I’ve spent a little bit of time this year with a bunch of Christians I didn’t know particularly well before now. If you’ve never been part of such a group, one thing that members often do to get to know each other better is share a bit of their life story. Specifically, how they came to be a Christian.
Something that struck me a few times was how common it is that people pick up a Bible, stone cold (for various reasons: whether in a hotel room, or an old one off the shelf, or prompted to do so by some momentous life event), and they start reading from the beginning.
Which makes sense. That’s where most books start. So too with the Bible.
Sort of.
I mean, that’s where it starts, but the stuff that I would want to point people to if they’re new to the whole reading-the-Bible thing would be the start of the New Testament – the gospels, the biographies of Jesus.
Because the ‘Christ’ bit of ‘Christianity’ is about Jesus Christ. He’s the one around whom the whole deal is centered.
Lots of people, however, when they start reading the Bible from the start, give up pretty quickly, as it seems to get irrelevant fast. If they’ve made it to Leviticus, they’re pretty committed, but they’re gone at the chapter after chapter of sacrifice offerings in ancient Israel. One can hardly blame them. I mean, if you’ve got no frame of reference, no Jesus who fulfils all this… then why is this stuff so significant?
So it got me thinking.
Why not print Bibles in a different order?
Rearrange the books inside.
Put the gospels up first. Get people reading about Jesus straight-up. That’s what we do with people if we start reading the Bible with them, so why not prompt others to do likewise?
We could do other things too, such as putting Luke and Acts together. Acts is the sequel, by the same author – why not have them together?
How about this:
- Mark
- Luke-Acts
- Matthew
- John
- Romans
- Pentateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy)
- Hebrews
- New Testament Letters
- Prophets
- Writings
- Revelation
Something like this could present Jesus to the reader first-up, from a few different perspectives. Romans has been regarded by lots of people as laying out the fundamentals of Christian belief, so put that next.
The core of Israelite belief is fundamentally important to understanding what goes on the New Testament, so we go back and read the Law (Torah/Pentateuch), and reflect on it specifically through the letter to the Hebrews.
What do you think?
There are a few downsides, of course.
Principally, the distinction between testaments, or covenants, may be made unclear. This is especially the case if the books from the OT and NT are interspersed.
We also stand to lose a certain historical heritage. Tradition has been that certain books stand in certain positions, often for good reasons. [1] Most of us, however, don’t really know what those reasons are.
But do we stand to gain more than we lose?
This, however, is complicated. English translations have a different ordering tradition to the original Hebrew Scriptures. The Hebrew Bible was divided into the Law (or Torah, Genesis-Deuteronomy), the Prophets (what we would call the history books, e.g. Joshua, Samuel, Kings, etc., plus the prophets, e.g. Isaiah, Ezekiel, Amos, etc.), and the Writings (the rest: Psalms, Proverbs, Daniel, Chronicles, etc.). Our ordering reflects a slightly different tradition, that of the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which had a different, more chronological, ordering of certain books.↩
