How to Read the Bible

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Session 1

  • What is the Bible?

  • The Story of the Bible

Get to know each other

  1. When did you first read the Bible?

  2. What has your story with the Bible been since then?

  3. What's your favourite book in the Bible?

  4. What's your biggest question about the Bible?

Video 1

This is episode 1 of an ongoing series that explores the origins, content, and purpose of the Bible. Here you'll be introduced to a condensed history of how the Bible came into existence, and the different forms of the Bible in the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christian traditions.

Watch

Further questions

  1. Why did God choose to reveal himself through the history, struggles and meditations of a particular people situated in a particular corner of the earth?

  2. How do the diverse genres of poetry, letters, law texts and wisdom writings complement the narrative texts and thus contribute to our overall understanding of the overarching story? Why the diversity of genres?

  3. What is the value of God revealing himself through texts spread out over a thousand years and written by different authors?

  4. What are the advantages or pitfalls to different Christian traditions including different lists of writings into the Bible?

  5. Does this story continue on in Christian believers today? If so, how? If not, what is fundamentally different between the story of the Bible and the story of the Church as lived out today?

 
 

Video 2

Question

  • In smaller groups, try and retell the story shown in the Bible, from beginning to end.

This next video summarises the overall story of the Bible as a series of crossroad decisions. All humanity, followed by the Israelites, redefine good and evil and end up in Babylon. They are followed by Jesus, who takes a different path that opens up the way to a new creation.

Watch

Discuss

  1. What strikes you as you hear the Story as a whole?

  2. Can you try and retell the story again? How was it different this time?

Further questions

  1. From the Tower of Babel story through the rest of the Old Testament, what specific consequences manifested themselves from choices that individuals and whole groups of people made in defining good and evil on their own terms rather than on God’s?

  2. Why is it so tempting to eat the “forbidden fruit” and define good and evil on our own terms?

  3. Why do you suppose it took so many generations for Jesus, the promised messiah, to arrive?

  4. How does God/Jesus’ definition of good, as serving others and practicing self-sacrificial love, ultimately triumph over the evil we often choose for ourselves? Where else can we see evidence of this triumph at work in the world?

  5. In the end, when all wrongs are made right, all evil is eradicated, heaven and earth unite, and humanity rules together with God, will it be because humanity finally chooses God’s definition, or because God overwhelms us with so much goodness that we have little choice in the matter? What are some other possible scenarios?