Tag: Structure

Meat and Milk

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I make a habit of posting here every day and I have been doing so for the majority of the five years that I have been blogging. As a result, to date I have 1,872 posts on this blog!

Posts

Now, not all of these posts are substantial posts. Every Monday I post a music video (“Music Mondays”), every Wednesday I post an inspiring quotation (“Wise Words on Wednesday”) and every Friday I post a funny picture or video related to the Faith (“Friday Frivolity”). Not only that, I often advertise other people’s websites and articles. However, mixed in with all these simple posts are the more substantive articles which I have written.

For quite some time now I have been concerned that many of my old posts now go unread because they’re mixed in with all these other posts and are therefore hard to find. One reader sent me a message saying that, once he discovered my blog, he went back to the very beginning and read through all of them! While that’s impressive dedication, I doubt many would do that. I recently set about taking some steps towards remedying this situation and making my more substantial articles more easily available…

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Impressing Girls at Bible Studies

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Have you ever been to a Bible study with a guy who always seems able to find the right page of the Bible in seconds? It’s impressive, right? You’re still flipping backwards and forwards through the Bible while he’s looking smug, polishing his glasses and helping the more attractive females in the group find the right page…

I would suggest that he’s able to find things so quickly, in large part, due to his understanding of the structure of the Bible. We looked at the structure of the New Testament yesterday, so let’s apply what we covered yesterday.

Let’s say that we’re looking for the 2 Timothy 3:15…

We know that Paul wrote this letter. Therefore 2 Timothy 3:15 must appear after the Gospels and Acts.

We also know that if we find ourselves flicking through the epistles from other Saints (James, Peter etc.) then we’ve gone too far.

When we’ve found the Pauline epistles, we have to narrow down our search…

We know that 2nd Timothy is a letter to a person (Timothy), so it must appear in the second half of Paul’s letters, after his letters to communities.

After a little bit of searching we finally come across 2nd Timothy. We turn to Chapter 3 and look to the 15th verse:

…from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. – 2 Timothy 3:15

So it’s clear that understanding the structure of the Bible makes it considerably easier to navigate. Now you can be a Bible ninja too 🙂

From Nathan Huang

The Shape of the New Testament

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One of the wonderful treasures of the Catholic faith in the Roman Rite is the Lectionary.

Pope Benedict and the Lectionary

Every Sunday the congregation hears large chunks of Scripture selected from different parts of the Bible, from both the Old and New Testaments:

1. Old Testament passage
2. Psalm
3. New Testament Epistle
4. Gospel Reading

Making Connections

The Readings selected for each week are usually united by a common theme. This is especially true for the Old Testament passage and the Gospel Reading. The brilliance of this arrangement is that it shows the unity between the Old and New Testaments. As the great Early Church Father, St. Augustine, wrote:

“The New Testament is hidden in the Old and the Old is revealed in the New”
– St. Augustine of Hippo, “Quaestiones in Heptateuchum” 2.73

However, as good as this arrangement is, I have found that it can lead to certain difficulties. In particular, Catholics can sometimes have difficulties understanding how the Readings they hear on Sunday relate to the respective books of Scripture from which they are drawn, and also how those books fit into the the New Testament as a whole.

What can be done to address this problem? Well, when leading small Bible study groups, I always begin by asking those present to walk me through their New Testament’s “Table of Contents” page. I do this because, as with most things, once one comprehends the overall structure of something, the contents becomes less intimidating and more memorable because one already understands the framework and context in which that content has been placed.

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