Hi <<First Name>>,
I hope this email finds you well.
You're receiving this email because you've automatically registered on my mailing list as having subscribed after the beginning of the series on the Bible.
Below is posted the text of the two emails that have already been sent in this series, its possible you've seen one of them already, apologies if so, I'm not great with making this stuff work seamlessly!
I hope you will get something out of the series, please understand that my daily emails are not intended to tell you what to think, but rather to give you something to think about. I'm sure many of people on the mailing list will disagree with some or even all of the stuff I write, and that's ok with me - I don't claim to be right about everything! That said, what I'm writing is based largely on scholarship, I'm not just making it up.
Peace,
Simon
Email sent on 15/7/19: A new series: The Bible
I generalise, but there are more or less two types of Christianity in the UK today. One of them, which one might describe as ‘mainstream’ Christianity is characterised by a number of things, including the approach it takes to the Bible. If you’re not familiar with the Bible, it’s a collection of books, all very old, but some significantly ancient. Many of these very old books belong originally to the Jewish tradition, and now form part of Christianity too. People who are mainstream Christians will sometimes describe the collected books of the Bible as “the word of God”. Most people who grew up as Christian in the UK, grew up with this sort of approach to Christianity.
Each of the three principal ‘streams’ of Christianity has a slightly different Bible, Catholics and Orthodox Christians have more books than the Protestants do, for instance. What they generally share though, is an underlying view of the Bible, which is that the book is a divine product, which means it is altogether trustworthy – because, y’know, God more or less wrote it. This is particularly true for Protestants.
But that kind of thinking has a few problems, philosophical, theological and practical. One of the main practical problems is that millions of people have stopped believing it. Which is kinda #awkward. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to outline an alternative approach to the Bible. You may think this is irrelevant to you if you’re not a Christian. However, the likelihood is that your thinking has been influenced by Christianity far more than you realise, and thinking about what the Bible is, will help you understand why you think the way that you do. And that’s always good.
Email sent on 16/7/19: In the beginning
It was the year 597 BCE, and Jehoiachin, the 18-year-old king of the land of Judah knew the game was up. His decision to defy the mighty Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had been a grave mistake. More or less as soon as the siege of his capital city, Jerusalem, began, Jehoiachin surrendered. The rash decision to break the treaty with Babylon meant that his reign had lasted just three months and ten days.
Not only was Jehoiachin hauled off to Babylon, but so were thousands of his subjects, leaving only the ‘poor of the land’ behind. Jehoiachin’s 21-year-old uncle Zedekiah was installed as a vassal king, but after a few years he too switched allegiance to Egypt in rebellion against Babylon, eventually facing yet another siege in which Nebuchadnezzar finally destroyed Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. The importance of the temple to the exiles can’t be overstated: it was the absolute centre of their religion. Back in Babylon, exiled scribes and scholars frantically pored over the scrolls and parchments they’d brought with them from Jerusalem, trying to make sense of things.
The documents they had brought into exile with them were live, written down versions of older oral narratives, they were still being edited and reconciled, added to and revised. And it was during this time of feverish study, in a determined bid to come to terms with their distressing reality, that a key piece of what would become the Bible was written: drawing from a very ancient mythic tradition found too in the Babylonian myth called Enuma Elish, the exiled Priestly writer(s) developed their most famous work, the first verses of the book of Genesis.
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