Exploring My Strange Bible

This last episode is about the manuscript history of the New Testament, as well as a short history of English translations. In the second half of this lecture, we talk about the process and the dynamics at work in collecting the books of the bible into the “canon," a technical term referring to the authoritative collection of the biblical books.

In this episode we dive into the composition and writing of the book of the New Testament. Specifically, we'll look at how the books themselves give us clues about when and how they were written. As we learn more about where the Bible came from, we gain a deeper sense of what the Bible is and what we're supposed to do with it.

In this series we explore how the Bible was written and the long process of its composition and manuscript history. The bible is a book with a very traceable history, it was not written in secret. The authors of these texts were of course humans, but they also claimed that through these human words God speaks to his people. It's important to keep the divine and human nature of the Bible in balance. Many people think that believing the Bible is God's word necessitates believing it came into existence with little or no human agency. This idea is foreign to the biblical authors and we should cherish the beautiful and complex ways the Bible was composed and collected over the centuries.

In this episode, we focus on the purpose of the laws in the story line of the Torah and the whole Bible. The story about the covenant that God made with the people of Israel at Mount Sinai makes up 2/3 of the entire Torah. There are 613 laws that God gives to Israel at Mount Sinai. In this lecture, we’ll talk about where the laws come in the story, and how the stories offer important commentary on the laws. In short, the Torah is showing how the Israelites were unable to truly love and obey God and to follow the laws. This unresolved tension creates a future hope that Moses himself announces. If God is ever going to have loving and faithful covenant partners, he will have to do some future work of transforming their hearts and minds. This is the future hope of the Torah that Jesus believed he was bringing to fulfillment.

This part camps out in the second book of the bible, Exodus. We explore the story of Moses, Pharaoh, and the liberation of the Israelites that all culminates in the night of Passover. This was one of the most important foundation stories for the Israelite people in ancient times, and its crucially important for understanding Jesus. He timed his arrival into Jerusalem for the Passover feast and at the Last Supper he used the Passover symbols to explain the meaning of his coming death. From there we move on to learning about the covenants between God and Israel and the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. This is, again, a core idea that Jesus picked up and developed in his own teaching .

After many years of pastoral ministry I found that some of the main misunderstandings people have about Jesus come from misunderstanding the larger biblical story that he brought to fulfillment. When we try to understand who Jesus was without reference to the Old Testament, it's kind of like watching the Star Wars movies, but skipping the first episode. You can follow what's going on, but you won't really understand the deeper elements of the story. This set of lectures was my effort to condense the first five foundational books of Jesus’s bible, because they introduce the Plot conflict and storyline that Jesus believed he was bringing to fulfillment.

Many people believe that science and religious faith are bitter enemies with conflicting views of the universe. One the one hand there is the scientific account of the origins of life and then there is the story of universal origins told by the bible. But is this tension real, or is it based on a deep misunderstanding of what the Bible is and how it communicates? This is a lecture I gave at a Science and Faith conference at Blackhawk Church in Madison, WI in the year 2011. I ask what it means to read the first two pages of the Bible as ancient Hebrew texts written thousands of years ago. When we begin with that simple fact, Genesis chapters 1-2 say many surprising things we never would have imagined, and they also leave unaddressed most of our modern questions. Consider this a crash course in reading the Bible as an ancient cross-cultural experience.

In the final episode we see Jonah's response when God forgives his enemies. He's hot with anger and chews God out for being to gracious. This part of the story challenges us to reconsider Jesus' teaching to love and forgive our enemies, those people in our lives who are the most difficult.

Jonah goes very much against his own desires to the ancient city of Nineveh. He utters a very strange five word sermon and the people of Nineveh have a very interesting response. Also, we discuss the meaning of the biblical word “repentance” and what it does and doesn’t mean.

In this episode we ponder the very strange and beautifully intricate poem that Jonah utters in the belly of the fish. This is a powerful and heavily ironic moment in the story. This poem represents a moment when one of God’s people is in crisis. Jonah discovers that his crisis is actually God’s work to bring him to the end of himself. Jonah’s experience in this story forces us to think about similar moments of crisis in our own lives.