 31: “Lemuel’s” message from his mother, including a description of the perfect wife

Ecclesiastes

This is a book of philosophical sermons traditionally also attributed to King Solomon, though there is some debate on its authorship. Read this if you are into philosophy and the philosophy of morality.

Song of Solomon, also called the Song of Songs

King Solomon addresses, through rather explicit poetry probably inspired by a dream, the proper shape of sexual activity within marriage. (Contrary to attempts by the early church to desexualize this chapter, modern scholarship shows that it is exactly what it seems to be.)

Job

This book is not what you probably think it is. The story of Satan’s challenge and Job’s suffering is summarized briefly at the beginning. The vast majority of this book comprises intense philosophical poetry about the nature of suffering, its origin, and the proper response to it. Like Ecclesiastes, this is for readers who are into the philosophy of morality and suffering and ready to do some deep thinking.

An interesting note here: The Pentateuch are regarded as the oldest texts of Judaism, penned by Moses himself, and there is some linguistic evidence within the text to suggest this is not a far-fetched claim. They are written basically in Ancient Egyptian, by an educated Egyptian who clearly came from an Egyptian educational and literary background, using Egyptian literary forms and techniques of the late Middle Bronze Age, specifically the Hyksos or post-Hyksos era, and betraying detailed knowledge of Egyptian systems of government and high society. Yet, as Egyptian as they are in form, they bear the unity of a single author and are decidedly anti-Egyptian in message, declaring the supremacy of Yahweh over all the false gods of Egypt. That makes the Pentateuch as old as the Egyptian hieroglyphs on the tombs of Pharaoh Ramses the Second.

The book of Job (and possibly Jonah as well) is even older. Internal evidence suggests that Job is the oldest book of the Bible, possibly maintained from the protohistorical era of early Sumer as an oral tradition and then faithfully recorded in written form later. Now, there are older stories in the Bible. Some of the accounts in Genesis of Eden and Noah’s ark contain details suggesting staggeringly ancient events, on the order of 6,000 to 8,000 B.C., but these details are retained and recorded in Moses’s Egyptian style. By contrast, the story of Job, while probably depicting events of a Sumerian period sometime between Noah’s flood and Abraham’s wanderings, seem to do so in the preserved style and composition of that same era, which is mind-boggling.

Jonah

Another legendary story, and again not what you probably think it is. This is a fable about a man who refused the charge given him by God and was condemned to die for three days. Yes, he is swallowed by a large sea creature, and at the end brought back and “vomited up” by the same, and later references to this story refer to him being in the belly of the beast for that time. But look at the poetry regarding his experience. It describes not being eaten, but being dragged down in the dark, cold, and crushing depths of the sea, likely as a metaphor for being dead. (“Sheol” is the Jewish “realm of the dead.”) Jonah is eventually redeemed from death by God and sent back on his mission, but he has not learned his lesson and the story ultimately ends in an unsatisfying way that demands further analysis by the reader of Jonah’s petulance and God’s relationship to him and the rest of humanity. Its peculiar ending suggests authenticity and perhaps even a measure of historicity.

The rest: major and minor prophets, and the closing of the book

The remaining books of the Old Testament you need not read in any detail for now. These are collections of prophecies by various Jewish prophets during the period of the Kings, the Babylonian Exile, and the restoration in Jerusalem up until the final prophecies of Malachi, given about 400 B.C. You might get into these prophecies later, but for now, let me point out a few that the ancient Jews (the Jews of the B.C. years) regarded as referring to and describing Messiah. By the time the voice of God goes silent with the end of Malachi, all of Jewish religious expectation is focused on theories of the Messiah’s coming.

I have marked some of the highlights above with a little (M). Those are references that are specifically Messianic, according to pre-Christian Hebrew scholars. (It is important that they be regarded as Messianic to pre-Christian Jewish rabbis because, if a man comes along and claims to be the Jewish Messiah, we must judge by comparing his life to what objective Rabbis before his time predicted, rather than to passages which his devoted followers later declared to be Messianic prophecies.) Here are a few more, so that you know what they were working with, what they were reading and reciting to each other, as the prophesied time approached. These were regarded as indicators of the Messiah in the years before Jesus of Nazareth was born:

• (M) Genesis 3:15, her seed shall bruise your head
• (M) Genesis 22:9-14, it shall be provided
• (M) Genesis 22:18, in Abraham’s seed all nations will be blessed
• (M) Deuteronomy 18:15, a new prophet like Moses

• (M) Zechariah 9:9, riding a donkey
• (M) Zechariah 11, thirty pieces of silver, potter’s field
• (M) Zechariah 12:10, whom they have pierced
• (M) Zechariah 13
• (M) Isaiah 7:14, born of a virgin, named God With Us
• (M) Isaiah 11, shoot from Jesse
• (M) Isaiah 42
• (M) Isaiah 49:6
• (M) Isaiah 52-53
• (M) Micah 5:2, born in Bethlehem
• (M) Jeremiah 23:5-6

Old Testament, recap

So, to review: Genesis and Exodus tell how the Jewish people (the ancient Israelites) came to be, and the rest of the Pentateuch describes the law and their arrival in the Promised Land. Once they’re in the Land, they live for several hundred years under the Judges, and Joshua and the book of Judges recount this period. Eventually they reject the system of Judges and demand a king. Ruth, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles recounts the next few hundred years of Israel, under the rule of various kings, including the first three who are most important: Saul, David, and Solomon. During this period, the first Temple is built.

The age of kings ends with Babylon overthrowing Israel and razing Jerusalem and the Temple. Daniel is a Jewish prophet in exile who delivers a number of critical prophecies. The exile ends when the Persians overthrow the Babylonians and a Persian king gives the Jews permission to return home and rebuild their Temple. Eventually they also rebuild the rest of the city. Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther cover this period.

The remaining books are collections of material important to the Jews: Psalms (songs), Proverbs (proverbs), Ecclesiastes (philosophical tracts), the Song of Songs, and various prophecies and fables (Job and Jonah).

For your first passage through the Old Testament, follow the roadmap above. Read Genesis and Exodus, check out the highlights through Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, skim Joshua and Judges. Read Ruth, 1st Samuel, and 2nd Samuel. Read 1st Kings through the story of Solomon, and skim the rest. Skim Chronicles if you like, to see how it parallels what you have already read.

Read Daniel. It will be challenging, but read it anyway.

Hit the highlights, for now, in Psalms and Proverbs, but come back to these wells often as sources of wisdom. Check out Song of Solomon if you are or plan to be married. Read Jonah, Ecclesiastes, and Job when your mind is ready for some philosophical deep thinking.

Finally (and I may anger some people by saying this), don’t bother with the rest (Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and the prophets) for now, except for the prophetic highlights given above.

Conclusion of the Old Testament

It’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s like the opposite of a normal book. All the epic stuff happens at the beginning, and the story becomes steadily more mundane and depressing, through the age of Judges, and Kings, until the Jewish nation finally loses its freedom, is temporarily scattered, and returns, only to keep their Temple and city by the pleasure of foreign rulers. And the relationship with God just sort of… tapers off to nothing. The voice of God goes silent. All that build-up. All that talk of the promised future, reclaiming their land, and the coming savior, Heaven on Earth, the permanent Israel, and the resurrection of the dead, left unfulfilled. But there is that timeline, that countdown. There is good reason–at least good Biblical reason–for Jews of about 30 A.D. to think they might witness the End of Days in their lifetime, after 400 years of silence.

The conclusion of everything will begin with the coming of their Jewish Messiah. What do they know about Him, according to the prophecies? He will be of the line of David. He will be born in Bethlehem, and will be come from nowhere important, the sticks, a poor place of no renown. He will come riding on a colt or donkey. He will defeat the enemies of Israel and bring God’s glory and blessing to all nations of the world. And he will also be rejected by the people of Israel, tormented, and killed. He will be dehydrated, his bones pulled out of joint but not broken, he will be lashed and pierced, and he will be cursed, or will become a curse. This last bit is, admittedly, troubling. As the Hebrew Bible is closed out, and translated (especially into Greek, creating the Septuagint), and spread around the Jewish world, scholars of it debate how reconcile the conflicting predictions. Messiah will reign, but he will also be rejected. He will be victorious, but he will also be tortured and executed. What does it mean? Will there be two messiahs? As the countdown winds down, they still have no good answers.

The New Testament

Then comes that voice, crying in the wilderness. A man named John, regarded as a new prophet in his time, baptizing Jews with water, telling them they must repent of their sins and be washed clean, telling them that he is washing them to make them ready for another who is coming after him, who will be the Lamb of God, will baptize the faithful with the Holy Spirit, and will take away the sins of the world.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke – the Synoptic Gospels

Synoptic meaning they all tell the same story. These are the three eye-witness accounts which the earliest Christians regarded as the most authoritative and accurate, and best written. Contrary to some now outdated claims, these were written within the first century A.D., meaning before the year 100, meaning they were put to paper while people who directly encountered Jesus were still alive. They are not the earliest Christian writings, but they are very, very early, and were circulating through Christian communities almost as soon as there were Christian communities. Each represents eye-witness observations, recorded by a dedicated researcher (or, in the case of Matthew, an eyewitness himself), probably written down with the help of scribal assistants, as was the custom of that era.

If you’re new to the Bible, and ancient ways of speaking are a little impenetrable for you, then try the New Living Translation for your first foray into the Gospels. If you want to get into deep nitty gritty detail, then most modern translations for high reading levels (New King James, ESV, NASB, even NIV) will be fine. The earliest of these accounts is probably the Gospel of Mark, but Mark also has the least detail, so you may as well read them in order. Read them like eye-witness testimony, and remember that, while they were written in Greek, they were written by Greek-speaking Jews for a Jewish audience. They are filled with references and allusions to the Old Testament. If you took a good trip through the Old Testament such as described above, you might get some of these references. If not, that’s fine, but understand that much of what is being said by the people in these Gospel accounts has meanings that will expand for you dramatically when you later study the Old Testament and discover that they are quoting the prophets and songs and stories with which they grew up as Jews. Linguistically, note that any dialogue they record, though they record it in Greek, was probably originally a mix of Aramaic and Greek, depending on the time and place of the conversation. (It is likely that Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount in Aramaic, probably repeatedly in a number of locations, at two of which he performed the feeding miracles. It is likely that he conversed with Nicodemus in Greek, though.)

John – the Gospel of John

The synoptic gospels describe the events from an observer’s perspective. Read John’s Gospel once you have a sense of the events as relayed in at least one of the synoptic Gospels. This is the same story, but as told by John, the closest friend and confidant of Jesus, who is able to interpret and describe the events of Jesus’s life through a higher theological framework. His is the story of Jesus’s life told with a focus on the meaning of Jesus’s life. Here you will see such statements as, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”

A note about what’s not part of the gospel:

If you grew up with the King James version or some other older version, there are two passages from the Gospels which more recent scholarship has indicated potentially were not part of these books as they first were written and circulated. They are as follows:

John 7:53 through 8:11: You know this story. A woman is about to be stoned, and Jesus says, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” The crowd disperses, and then he tells the woman to go free and sin no more. I’m sorry to say, this probably was not in the original Gospel of John, as John wrote it. Note, as you follow my link above, the double-brackets that enclose the beginning and ending of this passage. Modern Bible translations include it, but with the note that it is not original. Do not be completely discouraged, though. A number of scholars who have studied the origin of this passage, while they agree it is not original to John’s Gospel, are of the opinion that it is historical, i.e. that it is a true anecdote from the ministry of Jesus that was floating around with some fame until a well-meaning scribe gave it an anachronistic home in John’s work. So, you shouldn’t consider it to be part of the Bible, but you are safe in believing it is probably a true story. Not everything that Christ said and did was included in just these four accounts.

Mark 16:9 through 16:20: This is called “the longer ending of Mark.” The oldest manuscripts we have today do not include these verses, but simply end with verse 8: “…and they told no one, for they were afraid.” Did Mark write the longer ending? Did he write it later? Was he considering writing it, but never finished it, and one of his scribes added it later? Did someone else add it later because they couldn’t countenance his story ending on such an ellipsis? We’re not sure. However, this instance is not like the previous, the addition to the Gospel of John. Whether the longer ending of Mark was or was not part of the book does not change the theology of the Bible, by any stretch, and moreover it began to be widely included in circulated copies of Mark within a century or so, meaning that the earliest believers considered it canon.

Nonetheless, its addition raises an interesting question. With the longer ending, Mark’s record reads more like the other two synoptic Gospels, as a complete account. Without that ending, Mark’s account either is truncated or… artistic. It’s hard for a lot of scholars to imagine an ancient writer taking an artistic, dramatic approach to something like his eye-witness account of the life of Jesus Christ, but there are plenty of others who say, “Why not?” And the way Mark reads in other parts of his story, it really does fit his style, in a certain way. Matthew and Luke just want to tell you what happened and why. Mark is different. He likes to tell you what people saw, and then let you draw the conclusions. He likes to narratively set up scenarios that beg a question, and then leave you with an ellipsis… …and let you figure it out. So, if you decide to read this without the long ending, imagine it this way: The women have discovered the empty tomb and received the bidding of the angel, and the last we see of them they are hastening away from the gravesite, refusing to talk to anyone else on the road as they rush to find the Apostles and inform them that the impossible has happened. Fade to black. Roll credits. It’s like a cliff-hanger ending, setting up Season 2 of the series, or a pilot episode begging for the rest of the series to be made. Or, you may consider the epilogue of the longer ending to be part of the text, as most of the early church did, which is a little less interesting but just fine.

While we’re on this subject, there’s one more passage that probably isn’t original. It’s in the First Epistle of John, though, so I’ll mention it later. Meanwhile, what does all of this mean for the reliability of your Bible? If these passages were included in English Bibles for so many years in error, maybe all the rest of the New Testament is suspect. Maybe it’s all made up! How do we know we can trust any of it?

Actually, rather the opposite is true. The same process which has eventually revealed these three passages to be later additions has so vetted and validated the rest, so that the New Testament, as we have it today, is by several orders of magnitude the most thoroughly verified ancient text still extant. Your Bible, in one of the flagship translations, is word for word, down to fine detail, the very collection of letters and accounts that was being circulated among the first Christians, within the very lives of the people who walked with Jesus in his ministry.

Acts – the Rest of the Story

The Gospel accounts end with Jesus dying on the cross, being buried, and then witnesses finding the tomb empty. They then go on to describe Jesus appearing (as a physical, bodily person, resurrected from the dead) to various people who knew him in life, including his family and followers. Then, he disappears again, leaving his followers to carry on his mission and spread his teachings. The book of Acts is the denoument, in which Mark (author of the Gospel of Mark) tells the stories of what became of the Apostles and other followers in the following years, as they began the founding of the Christian faith and church around the ancient world. Once you’ve read one or two of the synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John, you can read this as the rest of the story of those same people. However, if you are more philosophically-minded, you may prefer to read the Book of Romans before you worry about Acts.

Romans – Paul’s Magnum Opus

There was, in those early days of the church (the days of Acts, after the departure of Jesus) a considered effort by the leadership of the Jewish faith (led by the Jewish scholarly priesthood, known as the Pharisees), to exterminate these messianic heretics before their faith could take root. A number of Pharisees, scholarly experts in the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish faith and fervently devout in their devotion to the Old Testament Law, made it their personal mission to see the Christians killed and their heresy extirpated. Among these was a young Pharisee of particular zeal named Saul, who traveled about hunting Christians, bringing them to trial, and supervising their torture and execution.

Then, one day, while traveling to Damascus to kill him some more Christians, he met Jesus. The encounter was, he reports, overwhelming, and it left him blind for several days. When he finally regained his faculties, he had a new name, Paul, and a new mission. He was utterly converted, and he lived the rest of his life, and went to his death, in service to Jesus, whom he now believed to be the Christ, the Messiah of the Old Testament prophecy in which he was so expert.

In his new mission to shepherd and spread the Christian church, he wrote a number of letters which were so renowned for their scholarship, erudition, and deep understanding of the teachings of Jesus, that they came to be regarded (even by Jesus’s own apostles, while they still lived) as Scripture, divinely inspired explanations of what it means to be Christian and practice Christianity. These are the Epistles (letters) of Paul.

Perhaps the greatest of all of these is the Book of Romans, written to a newly-created Christian church in Rome when Paul realized he simply would not be able to find time to visit them in person. In the book of Romans, because he is speaking to new believers with essentially no background except the basic Gospel story, he makes no assumptions but starts at the beginning. In one massive, philosophically titanic work, Paul describes from top to bottom and front to back the entire theology of Christianity. Once you have read one or two of the Gospels, if you then want to know how to apply it, what it means respecting how you should live as a Christian, this is the book you go to. This is the next book to study after the Gospels and Acts. Just understand that in places it is quite challenging, so don’t expect to understand everything he says on an easy first read. Here, a paraphrase like the New Living Translation might make your first reading easier, but it will not capture the full nuance of his language. Ultimately, you will have to study it word-for-word, using a careful word-for-word translation.

Hebrews – Christianity in an Old Testament Context

While Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is as complete a theological explication as you could ask for, you will not fully and completely understand the Christian message and teachings unless you understand them in the context of the Hebrew Bible, as one who studied it or grew up with it as a religious text. Indeed, part of the Christian teaching is that God created His relationship with the ancient Israelites and led them through everything He led them through, wove their story through the tapestry of world history, so that we would have that as a framework to understand Christianity when He revealed it. In other words, He not so much sent Messiah for the Jews, but created the Jews so that he could eventually send Messiah, and the world would have the Jewish history as a means of recognizing and fully understanding the Messiah’s nature and mission. The book of Hebrews, believed to have been originally a sermon (by an author now unknown to us), focuses on putting Christian teachings into that Old Testament context, helping new Christians understand the message through the necessary Jewish lens to fully grasp its meaning. It is essential reading, along with Acts and Romans, after the Gospels themselves.

The remaining Epistles

Some written by Paul, others by other authors, these remaining books of the New Testament (other than Revelations) are various collected letters by leaders and Apostles of the early church to new Christians around the world, with the purpose of making sure that, wherever they were, Christians received a consistent and accurate account of the life, teachings, and theology of Jesus the Messiah. They knew that a story like that of Jesus was ripe for legendary development and the false teachings of charlatans trying to get in on the action, so the ones who could speak with authority, the original Apostles and those who has personally witnessed Jesus’s preaching, traveled without rest, visiting each new church when they heard of it to ensure that the message being spread was true and accurate. And where they could not go in person, they sent trusted messengers with very detailed letters addressing either general theology or the specific concerns or problems of that new church. Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Thessalonians are agreed to be the very earliest Christian writings now canonized in the New Testament–that is, of all the Books of your New Testament, these are the earliest, written by Paul less than 15 years after the death of Christ, while most of the Apostles and even Jesus’s siblings were still alive and active in the church. This is important because, for a long time, skeptics would argue that the resurrection and deity of Jesus were myths added by other writers hundreds of years after Jesus. Modern scholarship on the reliability and age of Paul’s writings shows that within a couple of years after Jesus’s death, common Christian worship included these elements, and that they were from the beginning foundational of the understanding of Jesus according to those who followed him.

Also, I mentioned that there’s one more passage in some New Testament translations that probably was not original and should not be included. Here it is: 1st John 5:7. Older English translations included here a phrase about the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, as an affirmation of the trinity in heaven, then to be compared to three earthly symbols mentioned in verse 8. This apparently was text added by some well-meaning scribe in the Middle Ages, and the original epistle reads more like modern translations render it, with those words excluded. You can see a comparison in the link I have provided. The shorter modern translations are more accurate to the text. Don’t worry, though. The Trinity still comes up in plenty of other places in the New Testament, including the Gospels.

Revelations

What can we say about Revelations?–except perhaps that it is a book not meant for human understanding. It is regarded as authoritative prophecy from God, but it defies interpretation. Of all the books of the Old and New Testament, Revelations will probably tell you the least that is important or useful for your life today. It is fascinating, so feel free to read it. Just don’t try to apply it to what you see around you today. These are not the end times. These are just times. Your guidance is not Revelations, but Romans, and John, and Mark, and Hebrews, and the Old Testament. Focus on living your life. The Apocalypse will take care of itself.

Your Journey

So, where do you want to start? In the New Testament, or the Old? With the story of Christ, or the theology of Christ? With Biblical wisdom, songs that give you hope, or an inspiring story from ancient times? Or will you attack chronologically, trying to lay for yourself all the Old Testament groundwork so you can approach the New Testament with some facsimile of a Jewish mindset and experience? Hopefully, even if you want to undertake that most comprehensive approach, the guide above gives you an idea of what the Bible contains, how it’s laid out, and where to focus your work. Here’s my point: you don’t have to read it all, at least not on the first pass. Even if you want a thorough reading for your first journey, that still doesn’t mean you have to scour every word. You have a lifetime to come back for details, and for those books that aren’t important to your purpose at this moment.

I’m not saying there is irrelevant material in the Bible; not at all. What I’m saying is that you have a specific purpose at this moment. What I’m saying is that each book has its purpose, and your first purpose, upon a first reading, should be to grasp the overall narrative of the nation of Israel and the relationship of that nation to God, so that you can understand the story, and controversy, of Jesus Christ. The work I’ve given you here will accomplish that, to a higher level than most people ever accomplish, without driving you crazy or making the whole task impossible. Later, when there are elements of the Bible which you want to understand to a deeper level, you’ll be able to come back to the rest of its content with an agenda.

So, in whatever mission you have given yourself, proceed, and Godspeed. And, whatever that mission may be, may I recommend that your next stop be biblethinker.org, hands down the best resource on the planet for sheer bible study. I would recommend Mike Winger’s educational videos to anyone who is trying to figure out how to actually study and learn from the Bible. Consider starting with his series, “Verse by verse through the Gospel of Mark.” I’ve already mentioned three PhDs who have pioneered work on the historicity of the New Testament. For tidy (and thoroughly referenced) video summaries of some of the latest work on the historicity of the Old Testament, consider the relevant playlists on this YouTube channel.