The Bible in Ten Minutes
The Bible is the world's all-time number one bestseller. A book that has inspired great art, literature, cinema, and even comics. For Christians, it's the world's most important book. A guide for life containing God's words. You can spend your whole life studying it, and lots of people do, but we've got just ten minutes.
So the name Bible comes from the Greek word Byblos and the Latin word Biblia, which both mean books. Because the Bible is a collection of books, written by different authors at different times, over about one and a half thousand years. I'm going to be talking about the Protestant Bible, which contains 66 books. The Catholic Bible has more, but I'll come back to that. There are two main sections, the Old Testament and the New Testament. A testament is a statement of belief or a contract, and the contracts in the Bible are between God and his people.
There are 39 books in the Old Testament, mainly written in Hebrew. The language of the Jewish people and 27 books in the New Testament, mainly written in Greek. The Old Testament kicks off with the Pentateuch, which means five books, also known as the books of the law. Genesis starts at the beginning, the beginning of everything, with God creating the world in a week. He made Adam, the first man, and Eve, the first woman, and a perfect Paradise for them to live in. But then evil reared its ugly head for the very first time. The world got so evil that God decided to scrap it all and start again. Everything was wiped out by a flood, and only good old Noah, his family and his floating zoo survived. Noah's great great great great great great great great grandson was called Abram or Abraham. And God told him that his descendants would become a whole nation of people, and promised to give them a land of their own. Abraham's grandson, Jacob, also known as Israel, had 12 sons whose families became the 12 tribes of the Israelite people, who would eventually live in the Promised Land. Joseph was Jacob's favourite son and was spoiled rotten, so his jealous brothers sold him as a slave to some passing Egyptians. But after Joseph helped out the Pharaoh with some dream analysis, he was promoted to prime minister, forgave his brothers for the selling him as a slave thing, and invited the whole family to come and live with him in Egypt.
Exodus is set about 400 years later, but by now the Israelites had all been made slaves. Oww! God told an Israelite called Moses to free his people and lead them out of Egypt to search for the Promised Land. God parted the Red sea so the Israelites could escape to the other side, where they stopped off at Mount Sinai and Moses climbed to the top to meet God, who handed over ten commandments to live by. And lots of other rules followed. God was offering the Israelites a tempting contract. If they obeyed his law, he'd look after them and everything would be lovely. The Israelites wandered about in the desert looking for their promised land until 40 years later, they found it. Moses gave a big speech about the importance of keeping God's law, and then he died. The next 12 books describe life in the Promised Land and the rise and fall of the Kingdom of Israel. God chose Joshua to lead the Israelites into their new home, where they fought off the nasty neighbours and divided up the land between the 12 tribes of Israel. When some of the Israelites started to disobey God's law, it was up to 11 holy men and one holy woman, called The Judges, to sort them out. The most famous Judge was the super strong Samson, who always brought the house down.
This is Ruth. She wasn't an Israelite, but she married Boaz, who was. And their great-grandson is David, who's very, very important in the next book. By now a priest called Samuel was in charge. But the Israelites wanted a king, like all the nations next door. So Samuel chose Saul, but he wasn't really up to the job. Then, during a battle with some nasty neighbours known as Philistines, a local shepherd boy called David, great grandson of Ruth, volunteered to fight the Philistine champion, a giant called Goliath. He won and became a national hero. So when Saul died, David was crowned and led the Kingdom of Israel into a golden age of peace and prosperity, which you can also read about in the Books of Chronicles.
When David died, his son Solomon became king. He's known for his wisdom for building an impressive temple in Jerusalem and for having 700 wives, give or take. But the people began to fight amongst themselves, and the kingdom split in two. Israel in the north and Judah in the south. God's messengers Elijah and Elisha warned everyone that worse was to come if they didn't obey God, but no one was listening. Then disaster, Israel and Judah were invaded by foreign powers. Solomon's beautiful temple was destroyed and the people were dragged away to become slaves. The exile, as this period is called, lasted about 70 years. And then the Jews, the people from Judah, were allowed to return home. In Jerusalem, the temple was restored and Nehemiah got the city walls rebuilt. Back in Persia, a clever young Jew called Esther had won a beauty contest to become queen and used her influence over the king to foil a plot that would have wiped out all the Jews in the empire.
Next, there's a section of poetry and philosophy. This is Jobe, who remains faithful to God despite lots of horrible things happening to him, so he's rewarded for his loyalty. Psalms is a book of poems and songs, many written by King David, which were used in worship, and still are. Proverbs is a collection of wise sayings, and Ecclesiastes is all about the meaning of life, or the lack of it. The Song of Solomon or the Song of Songs is a steamy love poem, possibly written by King Solomon about his wife, one of his wives. Now we come to the prophets, the people who brought messages from God, teachings, warnings or even visions of the future. Isaiah is mainly about God's judgment on people who don't follow his law, but it also predicts the birth of a new Jewish king. Remember that. Jeremiah warns everyone that unless they obey God, they are going to be made slaves. And then in Lamentations, the writers are talking about the fall of Jerusalem and how terrible it all is. But Ezekiel gives all the people in exile hope that one day they will return to Jerusalem. Daniel gets thrown to the lions when he refuses to worship a foreign king. He survives thanks to God's protection, and the second half of the book imagines all the weird punishments that evil kings will face for enslaving God's people. The 12 final prophets continue with encouraging people to follow God's law, and predictions about what will happen if they don't. For example, Jonah is told by God to warn the city of Nineveh that, unless they shape up, they'll be punished for their wickedness. Jonah doesn't want the job and tries to escape in a boat, but he's thrown overboard, swallowed by a fish, spewed up on a beach, finally goes to warn the people of Nineveh and then gets grumpy when God forgives them all.
And that's the Old Testament. Or is it because there's also the Apocrypha? Greek for hidden, a collection of seven books that weren't included in the Protestant Bible. But you'll find them all in the Old Testament of a Catholic Bible. And Bibles used by Eastern Orthodox churches can have over a dozen more books.
The New Testament begins with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, known as the Gospels, which means good news. Each Gospel tells a story of Jesus's life from a slightly different viewpoint, and there's a lot of overlap, especially between Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which are known as the Synoptic Gospels, a word which means that they all have pretty much the same idea about what happened. John has a different take on events and spends more time explaining what he thinks it all means.
The story is told by all the Gospels goes like this. A young Jewish virgin by the name of Mary has a miracle baby called Jesus, and is visited by wise men from the east and some local shepherds, who are all convinced that the baby is a new king of the Jews. But when Jesus grows up, he becomes a carpenter. Then, when he's about 30, he's baptized by his cousin John, a different John, and becomes a traveling preacher with a radical message of love and forgiveness. As well as giving straight down the line teaching like The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus also told a good story, and parables, as they're called, were stories with a point. Then there were the miracles. Jesus changed water into wine, calmed storms, raised the dead, and those are just the highlights. You might have heard of the disciples, which means pupils or followers. Jesus chose these 12 men to help spread his teaching, and they eventually became leaders of the first churches, apart from Judas. The gospel writers all described Jesus using the Hebrew word Messiah or Christ in Greek, which means anointed one, or a person who has had perfume poured all over his head. This was a ceremony performed for people like Saul and David when they were chosen to be kings hundreds of years before, but by the time Jesus was born, the word Messiah had come to mean a hero like King David, who would begin a new kingdom of God. Bits of the Old Testament had foretold the coming of this Messiah, and the writer of Matthew is careful to point out how he thinks Jesus fits the bill. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus isn't just the Messiah, he's God in human form. Jesus's death and resurrection, which means to come back to life, is the most important bit for Christians because they believe it shows God's power over evil and the promise of life after death. The Gospel of Luke ends with Jesus rising up to heaven, promising that one day he will return.
Acts or, The Acts of the Apostles, picks up the story and describes how Christianity began to grow thanks to people called the apostles, which means messengers. Men like Peter, who was one of Jesus's disciples, and Paul, who wasn't. Paul's job had been to wipe out Christianity, but after seeing a blinding light and hearing Jesus speaking to him from heaven, he started to spread Christianity instead. The rest of the New Testament is full of letters, many of them written by Paul to friends or to groups of Christians. They were full of advice and teaching, so they were kept and copied and passed around.
The very last book in the Bible is called Revelation or Revelations or the apocalypse. The author John, yet another John, describes his scary visions of a terrible future. Then Jesus returns to Earth as promised. Evil is destroyed once and for all, and the world becomes a Paradise again, which is how God always wanted it to be, right from the very start, all the way back in Genesis.
