“Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so!” So goes the familiar children’s Sunday School song. To tell the truth though, I do not remember that I ever read the bible as a child or even had a bible until I was well into High School. As a Catholic it was not until the reforms of the Second Vatican Council were well underway that I was even encouraged to read the bible.

For many Christians, the only contact they have with the bible is when it is read in their church service or see it quoted at a sporting evening (John 3:16 for example). So we have only vague ideas of what the bible is and what it is about.

It is like the first time I got into a standard shift car. I had some vague idea of how the mechanics of coordinating the gears and the clutch worked, but since no one actually showed me, I had no actual hands on experience. On top of this I was somewhat fearful of trying to drive a standard shift car thinking that I might do serious damage to the car and myself if I did something wrong. One Sunday afternoon, when no one was around, I decided that the old Fiat, whose odometer had stopped working at 100K miles, was my best chance to learn how to drive a standard shift car. I went out, got in and gave it a try. I sputtered around a parking lot, starting and stopping each time I killed the motor because I could not coordinate the clutch and the gas pedal. To make a long story short, it took me a few more tries before I got comfortable enough to take the car out on the road. After a few more years I even owned a standard shift car.

My analogy is that we may indeed bring fear to our reading of the bible and we may sputter around at first, but given patience and study we can eventually get used to reading the scripture. So what do we need to know to begin? And if we already know something, what additional things do we need to know about the bible that will help us read it more critically and with better understanding?

First it might be helpful to know that the word “bible” simply meant in Greek, book. We use the word in a more formal way when originally, biblios, meant book or books. So the “bible” is actually a collection of books that we know through good biblical scholarship, were written over a very long period of time.

Using the word “bible” for the scripture though is a Christian thing. Jews would call their scripture the Torah or Tanak. Tanak is an acronym for the three sections of Jewish scripture- T for Torah or the Books of Moses (the first five books); N is for N’viim or the books of the Prophets; and finally the K is for K’tuvim or the writings which are all the rest of the books (check out this resource: http://www.hebrewresources.com/tanak1.htm ). I know this might be more information that what we might think we need to know, but since Christians call the first books of their bible the Old Testament, it is important to know that this our designation. To be respectful of our Jewish brothers and sisters we should actually refer to them as the Hebrew scriptures since that is the language that most of the books were written in. In future articles more will be said about the language of the scriptures and the various translations the scriptures have gone through. For the most part these scriptures were written over a period of almost 900 years, or roughly from the time of the early Monarchy and King David to just before the birth of Christ. What they recount is the story of God from the beginnings of Creation to the struggle for independence under the Greeks. In future articles more will be said about historical context of these scriptures, their theology and how we might interpret them.

The remaining “books”, Christians call the New Testament or perhaps more properly the Greek Scriptures since that is the language they were written in.

These books consist of the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John); the Acts of the Apostles; the letters of Paul (Romans, 1