Resources for a New Year: Chronological Bible

Con­tin­u­ing with my list of help­ful items to start a New Year, today I’ll men­tion The Chrono­log­i­cal Study Bible: New King James Ver­sion from Thomas Nelson.

Through my life, like many Chris­tians, I’ve read the Scrip­tures from var­i­ous per­spec­tives. For too many years, it was a Law-heavy rule­book, filled with long lists of things to do (or don’t). In recent times, it’s been more of a relationship-strengthening love let­ter. It’s def­i­nitely clas­sic lit­er­a­ture and food for the philo­soph­i­cal mind. And while there’s a val­ued place for seri­ous schol­ar­ship, the Bible is ulti­mately so much more than a textbook.

It’s a story. It has a begin­ning, an end­ing, and an awful lot going on in the mid­dle (albeit, with some very long peri­ods of seem­ing inaction).

It’s more of an epic, really, but how often is it read that way? We cer­tainly don’t start nov­els or biogra­phies in the mid­dle and then skip around with no regard to his­tory or plot.

Here’s a bit from a reviewer that makes an excel­lent point:

Can you imag­ine read­ing through a book of Amer­i­can His­tory that was out of order? Let’s say the nar­ra­tive started with man step­ping on the moon, then moved to the war of 1812, then to the Great Depres­sion, then the sign­ing of The Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence and next to the War Between the States, finally end­ing with the Golden Era of Indus­try begin­ning in the 1900′s. You would indeed have indi­vid­ual sto­ries of his­tor­i­cal fact about Amer­ica and Amer­i­cans, but it would be dif­fi­cult to fully see the grand pic­ture of the his­tor­i­cal time­line of the USA. The bible most of us read and study from every­day is much the same way. Each book is truth and points to The Truth but, many times the nar­ra­tive time­line is out of order.

The Chrono­log­i­cal Bible does much to alle­vi­ate the prob­lem. The edi­tors care­fully attempt to move books, chap­ters and verses of scrip­ture from their canon­i­cal loca­tion to a loca­tion in the nar­ra­tive that best reflects the his­tor­i­cal order of the story of the bible, God and Jesus.

You will see and expe­ri­ence the beauty of the bible nar­ra­tive in a new way. Freed from the canon­i­cal order, the bible becomes a giant story novel of God and His rela­tion­ship with His planet and cre­ation. (quoted in Frank Viola’s post that first exposed me to this volume)

I’ve read the Bible through many times, often fol­low­ing read-through-in-a-year guides (here’s an inter­est­ing one, if you’re into that). Even with an intermediate-to-advanced level of Bible knowl­edge, I’d sure hes­i­tate before try­ing to place char­ac­ters in a pre­cise his­tor­i­cal con­text, and I am cer­tain that I’d not be able to recre­ate a time­line of events with more than 50% accu­racy. It’s high time to end the con­fu­sion and, lit­er­ally, get the story straight.

I chose this par­tic­u­lar tool because of the added fea­tures like his­tor­i­cal com­men­tary and schol­arly charts and graphs sprin­kled through the text, and because the NKJV is one of my pre­ferred options for study. (My favorite is the Eng­lish Stan­dard Ver­sion; while there are read­ing plans avail­able that arrange the ESV text in his­tor­i­cal order, I really wanted some­thing that was already laid out for me in sequence, bound in one vol­ume, and included robust study helps.)

This year, I’m really excited about read­ing the Bible as a nar­ra­tive story for the first time. I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing his­tory unfold in an orderly way through the Old Tes­ta­ment, and to under­stand­ing the thought­ful pro­gres­sion of the­o­log­i­cal con­cepts in the New Testament.

Have you ever read the Bible chrono­log­i­cally? I’d love to hear about your read­ing plans for 2013!