The History of the Bible

Last week, when I was teach­ing about study­ing the Bible in my Giv­ing the Sense series, I said I was going to give out a series of resources on how to under­stand the his­tory of the Bible and where your par­tic­u­lar pas­sage falls in that time­line. I’ve made a cou­ple dif­fer­ent resources on this. The first thing I did was cre­ate a quick cheat sheet (in pdf for­mat) for most books of the Bible.

Of course, the time­line isn’t very help­ful for things like the Psalms, since the times dur­ing which they were writ­ten were so scat­tered. Some­one sug­gested I link to a chrono­log­i­cal Bible read­ing pro­gram. Cross­wire put that one out in pdf for­mat and it’s pretty good. Keep in mind for both of the above down­loads that dates for a lot of pas­sages are debated. What I’m giv­ing you is a good start­ing point, but you will prob­a­bly want to con­sult more schol­arly resources.

Next up, I promised to give you guys the overview of redemp­tive his­tory that I wrote for my class on Under­stand­ing Scrip­ture. That Bible overview, all eight pages of it, is now avail­able in pdf for­mat. It should really only take about fif­teen min­utes to read and you can use it as a reference.

Note that if your browser is hav­ing prob­lems view­ing the files I’ve linked to (as many browsers are wont to do), you can right click on it and click “save link as.”