A Bit of an Update on Things…AND MY COMMERCIAL (sort of!)

I haven’t written anything on my blog for about a month. The reason for that is a combination of things. This summer was “the summer of putting the house back together” after the tornado of March 31! There has been a lot of contacting window guys, driveway guys, roofers, etc., and it just takes up time. Then there is the fact that I had to get ready for the upcoming school year…not to mention that the first day back for the teachers and all those wonderful staff and “professional development” meetings was (gulp!) July 31^st—the first time I’ve ever had to start a school year in July.

On top of all that, I’ve not only been working on a journal article I was asked to do, but I was also working with my publisher on tying up any loose ends for my new book that is coming out in September! Time for a shameless self-promotion…

A Brief History of Joel’s Adventures in Biblical Studies
I grew up in a Christian home where every Sunday morning, and many Sunday evenings…and some Wednesday nights…my family and I were in church (in high school, those Wednesday night youth groups were a constant). And one thing I got every Sunday morning in Sunday school was a small 3–4-page pamphlet called “Pix” that contained basically a realistic-cartoon story from the Bible. Not only that, but some family friends of my parents had gotten me the entire Bible in that “Pix” format. Yes, my very own realistic-cartoon Bible. I read it all the time. The only thing I probably read as much in grade school was a book in my school library entitled Meet Abraham Lincoln. What can I say? The Civil War and the Bible were my two main reading interests in grade school.

I also went to a Christian high school and was one of those few Christian high school students who actually like the Bible classes. Well, the classes themselves weren’t all that great, but the Bible always fascinated me. That being said, if I was honest, both in high school and college, just sitting down and reading long sections in the Bible tended to be rather hard. Not because it was the Bible, but because I just had a hard time staying focused. The same held true for any kind of literature. I loved poetry, but novels? Ugh…my eyes would start to scan and wander, and I’d flip through a couple pages before I was able to regain focus, but by then, I had missed 2-3 pages of the novel—what’s going on?

All that said, thanks to that realistic cartoon Bible I grew up with, I knew most of the Bible stories fairly well. But throughout high school and college, my Bible reading tended to be like most people’s Bible reading: skimming for interesting verses that I just find some “application” to my life.

That changed during my time in the Peace Corps, Kazakhstan. There I was, basically in the middle of central Asia, in a former republic of the former USSR, with (obviously) no churches around I really knew of, and with a lot of time on my hands. What I decided to do was to read through the entire Bible, cover to cover, and try to come to it without any preconceived notions, basically “forgetting” that it was THE HOLY BIBLE, and just read it as if it were any other book. And so, starting that November, almost every day, with a notebook next to me, I’d start reading and taking notes on anything that jumped out at me, any questions I had, and any observations I had. That was the first time that the Bible—the actual Bible, not the cartoon version—truly became fascinating. I started to see beyond just the basic stories and started wrestling with all those strange details one finds in the Bible that one can’t make heads or tails of.

It was that year in the Peace Corps that I knew I wanted to go back to graduate school and study the Bible. I didn’t know if I’d ever do anything with a graduate degree in Biblical Studies, but I knew I wanted to take a couple years studying it for the sheer sake of learning.

In the Fall of 1995, I started my first master’s program at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. Long story short, those two years changed my life. For the purpose of this post, though, I will just share that early on, as I was taking my first Biblical Studies courses, I distinctly remember thinking, “Why wasn’t I ever taught any of this stuff in my high school Bible classes?” Granted, the higher-level graduate issues regarding the Bible are over the heads of your typical high school students, but a lot of the basic things weren’t. Little things like, “Paul was writing to real people in Corinth in the mid-50s—I Corinthians had to make sense to them.” “Revelation was written to Christians in Asian Minor who were suffering persecution in the late 90s—it had to make sense to them.”

Simply put, the basics of understanding each biblical book in its historical context and then trying to understand each biblical book as a coherent literary work opened up the biblical world in a way I never thought possible. That being said, I never had any ambition to “become a scholar,” per se. Given my background, I wanted to take what I learned at the graduate level and then make it available and understandable to Christians who would never go to graduate school. I wanted to take the good stuff found in the academic world of Biblical Studies and make it digestible to your normal, everyday Christian. For me, that meant teaching in high school.

In addition to that master’s degree in the New Testament at Regent College, over the past 25 years, I’ve ended up getting another master’s degree in the Old Testament, a PhD in the Old Testament, all the while teaching Bible and/or English in three different Christian high schools. I also have taught Biblical Studies and Religious Studies courses at the college level for a number of years as well.

Now, during my 17 years teaching high school, I quickly realized that there simply isn’t a lot of actual good material for high school Bible courses. And so, thanks to the administrators of those schools at which I taught, I was able to develop my own curriculum from scratch. Then, when I started teaching introductory Bible courses at the college level, I realized something else. A lot of the Bible textbooks written for the college level tend to be rather dry and over the heads of most students. Scholars tend to write to impress other scholars, even when they (in theory) are writing introductory books for students!

The result I’ve found in a lot of these textbooks (I saw it in the textbooks I used in graduate school myself) is that they go really heavy into highly specialized scholarly issues (like source criticism, textual questions, “Q” and the “Synoptic Gospel problem”)—namely all the historical-critical issues—but surprisingly spend very little time actually making sense of the actual biblical text that people read. For example, I remember one Old Testament Introduction book that spent pages dissecting the Noah story in Genesis 6-9 and arguing that certain verses belonged to the “J” source, others to the “E” source, and still others to the “P” source. Did the book ever even try to explain what Genesis 6-9 in the form we have it today means? OF COURSE NOT!

The result of all this is over these past few years, I’ve taken all the work I’ve done while teaching at the high school and college levels, and I’ve made a few books! Now, since I worked my way as a janitor through college and my first graduate program, I’ve decided to title these books as The Blue-Collar Bible Scholar: Reader’s Guide to the New Testament and The Blue-Collar Bible Scholar: Reader’s Guide to the Old Testament. And yes, the New Testament Reader’s Guide is coming out next month—in September! I’m currently editing the Old Testament Reader’s Guide, and hopefully that will make its appearance in a year or so.

The thing that makes my book unique is a number of things.

1. I provide a brief explanation of the time of writing and authorship of each book, as is generally accepted in both biblical scholarship and Church Tradition.
2. I provide a “Big Things to Know” section that highlights the major themes and literary imagery in each New Testament book. This essentially is a “heads up” to the reader to look out for these themes and images as he/she reads any given New Testament book.
3. I provide a “Story Chart” or “Literary Map” of each New Testament book that gives the reader a visual of the overall flow of each New Testament book. This is extremely helpful, in that it helps the reader (a) follow the storyline in books like the Gospels and Acts, and (b) trace the argument that is being made in each New Testament letter.
4. I then provide a “walkthrough” of each New Testament book, passage by passage, helping the reader understand how each New Testament book fits together as a coherent whole.
5. Finally, in the corresponding BCBS Reader’s Guide to the New Testament Workbook, I provide study/discussion questions for the reader as he/she reads through each book in the New Testament. The workbook can be used in individual study, a Sunday School or Bible Study small group, or high school Bible class.

When it is all said and done…

If you want to read the New Testament with a better understanding…

If you are a Bible teacher who is looking for a book/curriculum that your students will actually appreciate…

If you are a pastor or Sunday School teacher who would like something that helps your church members become more biblically literate…you will love The Blue-Collar Bible Scholar’s Reader’s Guide to the New Testament.

It will eventually be available everywhere, but it is currently available for pre-order at McGahan Publishing. In addition, I am going to try to start up a Blue-Collar Bible Scholar Podcast, where I will do a bit of “online teaching” for anyone interested, and possibly try to do some interviews with other teachers, pastors, and scholars (who knows?) over the best ways to understand and appreciate the Old and New Testaments.