Christians have the Bible as their holy book – the word Bible means book, though actually it’s a whole library of books, written over thousands of years. And as I said last week, if you’re looking at Christianity you have to start from Judaism, because their holy book, the Hebrew Bible, has become the first of our holy books. The Hebrew Bible starts with five books of the Torah, or Law.

Torah tells the story of people with God from creation to the origins of the people of Israel, their rescue from slavery in Egypt and settling in Palestine, and the laws God gave them to live by. It has many famous characters. There are Adam and Eve, who discovered the difference between right and wrong through eating an apple. There is Noah, who built the ark and rescued two of every kind of animal from the flood when God became angry with the whole world and wanted to wipe it all out and begin again. There are Abraham and Sarah, whom God called in their old age to start a family that would become the Jewish people. There is Hagar, Sarah’s servant, whom Sarah treated badly but God rescued in the wilderness, with her son Ishmael. There is Moses: saved from death when he was a baby, brought up by an Egyptian princess, called by God to lead his people, the Israelites, out of Egyptian slavery, and given God’s laws on Mount Sinai.

After Torah come books of history, with more stories of the people of Israel and their dealings with God. Ruth, a foreign woman, finds her loyal love for her widowed mother-in-law gives her a happy ending. Ruth’s great grandson David, shepherd and warrior, is the most famous king of Israel, and his son Solomon is the wisest king. There are a whole succession of kings, some of whom rule wisely and honour God, while others do not. Then come wise writings: the Psalms which are Israel’s songbook, collections of proverbs and even love songs. They speak to God and about God from many aspects of human experience: victory and defeat, joy and sorrow, love and anger. Finally come books of prophecy, speaking God’s word of judgment to the powerful and God’s word of protection to the powerless, right up to the nation’s defeat as a result of power politics, their exile in Babylon, and their return to Palestine.

This is the Bible Jesus knew, so Christians must treat it with respect. Yet for centuries Christians forgot that Jesus was Jewish and looked down on the holy book through which he, like all other Jews, learned much of God. And this was partly because of the way the Christian New Testament, our most holy book, came about. The New Testament has this name because Christians see Jesus’ death and resurrection as a new testament or agreement made between God and people, like the agreements God made with Noah, Abraham and Moses in the Hebrew Bible. But the Hebrew Bible they called the Old Testament, as though it was out of date and Christians didn’t need to take notice of it any more. Right up to the Holocaust last century, when so many Jews were horribly murdered, Christians have often mistreated Jews, because they thought it was the Jews’ fault that Jesus had died. And this was partly because the New Testament was written against a background of strife between Christians and Jews.

The first books you will see in the New Testament are the four Gospels, which carry the names of four famous followers of Jesus: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And each of the Gospels – the word Gospel means ‘good news’ in old English – tells good news about Jesus. Because Christians believe that Jesus shows us what God is like, the stories in the Gospels about him teaching, healing, having power over nature and over the spiritual world are good news for us about how God cares for God’s world and its people. And the way God’s love was strong enough to raise him from death is, for Christians, the ultimate good news.

The Gospels teach about Jesus that he is God’s chosen one or Christ, foreseen by the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. They also describe how though ordinary people loved him, some Jewish leaders hated him because he was a troublemaker who might make the occupying army, the Romans, kill them all. But though the Jewish authorities might have wanted to kill Jesus, only the Romans actually had the power to do so, and it was they who carried out his execution. After Jesus’ death, to start with Christians were seen as a new sort of Jew. But when it became clear that most Jews did not accept that Jesus was the Christ, Christian Jews were thrown out of the synagogues, where Jews worshipped and gathered. The Gospel writers, writing at this time, looked back at the stories from Jesus’ time and saw the start of their current troubles there; so gradually through the Gospels the Jews were blamed more and more for Jesus’ death.

There was another reason for trouble between Christians and Jews. One of the most famous Jewish Christians is Paul from Tarsus. He started off thinking that Christians were Jews who were teaching wrong things about God. He travelled miles to put people in prison if he found them telling anyone about Jesus. But then he himself became convinced that they were right. On a famous journey from Jerusalem to Damascus, he had a vision of Jesus that turned his whole life around. Now he wanted to tell all the other Jews that Jesus really was God’s Christ. But most Jews didn’t want to hear, so he started telling other people instead.

Paul went on travelling around the Roman Empire, but to talk about Jesus. And he persuaded so many people who weren’t Jewish that he started up churches all over the Mediterranean. Paul would stay a while in a place, build up a church, then move on somewhere else. And to keep in touch with people in the churches he had founded or helped, he wrote letters to them, letters that have been kept as part of the New Testament. Other Christians also wrote letters that have become part of our holy book. These letters give us an idea of what the first Christians thought and argued about, so they are still relevant to churches now. And the last book in the New Testament is a fiery prophecy, like some in the Hebrew Bible, foreseeing the downfall of the Roman Empire which was mistreating Christians, and the time when the world would end and Jesus would come back to judge everyone. We’ll hear more about that last judgment in a fortnight’s time.

As you can imagine, Paul wasn’t very popular with Jews who didn’t think Jesus was God’s Christ. He was badly treated: whipped, stoned, thrown out of town, thrown into prison. In the end he was imprisoned in Rome and we don’t know what became of him. But he was always asking himself: what was wrong that his fellow Jews couldn’t recognise Jesus as God’s chosen one? He decided in the end that while God would not give up on the Jewish people, whom God had chosen, those Christians who weren’t Jewish had become God’s people too. The Hebrew Bible became a Christian story as well as the Jewish story: Abraham and Sarah turned into our parents as well as the ancestors of the Jews. Moses led us out of Egypt as well as the people of Israel. And from there it was a short step for Christians to start believing that we were better than Jews, that God loved Christians more than Jews; that Jews were actually God’s enemies. It was only centuries later that people remembered that Jesus was Jewish, and that the Hebrew Bible was the Jewish holy book long before it ever became ours.

However, for the Jews the Hebrew Bible is more important than it is for Christians. One example is the Torah, where the Jewish Law is written. While Christians obey the Ten Commandments, a summary of ten very important laws for living with God and people, most Jews believe that all the other laws in Torah are equally important. So most Jewish people will not eat pork or shellfish because they are forbidden in Torah. But Christians believe these food laws do not apply to them. Jesus told his followers that what comes out of a person’s heart is more important than what goes into their mouth – that people with greed or hatred in their hearts are more displeasing to God than people who eat particular foods. So when Paul was telling Christians who weren’t Jewish how they should live, he believed that while Jewish Christians should keep all Moses’ laws, it wasn’t so important for other Christians, as long as they didn’t put people off God. And after a lot of argument, the rest of the church agreed with him.

You can see from this quick description of the Bible that, like most Christians, I don’t believe every word was dictated by God, or that the whole of it should be taken literally for all time. It comes from hundreds of people over thousands of years, telling of experiences with God at different times, in different places. And over the course of time people grew to understand much more about God and the world than they had done to start with. It is poetry, story, history, philosophy, prayer, song, protest and lament. So to understand the Bible it helps to know something of its background.

When the first account of creation was written in the book of Genesis, the authors weren’t wanting to write a scientific textbook. They wanted to argue against worshipping the sun, moon and stars, as people were doing in many religions of the time. Like the rest of the universe, Genesis tells us, these heavenly bodies have been created by God, who is greater than any created thing. So for me there is no contradiction between those first verses of Genesis, a poetic statement that it is God who creates, and scientific accounts of just how the universe has evolved over millions of years, accounts that no one could have understood when Genesis was written. God has given us both the revelation that the universe was created from outside itself and minds intelligent enough to work out some of the details of how it came into being. So to understand both the Bible and the universe we need to use our God-given imagination and our God-given intelligence.

I do believe that the Bible can reveal God’s nature and God’s will to us today, whether or not we count ourselves as Christian. But Christians need to be cautious about how that revelation comes to us. Too many Christians in history, and, alas, too many today, have read its stories about God’s victory coming to the people of Israel and thought they must mean that God is on our side too, that God wants to kill our enemies, that we are always right. Christians can be tempted to say, I want something to happen, so God must want it too, and to use the Bible to justify unworthy desires. It has often been used as a weapon by powerful people against those who have no power: to justify racism, apartheid and men treating women badly, as well as the bad ways Christians have treated Jews in the past. Unfortunately people who think in that way have forgotten to read Jesus’ command, also in the Bible, to love our enemies – though in such a complex book, we are all guilty of seeing what makes sense to us and ignoring the rest.

Because of this bad history, some Christians want to forget about the Bible altogether. It is too old, they say, it is out of date in this modern world. But the Bible has riches for us.

Through the Bible we are reminded that we are created beings, made in God’s image, and that we have a duty to look after God’s world – something we need to remember before we heat our planet out of existence.

Through the Bible we are reminded that God is not on the side of kings and queens, powerful men and women. God is on the side of people with nothing and no one to support them, and so should we be if we want to be where God is.

Through the Bible Christians learn about Jesus, the man who let more of God shine through humanity than anyone else, and who showed us how far God would go to show us love: through death and out the other side, into life that can’t die.

And through the Bible we are taken up into a conversation with many other women and men through the centuries who have tried to follow God and to do what is right. Sometimes they have succeeded; sometimes they have failed; but their story is also part of our story, their experience part of our experience. And this is how I understand the Bible, the Christian scriptures – as a collection of conversations, a set of stories through which, by the help of God’s Spirit, Christians encounter God: words that help us understand what we believe, how we find meaning in life, and why we live as we do.