-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.
-The Old Testament was written in Hebrew,
with a few bits in Aramaic.
-The Old Testament is the story of God
creating the world and Israel, who are his chosen people.
-Some of it is poetry.
Some of it is biography.
Some of it is straightforward narration of history.
-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.
-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.
-The New Testament talks about Jesus as the Messiah,
the Christian fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecies.
-The point is that Jesus is God's son,
and he came to keep God's promise that we
will be with God forever.
-The New Testament was written in Greek,
because Greek was understood right across the world
at that time.
-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.
-If you read the Book of Revelation,
John said, an angel told me to write this down.
-Sometimes it's clear that they are speaking for themselves
about their own understanding of what God has said or done.
-Luke says, I asked a lot of people, I did a lot of reading,
and I've written this up.
-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.
-So the Bible is actually made up of 66 different books,
written by over 40 different people,
across a span of around 1,500 years,
across 3 different continents, 3 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 bear in mind,
what kind of text am I reading, and how is it
appropriate to interpret it?
-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.
-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.
-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.
-Other bits, we realise, OK, the person who is writing this
section meant and intended for it to be read
as straightforward history.
-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.
-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 are to take and to apply
to our lives.
-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.
-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.
-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.
-Now it's been translated into over 2,000 languages.
That's 10 times more than any other book.
-This is the New Testament in a language called
Kwa from the Ivory Coast.
[READING KWA]
-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 Kwa,
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.
-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 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?