Holy Books: The Bible
Alistair McConville The Bible is a collection of books. In fact, the word Bible means a collection of books, and it's divided into two. There's the Old Testament, which is composed of 39 small books, and there's the New Testament, which has 27 small books.
Eddie Arthur The Old Testament was written in Hebrew with a few bits in Aramaic.
Alex Wood The Old Testament is the story of God creating the world, and Israel, who are his chosen people.
Tanya Walker Some of it is poetry, some of it is biography, some of it is straightforward narration of history.
Alistair McConville Books of law, for example. This is Leviticus, which tells the early Jewish people how to live. Poetic books like the Psalms, which would have been put to music. This is Proverbs, which is philosophical reflections, really. There are books of prophecy, like Jeremiah, that explain what God is saying about the future of the Israelites.
Alex Wood The Bible is all about God's rescue plan, and that plan really comes into play when Jesus comes into the story, and that's the beginning of the New Testament.
Alistair McConville The New Testament talks about Jesus as the Messiah, the Christian fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecies.
Alex Wood The point is that Jesus is God's Son, and he came to keep God's promise that we will be with God forever.
Eddie Arthur The New Testament was written in Greek because Greek was understood right across the world at that time.
Alistair McConville There's a collection of biographies of Jesus, those are the Gospels. There are letters from various important early Christians, and it has apocalyptic works that are predicting how the world's going to end. Most people don't think of God as having literally written the Bible with a pen and paper. Rather, they think that God inspired human writers to record those things that God wanted to say.
Eddie Arthur If you read the book of Revelation, John said, an angel told me to write this down.
Alistair McConville Sometimes it's clear that they are speaking for themselves about their own understanding of what God has said or done.
Eddie Arthur Luke says, I asked a lot of people. I did a lot of reading, and I've written this up.
Alistair McConville As people continue to write about Jesus, it became important to make a final decision about what was going to be in the Bible. Lots of bishops came together when the Roman Empire became officially Christian, to discuss which books that they already knew and respected should be in the official version of the Bible, and which shouldn't.
Tanya Walker So the Bible is actually made up of 66 different books, written by over 40 different people across a span of around 1500 years, across three different continents, three different languages, and loads of different genres. There's all sorts of different things going on, and when we come to read the Bible, we, we bear in mind what kind of text am I reading and how is it appropriate to interpret it?
Alistair McConville How to interpret individual passages varies. So in the Catholic Church, for example, only the church has the authority to explain to Christians what the Bible means. In the Protestant church, more characteristically, individuals have greater scope to interpret the Bible for themselves.
Tanya Walker Some of it is poetry, and we're meant to read it allegorically, metaphorically, it's hinting at different things, but it's not meant to be taken literally.
Alistair McConville Some Christians say that Genesis, for example, is a historical account of the beginning of the world. Other Christians say that Genesis tells us something true in a metaphorical way.
Tanya Walker Other bits we realise, okay, the person who was writing this section meant and intended for it to be read as straightforward history.
Alistair McConville The Gospels are a really important part of the Bible. They are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, four different books, each of which gives an account of the life of Jesus.
Tanya Walker This is exactly how it happened, the people are saying, these are our eyewitness accounts of what happened. But then, of course, some of the things that Jesus says are stories. He tells parables, and we're not to take them literally, but we're to understand that in that story there is a meaning that we're to take and to apply to our lives.
Alex Wood I think loads of us find reading the Bible really difficult, and I definitely was like that. I never read the Bible, and whenever I did, I found it really tricky to understand. It wasn't really until I joined a church and I met a friend and he explained how to read the Bible, where to start, which bits to read, and since then, I've found reading the Bible one of the most fulfilling things that I do.
Tanya Walker So you may have noticed that Christians write in their Bible, or that their Bibles are very worn through sometimes. This is because Christians believe that it's the meaning that's important and precious, and not the paper and ink itself.
Eddie Arthur And from that we have the notion that the Bible itself can be translated. The important thing is that it's available in the language of the people who are reading it.
Tanya Walker Now, it's been translated into over 2000 languages. That's ten times more than any other book.
Eddie Arthur This is a New Testament in a language called Guéré from the Ivory Coast. (Reads from the bible). There is no one way that people do translation. In Ivory Coast we worked in a mud hut, with solar panels on the roof, and a laptop plugged into that and discussed the text in Greek, seek to express it as clearly as possible in Guéré, and then go through a rigorous process of review checking, editing. It took longer to revise it than it did to do the initial translation.
Alex Wood On Sundays, we read the Bible together. Somebody will step up onto this stage here, they'll open the Bible and they'll find a particular passage, and then we'll all grab our Bibles where we're sat, and we'll have a look at it together. The most important thing, I guess, is for that preacher or that speaker to explain how the passage is relevant to us today, how is it going to make a difference to our lives?
