The One Hour Bible: From Adam to Apocalypse in sixty minutes

By SPCK

Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit, Jacob and the stairway to heaven, Joseph and his brothers, Moses and the Exodus, Samson and Delilah, David and Goliath, Jonah and the whale, the life and teachings of Jesus, the birth of Christianity. . . the Bible is full of dramatic stories that have made it the world’s bestselling book. But whoever has time to read it all from cover to cover?

Now, at last, here’s a way of getting to know the Bible without having to read every chapter and verse. No summary, no paraphrase, no commentary: just the Bible’s own story in the Bible’s own words.


Contents

Foreword
Editor's introduction


PART ONE: SCENES FROM THE OLD TESTAMENT

Prologue In the beginning

1 From Eden to Babel
2 Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
3 Joseph in Egypt
4 Moses and the Exodus
5 Israel in the wilderness
6 The Promised Land
7 Samson and Delilah
8 The story of Ruth
9 Samuel, Saul and David
10 Solomon the sage
11 Elijah the prophet
12 The story of Jonah
13 Exile and return

Epilogue A prophecy


PART TWO: SCENES FROM THE NEW TESTAMENT

Prologue In the beginning

14 Jesus is born
15 The healer
16 The teacher
17 The sacrifice
18 Acts of the apostles

Epilogue A vision

Further reading
Timeline and index

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK
• Release date: Aug 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9780281079650

Book preview

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Philip Law is Publishing Director at SPCK. His previous books include A Time to Pray (Lion, 2002), The Story of the Christ (Continuum, 2006) and The SPCK Book of Christian Prayer (SPCK, 2009).

First published in Great Britain in 2018

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 36 Causton Street London SW1P 4ST www.spck.org.uk

All Scripture text is taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright ©1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation; Anglicized Text Version, © SPCK 2018. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188, USA. All rights reserved.

Introduction, timeline and selection and arrangement of NLT text © SPCK 2018.

New Living Translation, NLT, and the New Living Translation logo are registered trademarks of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

SPCK does not necessarily endorse the individual views contained in its publications.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978–0–281–07964–3 eBook ISBN 978–0–281–07965–0

Typeset by Colin Hall, www.refinedpractice.com First printed in Great Britain by Jellyfish Print Solutions Subsequently digitally printed in Great Britain

eBook by Colin Hall, www.refinedpractice.com

Produced on paper from sustainable forests

The text of the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, may be quoted in any form (written, visual, electronic, or audio) up to and inclusive of five hundred (500) verses without express written permission of the publisher, provided that the verses quoted do not account for more than 25 per cent of the work in which they are quoted, and provided that a complete book of the Bible is not quoted.

When the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, is quoted, one of the following credit lines must appear on the copyright page or title page of the work:

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation; Anglicized Text Version, © SPCK 2018. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188, USA. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright ©1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation; Anglicized Text Version, © SPCK 2018. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188, USA. All rights reserved.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation; Anglicized Text Version, © SPCK 2018. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188, USA. All rights reserved.

A note to readers

The Holy Bible, New Living Translation, was first published in 1996. It quickly became one of the most popular Bible translations in the English-speaking world. While the NLT’s influence was rapidly growing, the Bible Translation Committee determined that an additional investment in scholarly review and text refinement could make it even better. So shortly after its initial publication, the committee began an eight-year process with the purpose of increasing the level of the NLT’s precision without sacrificing its easy-to-understand quality. This second-­generation text was completed in 2004, with minor changes subsequently introduced in 2007, 2013 and 2015.

The goal of any Bible translation is to convey the meaning and content of the ancient Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts as accurately as possible to contemporary readers. The challenge for our translators was to create a text that would communicate as clearly and powerfully to today’s readers as the original texts did to readers and listeners in the ancient biblical world. The resulting translation is easy to read and understand, while also accurately communicating the meaning and content of the original biblical texts. The NLT is a general-purpose text especially good for study, devotional reading, and reading aloud in worship services.

Contents

A note to readers vii

Editor’s introduction ix

Part 1: SCENES FROM THE OLD TESTAMENT

Prologue: In the beginning 3

1 From Eden to Babel 5 2 Abraham, Isaac and Jacob 9

3 Joseph in Egypt 16

4 Moses and the exodus 20

5 Israel in the wilderness 24

6 The Promised Land 28

7 Samson and Delilah 31

8 The story of Ruth 34

9 Samuel, Saul and David 37

10 Solomon the sage 45 11 Elijah the prophet 49

12 The story of Jonah 54

13 Exile and return 56

Epilogue: A prophecy 61

Part 2: SCENES FROM THE NEW TESTAMENT

Prologue: In the beginning 65

14 Jesus is born 67

15 The healer 70

16 The teacher 76

17 The sacrifice 83

18 Acts of the apostles 88

Epilogue: A vision 93

Further reading 95

Timeline and index 97

Editor’s introduction

The Bible is the world’s bestselling book. Full of memor­able stories, inspiring poetry and timeless wisdom, it has influenced the lives of billions around the world and across the centuries. Yet even those who read it every day will readily admit that it’s not always an easy read, and few people manage to read it all the way through.

Why is that? Well, for a start the Bible is very long: most versions of it contain at least 770,000 words – roughly 600,000 in the first section, known as the ‘Old Testament’, and 170,000 in the second section, or ‘New Testament’. (Those figures apply just to the Protestant Bible; the official Roman Catholic and Orthodox Bibles are even longer.)

But as well as finding it very long, if you’re new to the Bible you’ll soon discover that its contents are just too complex to read comfortably from cover to cover. There are long lists of names, collections of laws, regulations for worship and detailed building instructions; there are histories, chronologies, poems, prayers, proverbs, parables, prophecies and visions; there are Gospels, letters, memoirs, theological reflections, speeches, hymns, and a mysterious form of writing known as ‘apocalyptic’.

All these different writings were collected and edited by a range of authors – priests, prophets, poets, sages, apostles – over more than a thousand years. The earliest parts of the 39 books that make up the Old Testament were probably written around three thousand years ago, while the 27 books in the New Testament were