I am wrapping up a class that I am teaching that covers all kinds of material about the canon of the Bible. One of the things that folks wanted, however, was something to build their faith, not just a bunch of knowledge. I agreed and so we began a journey together that I hope has been encouraging and enlightening for all.

How We Got the Bible is what I called the class at first. Since then, however, we’ve talked about all kinds of things. One odd example concerns why I held up Mark 8:24 signs at sporting events when I was in college. Outside of some the the stranger elements, we have also covered topics about how to share the gospel with others, the study of other religions (like Islam, Sikhism, LDS), English translations of the Bible, and what does it mean when two documents have a 3% textual variance between them.

I’d like to think that it was somewhat educational – I admitted up front that some of the material I was presenting was over-simplified. The reason was that we were going to cover a lot of ground in 10 weeks. Still, I’d really thing the material is fair and something of value to others.

To that end, I hope to post about our classes and share them with everyone. If I had to give the class a title, I would have to go with How We Got Here from There. Each class, “There” changed from the beginning of time, the birth of John the Baptist, the first English Bible or our individual conversions. “Here”, however, stayed the same. It is always today. Starting with the beginning of time, how did we get the Old Testament we have today. Starting from 1991 (my conversion), how did I get to what I believe and practice today?

I gave out a ‘cheat’ word that was the correct answer for just about every question. That will come next time.