John (J L) Han
I have written an essay on How to Study Bible?. If you are a Christian, you may go there. If you are a non-believer, you may also glance that essay. As you can see in that essay, as a non-believer you are not able to truly understand the Bible because you do not have the Holy Spirit within you. However, you still may learn more about the Bible and Christianity, which is why I am writing this article.
Obviously, understanding Bible is a hugely important task. The importance of Bible cannot be overemphasized. Bible is the most printed book in the world and serves as the guide to more than one billion Christians. Bible can also be intimidating, difficult to know the true meaning of Bible passages.
An excellent introductory book on Bible is Robert Hann, “The Bible, an owner’s manual”[1]. It was used for third rate or lower US universities for a Religion 101 level course. It is unbiased with fair coverage for Catholics and Protestants. It is relatively easy to understand. Prestigious universities may use excellent textbooks but might be more difficult to understand. This book is out of print but if you are in the US you can buy a cheap copy on eBay.
The first step of Bible reading is to know its formation and its key overviews. This is provided in Basics of Bible or 圣经浅谈 in . For a broad context of world religions, one might want to refer a textbook [2].
Another key question for you might be whether God exists. I will direct you to two good websites [3,4]. I also have written an article in Chinese [5]. If warranted, I might write more later. But do read [3,4] carefully before asking your questions.
One thing you do not want to do is to learn Bible from movies or books that viciously attack Christianity, such as “The Da Vinci Code”[6]. Now where to start? Unlike some other sacred books such as Buddhist books or Quran of Islam, some books in the Bible are actually very easy to understand. Some say that The New Testament is easier to understand while The Old Testament is harder to understand. In my opinion, it might be the opposite for a deep understanding. Some books of The Old Testament are very good stories, such as Ruth, Esther, Jonah. You may start with them. I would suggest Genesis and Exodus. They are not too difficult to understand and have enormous implications throughout the Bible. For The New Testament, I suggest to read Mark first. According to Watchman Nee, the four books on gospel each describe one aspect of Jesus, Matthew on His kingship, John on His divinity, and Mark is on His humanity. Mark is relatively easy to understand yet has almost all important aspects of Jesus’ life and teaching. I will open a web page on teaching Mark.
References:
[1] Robert R. Hann, “The Bible, an owner’s manual” : Paulist Press, c1983.
[2] N. Smart, “The World’s Religions”, 2nd Ed. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
[3] https://www.truthnet.org/
[4] https://www.godandscience.org/
[5] 韩家亮：谁创造了上帝与上帝投骰子吗？ https://ciaos.org/modules/wfsection/article.p...
[6] Inside Job, Fahrenheit 9/11,The Da Vinci Code...
https://hxwk.ciaos.org/han-jialiang.hxwk.org/2012/03/29/inside-job-fahrenheit-911the-da-vinci-code/