Foundations
An 8-part introduction to the Bible — its origins, its remarkable survival through history, why it can be trusted, how to read it well, and why its authority matters more than ever in a world that picks and chooses what it wants to believe.
The Bible is the most read, most translated, most argued-over book in human history. Billions of people have staked their lives on it. Empires have tried to destroy it. Scholars have spent lifetimes studying it. And yet, for many people sitting in church on a Sunday morning, it remains strangely unknown.
This course won't give you easy answers. It will give you something better: reasons to take the Bible seriously, tools to read it well, and an encounter with one of the most extraordinary collections of writing the world has ever seen. Our aim is not just that you'd know about the Bible — but that you'd want to open it, live inside it, and let it reshape how you see everything.
Eight parts. Real scholarship. Honest questions. Start anywhere — but start.
What Is the Bible?
One story, many voices
The Bible is not a single book dropped from the sky. It's a library of 66 books written across 1,500 years by around 40 authors — yet it tells one unified story: God creating a good world, humanity choosing a different way, and God working through history to restore everything, ultimately through Jesus. It is ancient. It is human. And Christians believe it is, at the same time, something far more.
Questions we're exploring
- What exactly is in the Bible, and how is it structured?
- Why does the Old Testament matter if we follow Jesus?
- How can one book contain so many different kinds of writing — law, poetry, prophecy, history, letters?
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Peterson — pastor, author of The Message, and one of the most beloved Christian writers of the twentieth century — wrote that Scripture is less like an instruction manual and more like a love letter. It requires relationship and time to understand, not just information transfer. His short book Eat This Book is the ideal companion to this part of the course.
Connection Exercise
Before you move on: flip through a Bible (physical or digital) and notice the different types of writing — history, poetry, prophecy, letters. Pick one book from the Old Testament and one from the New and read just the opening paragraph of each. What feels different? What do you notice?
Where Did the Bible Come From?
Origins, authors, and the ancient world
The Bible was written in real historical contexts — by real people in real places facing real crises. Understanding when, where, and why each book was written unlocks its meaning. The Old Testament took shape over a thousand years; the New Testament was largely completed within one generation of Jesus' death and resurrection. These are not anonymous myths — they are documents with authors, audiences, and traceable origins.
Questions we're exploring
- Who actually wrote the Bible, and when?
- What languages was it originally written in — and does that matter?
- What was happening in the world when each section was written?
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Blomberg (Denver Seminary) is one of the most respected evangelical scholars on the historical context of the New Testament. His free course on BiblicalTraining.org covers the authorship and background of every NT book in detail that is genuinely accessible — designed for pastors and curious laypeople, not just academics.
Connection Exercise
Read Psalm 137 (written during the Babylonian exile — people who had lost everything) and then Psalm 23 (written from a place of calm trust). Notice how different they feel. Context shapes everything. What circumstances in your own life have shaped how you've read or heard Scripture?
The Bible Through the Ages
Dead Sea Scrolls, manuscripts, and survival against the odds
How has the Bible survived? For centuries it was copied by hand. Empires tried to eradicate it. It was written in three languages across three continents over fifteen centuries. And yet the text we read today bears extraordinary similarity to the oldest surviving manuscripts. The story of how the Bible was preserved is one of history's most remarkable — and it begins with a shepherd boy, a cave, and jars full of ancient parchment.
Questions we're exploring
- What are the Dead Sea Scrolls and why do they matter?
- How do we know the Bible hasn't been changed over centuries of copying?
- What is textual criticism, and does it undermine or actually strengthen confidence in Scripture?
- How were ancient manuscripts copied, checked, and preserved?
In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd threw a stone into a cave near Qumran, on the shore of the Dead Sea, and heard something shatter. What he had found — thousands of fragments of ancient scrolls — turned out to be the oldest known manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, dating from the third century BC to the first century AD. Among the most significant: a complete scroll of Isaiah, over 2,000 years old.
Before this discovery, the oldest Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament dated to around 900 AD. The Dead Sea Scrolls pushed that back by a thousand years. The result? The Isaiah scroll from Qumran and the medieval manuscript differed by almost nothing of theological significance. The text had been copied with extraordinary care across ten centuries.
The New Testament picture is, if anything, even more striking. There are over 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament — some dating to within decades of the original documents. No other ancient text comes close: Caesar's Gallic Wars survives in ten manuscripts, the earliest over a thousand years after Caesar. Homer's Iliad has around 650. The New Testament has thousands, allowing scholars to compare and verify the text with a level of confidence unprecedented in ancient literature.
"In terms of manuscript tradition, the New Testament is the best-attested document from the ancient world by a very wide margin." — F.F. Bruce, Professor of Biblical Criticism, University of Manchester
This does not by itself prove divine inspiration. But it does establish something important: what we read today is genuinely close to what was originally written. The text has not been corrupted, invented, or systematically changed. It has been copied, guarded, and handed down — often at great cost to those doing the handing.
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F.F. Bruce was Professor of Biblical Criticism at the University of Manchester and is widely considered the father of modern evangelical biblical scholarship. His book The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? — written in 1943 and still in print — remains the most accessible single introduction to the manuscript evidence for the New Testament.
Connection Exercise
Hold a Bible. Consider that what you're holding is the result of thousands of years of copying, preserving, translating, and handing on — across cultures and languages, often under persecution. People died rather than surrender these texts to those who wanted to destroy them. Does that change how you hold it? How you read it?
Can We Trust the Bible?
Archaeology, history, and the question of reliability
Archaeology has a habit of confirming what critics once called impossible. Cities dismissed as legendary have been excavated. Names dismissed as invented have appeared on ancient inscriptions. The pool of Siloam, mentioned in John 9, was discovered in 2004. The existence of Pontius Pilate — once doubted — was confirmed by a stone found in Caesarea in 1961. The Bible makes historical claims. Those claims can be tested. And the pattern of those tests is striking.
Questions we're exploring
- What does archaeology tell us about the Bible's historical claims?
- How do the Gospels hold up under historical scrutiny?
- Do historical reliability and faith actually need each other?
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Wright's landmark work The Resurrection of the Son of God — over 800 pages of historical argument — is considered one of the most rigorous defences of the Easter accounts ever written, engaging sceptics entirely on their own terms. He argues not from faith, but from the same historical methods applied to any other ancient claim. Simply Jesus is the accessible entry point.
Connection Exercise
Read Luke 3:1-2 — Luke dates the beginning of John the Baptist's ministry by naming six different rulers simultaneously. This is the kind of detail a forger would avoid (too easy to check and be caught out). Then read Luke 1:1-4 to see what Luke himself says about his method. What does it tell you that he writes this way?
How Did We Get Our Bible?
Canon, councils, and what was left out — and why
The canon — the agreed list of books in the Bible — was not decided at one dramatic meeting by one powerful person. It emerged through a long, communal process of the church recognising which texts carried genuine divine authority. The criteria were: was it apostolic (connected to an eyewitness)? Was it consistent with what had been received before? Was it recognised across different Christian communities? Books were not invented or imposed — they were discerned.
Questions we're exploring
- Who decided what went in — and what got left out?
- What about the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gnostic texts?
- Why do Catholic and Protestant Bibles have a different number of books?
- Does the fact that humans were involved in forming the canon undermine its authority?
Books like the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Judas — sometimes called "lost gospels" — were not suppressed by a powerful church wanting to control the story. They were written significantly later than the canonical Gospels (often second century or beyond), were not connected to apostolic eyewitness communities, and reflected theological agendas quite different from the earliest stream of Christian teaching. The early church did not reject them because they were threatening. It rejected them because they simply did not qualify.
The recognition of the New Testament canon was largely settled by common usage across the church long before any council formalised it. Athanasius's Easter letter of 367 AD lists exactly the 27 books we have today — not as a new decision, but as a recognition of what the church had already received.
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Kruger (Reformed Theological Seminary) is the leading evangelical scholar on New Testament canon formation. His book Canon Revisited is the definitive academic treatment. His blog Canon Fodder makes the same material accessible to anyone with a genuine question. He argues persuasively that the canon is not a late church imposition — it is the natural outcome of the church receiving what the apostles left.
Connection Exercise
Read 2 Peter 3:15-16 — Peter, writing in the first century, already treats Paul's letters as "Scripture" alongside the older writings. The canon was being recognised from the beginning, not invented later. Does it concern you or reassure you that the process was slow and communal rather than instant and top-down? Why?
Scripture vs. Personal Opinion
What happens when culture picks and chooses
We live in a culture that treats personal opinion as the highest authority. The question is no longer "what does God say?" but "what feels true to me?" When this posture meets the Bible, the result is a kind of spiritual supermarket — we take what resonates, leave what challenges us, and quietly assume that our own instincts are a reliable guide to truth. This part asks a harder question: what if the Bible is designed precisely to confront us with things we wouldn't choose on our own?
Questions we're exploring
- Is it intellectually honest to say "I believe the Bible" while ignoring parts that challenge me?
- How do we distinguish between legitimate interpretation in new contexts and simply making the Bible say what we want?
- Can the same Bible be used to support opposite positions — and what does that tell us?
- What does it look like to let Scripture speak, rather than speak for it?
There is a difference between interpretation and preference. Every reader brings assumptions to the text — that is unavoidable, and good biblical scholarship has always acknowledged it. But acknowledging our assumptions is the beginning of reading honestly, not a licence to replace the text with our own views.
The cultural tendency today is to treat the Bible as a resource — something we draw from when useful, set aside when inconvenient, and mine for quotes that confirm what we already think. This is not new: Thomas Jefferson literally cut up his Bible with a razor blade and kept only the parts he found morally acceptable. The result is called the "Jefferson Bible" and it ends with Jesus dead in a tomb — because Jefferson removed the resurrection.
The irony is that a Bible edited to confirm our existing instincts is no longer capable of doing what a Bible is for. The prophets didn't tell people what they wanted to hear. Jesus didn't. The letters of Paul frequently make readers uncomfortable. The psalms include things we would never choose to pray. It is precisely this quality — the Bible's willingness to challenge, disturb, and discomfort — that is evidence of its integrity, not a problem to be smoothed over.
NT Wright's model is helpful here: he describes the Bible as a five-act play — creation, fall, Israel, Jesus, church — and suggests that Christians are called to act faithfully within the final act, improvising from what has come before in a way that is consistent with the whole story, not inventing a new play entirely. The authority runs through the story. Our job is to inhabit it, not rewrite it.
"The Bible is not a wax nose to be shaped by every spirit of the age. It has a spine." — Eugene Peterson
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Wright's book Scripture and the Authority of God is the essential read for this topic. He argues that both conservative and liberal readers are often guilty of domesticating Scripture — the conservative by treating it as a rule book, the liberal by treating it as a record of evolving human sentiment. Both approaches rob the Bible of its power. The real question is not "what does this text mean to me?" but "what is God saying through this text to his people?"
Connection Exercise
Identify one passage in the Bible that you find genuinely difficult — one that challenges something you instinctively believe or want. Sit with it. Don't resolve it yet. Ask: what would it mean to take this seriously rather than explain it away? What would change if I did?
Why the Bible Has Authority
Inspiration, the Spirit's witness, and why it matters now
The Bible's authority is not given to it by the church, by scholarship, or by a vote. Christians believe it carries authority because it is, in some real and irreducible sense, the Word of God — written by human beings in human language in particular historical moments, and yet carrying something that transcends all of that. The question of why we believe this — and what it demands of us — is one of the most important a Christian can ask.
Questions we're exploring
- What does "inspired by God" actually mean — did God dictate it word for word?
- Why should I believe it's God's word rather than just human words about God?
- What does it actually mean for the Bible to have authority over my life?
- How do we hold together the Bible's humanity and its divinity?
The doctrine of inspiration does not claim that God bypassed the human authors and wrote through them as a typist. Paul's letters sound like Paul. Luke writes with a historian's precision. The Psalms carry the marks of particular poets in particular moments of grief, joy, or bewilderment. Inspiration, in the classic Christian understanding, means that God worked through the full humanity of these writers — their personalities, their contexts, their literary forms — to communicate what he wanted to say.
The result is a text that is irreducibly human and, at the same time, claims to be something more. Jesus treated the Old Testament as the unbreakable word of God (John 10:35). Paul writes that "all Scripture is breathed out by God" (2 Timothy 3:16). Peter tells his readers that the prophets "spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" (2 Peter 1:21). The New Testament's own testimony about Scripture is consistent: these texts are not merely human documents.
But the final argument for the Bible's authority is not academic — it is experiential and communal. Across every culture and century — in slave communities in America, in underground churches in China, in persecuted communities in the Roman empire — people have encountered the living God through these texts. Not despite the Bible's humanity, but through it. The Bible has an uncanny ability to speak into the exact situation of the reader with a precision that no merely human document can explain.
And this is why the stakes of this course are real. A culture that dismisses the Bible's authority is not simply making an intellectual choice — it is losing access to the clearest account humanity has of who God is, what human beings are for, and how the world's deepest story ends. Recovering that authority is not about control or tradition. It is about truth.
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Willard was a philosopher at the University of Southern California and one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the twentieth century. He was insistent that belief in Scripture's authority was not anti-intellectual — it was the most rational response to the evidence of what Scripture has done and continues to do in human lives. His book The Divine Conspiracy is a masterclass in letting Jesus' teaching actually reshape how you see reality.
Connection Exercise
Read Hebrews 4:12 — "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword." The claim is not that the Bible is old and venerable. It is that it is alive. This week, read one passage slowly — not to extract information from it, but to let it speak. Ask: what is this text doing to me? What is it exposing? What is it offering?
How to Read the Bible for Life Change
From information to formation
The goal of reading Scripture is not to become more biblically knowledgeable. It is to become more like Jesus. This is the difference between information and formation. Ancient practices — slow reading, memorisation, meditation, praying the text — have shaped Christians for two thousand years precisely because they are not about acquiring data. They are about encounter. The question is not just "what does this text say?" but "what is happening to me as I read it?"
Questions we're exploring
- What's the difference between studying the Bible and being transformed by it?
- How do I build a reading habit that actually lasts — and actually changes me?
- What does it look like to read the Bible in community rather than alone?
- What are the ancient practices — lectio divina, memorisation, meditation — and are they for ordinary people?
Dallas Willard used to observe that most churches produce people who are very good at attending talks about the Bible — but not at actually knowing it. The difference, he said, is study: the slow, repeated, prayerful engagement with specific texts over time. Not consuming them, but dwelling in them.
The practice called lectio divina — divine reading — goes back to the early church. It has four movements: reading (what does the text say?), meditation (what strikes me in particular?), prayer (what do I want to say to God in response?), and contemplation (what does God want to say to me?). It is not complicated. It requires only slowness — which is, for most of us, the hardest thing.
Eugene Peterson spent years translating the Bible into The Message — not to replace other translations, but to recover what he called the "tone" of the original: the energy, surprise, and urgency of texts that were never meant to be read in a pious mumble. He wanted his congregation to be startled by Scripture again. That startlement, he believed, was the beginning of transformation.
"Long before the Bible is a 'source of doctrine' or a 'guide for living,' it is a voice — a voice to be listened to, not managed." — Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book
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Peterson was a pastor, poet, and scholar who spent 29 years in the same congregation and 10 years translating the Bible into The Message. He was suspicious of efficiency and speed applied to Scripture. His conviction was that the Bible is a text designed to be lived inside over a lifetime — re-read, prayed, memorised, and allowed to shape not just what we think, but how we see. His book Eat This Book is short, beautiful, and the most human thing ever written about why reading the Bible matters.
Connection Exercise
Choose one short passage — try Philippians 4:4-7 or John 15:1-5. Read it four times slowly: first for understanding (what does this say?), second for what strikes you (what word or phrase lands?), third for prayer (what do you want to say to God in response?), fourth in silence (sit with it). This is lectio divina. What was different about reading this way versus your normal approach?
Where to Go From Here
You've completed the eight parts. What now? The best thing you can do is open the Bible and start. Not to study it as an object, but to inhabit it as a place — a world with its own logic, language, and way of seeing.
Read the Bible whole
- BibleProject Reading Plans — structured plans with daily animated overviews
- The Bible Recap — one-year plan with daily podcast (Tara-Leigh Cobbs)
- The Message by Eugene Peterson — ideal for reading large chunks at pace
Free courses and deep dives
- BiblicalTraining.org — thousands of hours of free seminary-level courses
- The Gospel Coalition Courses — free courses with leading scholars
- Yale Bible Study — free materials from Yale Divinity School professors
Books to read next
- Simply Christian — NT Wright
- Eat This Book — Eugene Peterson
- The Drama of Scripture — Bartholomew & Goheen
- Scripture and the Authority of God — NT Wright
- The Divine Conspiracy — Dallas Willard
"Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light to my path."
Psalm 119:105