Where do I start reading the Bible?

What Christians believe about this book

Before talking about method, we should say what we claim: Christians hold the Bible to be the Word of God — inspired by him, trustworthy and authoritative for faith and for life (2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:20-21). It is not merely a collection of interesting ancient texts.

You do not have to share that conviction in order to read it. Many people begin by reading it simply as a document, and that is an honest way to start. But you have the right to know from the outset what we ourselves think of it.

The page-one trap

Many people decide to read the Bible by starting at the beginning. They get through Genesis with interest, hold on through Exodus, and then meet Leviticus with its regulations about sacrifices. That is where they stop.

This is not a failure of perseverance. It is a mistake of method. The Bible is not a book: it is a library of sixty-six writings, composed over more than a thousand years, in several genres — narrative, poetry, law, letter, prophecy. You do not read it like a novel.

Start with Jesus

If you want to understand what this is all about, start with a gospel.

• Mark — the shortest and the fastest. An hour and a half of reading. It begins without a genealogy and goes straight to the point.
• Luke — the most detailed, written by an investigator who says he checked everything with the witnesses (Luke 1:1-4). Attentive to the poor, to women, to foreigners.
• John — more meditative. Save it for a second pass.

Read one gospel all the way through before opening anything else. That is the most useful advice on this page.

Then

A sequence that works well:

• Acts — what happened next, and how that handful of people spread.
• Psalms — human prayer in every state, anger and despair included. One psalm a day.
• Genesis 1 to 12 — the great questions of origin and the beginning of Abraham’s story.
• A short letter — Philippians, or 1 John.

How to read

• A little, but regularly. Twenty minutes three times a week beats an abandoned marathon.
• A readable translation. In English, the NIV, the New Living Translation or the Good News Bible read easily. Simplified editions are worth having if English is not your first language.
• Three questions for each passage: What does this text say about God? What does it say about human beings? Is there something to do today?
• Write down what blocks you. You do not have to understand everything the first time. Nobody does.

About the difficult passages

There are some. Violence in the Old Testament, laws that baffle, texts that have been used to justify the unjustifiable. Setting them aside at the beginning is not dishonesty: it is method. You understand a library from its centre, not from its margins.

And when you come back to them, do it with someone.

Do not read alone

The best accelerator is still reading with others, once a week, in a small group where you can ask silly questions. All the communities in the network do this, in one form or another.