How to Read the Bible

Sixty-six books, many writers, many centuries and many kinds of writing, bound together as one unfolding story.

Every book was first spoken or written to someone else, in another land and another age. Scripture also says it was written for those who came later. Both are true, and holding both is where careful reading starts.

Writers leave out what their audience already knows, and readers fill the gaps from their own world without noticing. An experiment with one famous parable shows it happening.

A verse means what it means in its place. Learn to widen the circle: the sentence, the passage, the book, the whole story.

Story, poetry, proverb, prophecy, law, letter, vision. Each kind of writing sets its own rules for the reader, and the Bible's kinds are ancient ones.

Few people could read, books were rare, and God's word reached almost everyone through the ear, in company. Meet the world Brent Sandy calls lost to modern readers.

God speaks, messengers proclaim, communities remember and retell, and then it is written to be read aloud again. Follow the word from voice to page.

A listener cannot look back up the page. Learn the repetition, refrains, brackets and build-ups that carried meaning for people who heard.

Listen to a letter the way its first church did: whole, aloud, in one sitting. Then see what chapter and verse numbers hide.

Try interpreting by ear on real passages, and weigh the caution Sandy's critics raise: hearing adds to careful reading and never replaces the written words.

What a culture counts as proper, how it divides peoples, and how its language cuts up the world: three visible differences that still trip Western readers.

The single self beside the shared self, guilt within beside shame before others, the clock beside the right moment. The Bible speaks to both sides of each.

The deepest assumptions are the hardest to see: that rules stand apart from relationships, that our list of virtues is the Bible's, and that the Bible is chiefly about me.

“In their culture…” is a claim, and claims need evidence. Learn four tests, so that background lights up the text and never replaces it.

Honour was a person's worth in the eyes of their group, and it could be won, challenged and lost in public. See it at work in the Gospels, and see whose opinion Jesus says counts.

Crucifixion was designed as public disgrace. Follow how the New Testament says God overturned that verdict.

The household gave a person their name, their living and their protection. That is the weight behind Jesus calling his followers a family.

Gifts bound people together in a web of favour, loyalty and thanks. The New Testament borrows that language for grace and faith, and breaks it.

Purity was a map of what may come near a holy God, and it is neither a list of sins nor health advice. Read the Gospel scenes of touch and table against that map.

A host's duty, what a shared table declares, how a father was expected to behave. Read Luke's scenes with the customs their hearers assumed.

Great kings and treaties, temples and images, stories of gods and creation. See where Israel used the forms of its world, and where it said what its neighbours did not.

Four centuries of empires, the groups in the Gospels, and Rome's claims about Caesar. Hear “gospel”, “Lord” and “peace” with their first edge.

A letter was dictated among co-workers, carried by a trusted friend, and read aloud to a gathered church about a real situation. Learn to rebuild that situation with care.