The Bible. It's one of the most influential books in human history.

It explores the big questions of why we exist.

It's inspired many people to do amazing things and.

Confused many others.

And you've probably got one sitting around somewhere.

So what is the Bible, actually?

Well, the Bible is a small library of books that all emerged out of the history of
the people of ancient Israel. And in one sense, they were just like any other
ancient civilization. But among them were a long line of individuals called
prophets. And they viewed Israel's story as anything but ordinary. They saw it as a
central part of what God was doing for all humanity. And these prophets were
literary geniuses. Really? Yeah. They expertly crafted the Hebrew language to write
epic narratives, very sophisticated poetry. They were masters of metaphor and
storytelling, and they leveraged all of this to explore life's most complicated
questions about death and life and the human struggle.

So there's a lot of different authors writing this book.

Yeah. And these texts were produced over a thousand year period, starting with
Israel's origins in Egypt, then leading up to their kingdom with their first
temple. But eventually they were conquered by the Babylonians, who took them away
into exile. Then, at a crucial moment in their history, many Israelites returned to
their land. They built a second temple. They reformed their identity. And this is
when the Jewish scriptures began to be formed into the shape that we have them
today.

Okay, the Jewish Bible, what's in it? Well, in.

Hebrew it's called by an acronym to knock. The T stands for Torah, sometimes called
the law. That's Israel's five book Foundation story. The N stands for M, the Hebrew
word for prophets. And this section consists of the historical books that tell
Israel's story from the prophets point of view. Then you get the poetic books of
the prophets themselves. The K stands for captivity, the Hebrew word for writings.
This is a diverse collection of poetic books, wisdom books, and more narrative. And
the Jewish people believe that through all of these literary works, God speaks to
his people.

Now, there are other Jewish writings being produced during this Second Temple
period as well.
Yeah, a really diverse group of texts. And these two were highly valued in Jewish
communities. And there was debate from ancient times about whether or not some of
these should be considered part of their scriptures.

So this is a lot of different writings over a long period of time. Why did they put
them all together like this?

Well, all together, these texts tell an epic story about how God is working through
these people to bring order and beauty out of the chaos of our world. And it all
builds up to a hope for a new leader who would come and renew all creation. And
then that's not concludes, and this leader never comes.

So it's an expertly crafted work, but it's missing an ending.

That's exactly right. Now, a few centuries later, a Jewish prophet comes onto the
scene named Jesus of Nazareth. He claimed he was carrying the Tanakh story forward.

Yeah, so Jesus did a bunch of cool stuff, was killed, but his followers claimed he
was alive from the dead.

Yeah, they said that Jesus was that long awaited leader who would restore the
world. And so his earliest followers called apostles. They compose new literary
works about the story of Jesus. They called these good news or the gospel. They
formed an account called acts about the spread of the Jesus movement outside of
Israel. And then they circulated letters to different Jesus communities all around
the ancient world.

And they saw these writings as part of the Scripture. Yeah.

The apostles wrote all of this as the fulfillment of that epic story found in the
Tanakh. And they were continuing the literary genius of the Jewish tradition. They
also believed that God was speaking to his people through these texts alongside the
scriptures of Israel.

So that's the Old and New Testament. But what did the early Christians think of the
other Second Temple literature?

Well, different groups had different views about some of these books, but we know
they read them and valued these texts because they passed them along with the
Jewish scriptures.

Okay, so we've got the Tanakh, the Jewish scriptures. We got these other Second
Temple period works, then the writing of the apostles about Jesus. And that's a lot
of literature. So what's in my Bible?

So the Christian movement has taken different forms over 2000 years. And from the
beginning, all Christians recognized the Tanakh and the New Testament as scripture.
And for centuries, much of the Second Temple literature was read as part of the
biblical tradition. The Catholic Church eventually made it official and called some
of the books from this collection the Duero canonical books. Some Orthodox churches
used even more books from this second temple literature, and then in the 1500s,
during the Reformation, Protestant Christians wanted to go back to the oldest
writings of the prophets and apostles, so they accepted only the Old and New
Testaments.

Okay.

I think I got it, but how does a collection of books, produced over a thousand
years by all these different authors tell one unified story?

Yeah, that's the question will address in our next video.

Hey, I'm John and I'm Tim.

This is the Bible project. We believe the Bible is a unified story that leads to
Jesus and has profound wisdom for the modern world. So we're creating videos to
show that.

This was the first in a brand new series that we're starting, How to Read the
Bible. But we have lots of other kinds of videos, and you can find it all for free
on our website at Join the Bible Project.

Com in fact, there you can find a handout that will accompany this video. It just
goes into more detail and the information that this video is about and lots of
other resources. So check it out. You could also be a part of this by supporting us
at the Bible Project comm.

Our goal is to make all of these resources available for free to anybody, anywhere.
And we can do that because of your support. So thanks so much, you guys. Thanks.