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    How Can Anyone Read the Bible?
    How Can Anyone Read the Bible?
    How Can Anyone Read the Bible?
    Ebook52 pages39 minutes

    How Can Anyone Read the Bible?

    By L. William Countryman

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    About this ebook

    Offers basic information to make the Bible less formidable to beginning readers.

    In How Can Anyone Read the Bible? preeminent biblical scholar Bill Countryman provides a basic introduction for those with little knowledge about the Bible that aims to provide an easy point of entry into engagement with Scripture.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChurch Publishing
    Release dateAug 1, 2017
    ISBN9780898691252
    How Can Anyone Read the Bible?
    Author

    L. William Countryman

    L. William Countryman is a retired professor of New Testament from Church Divinity School of the Pacific. He has authored numerous books for scholars and laity, including How Can Anyone Read the Bible?: A Little Book of Guidance,Calling on the Spirit in Unsettling Times, and Living on the Border of the Holy: Renewing the Priesthood of All. He lives in Berkeley, California.

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      Book preview

      How Can Anyone Read the Bible? - L. William Countryman

      How can anyone read the Bible?

      This question can be heard in two different ways. It might sound like a cry of exasperation: I tried it and it’s unreadable! Or it could be heard as a question about whether it’s really worthwhile for an ordinary reader to give it a try: I’m not an expert. How do I hope to make sense of it?

      I understand why some readers give up on the Bible. Parts of it are very readable—in fact, quite gripping. Other parts may seem confusing or boring. Part of the challenge for new readers, then, is figuring out where to begin and how to navigate this vast ocean of words. My goal, in this little book, is to supply some basic guidance to help you along as you start making your way through this great trove of riches—riches that readers have been rediscovering again and again for centuries now.

      You may, of course, know some parts of the Bible already. Perhaps you’ve been hearing passages from it in church for years but without knowing how they fit together in the book itself. Or perhaps you’re familiar with some of the most famous texts, such as the Twenty-Third Psalm or the texts that Handel used in his oratorio Messiah or Brahms in his German Requiem. Or then again, you may never have had any direct encounter with it at all and are drawn mainly by curiosity.

      Either way, the Bible can be confusing because it is not tied together by a single, connected narrative or topic, like most modern books. It’s a collection of many different kinds of materials written down over a period of more than a thousand years. Even the youngest parts of it are almost two thousand years old, and the oldest contain stories that go back more than three thousand years.

      Still, it does have its own kind of coherence and continuity. Its backbone is a story line unfolding over a very long stretch of time. There are themes that keep reappearing, sometimes in unexpected ways. There are persistent tensions that keep cropping up, just as they do in all of human experience. And what ultimately holds it all together is a sense that every part of it is embedded in God’s age-long effort to make Godself known to the minds and hearts of human beings.

      My assumption, as I write, is that all sorts of people may pick this book up—some who are curious, some who may be hostile but feel a need to understand what they find objectionable, some who are Christian and want to read the Bible with more understanding, some who are people of other faiths or none, wanting to know more about what lies at the root of Christianity. As to myself, I am a scholar of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures and a Christian for whom the Bible has been a source of new and deeper understanding of my life, the world, and God over many years. And you, the reader, are welcome, whoever you are. I hope you will find something here to help you as you begin or further an acquaintance with the Bible.

      So, then, can anyone read the Bible?

      Yes. For that matter, you can come to know it quite well just

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