Hey, this is John from Bible Project, and we are continuing a series on what type of book

we view the Bible as.

We're calling it the paradigm series.

In the last episode we began talking about how the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew

Bible or the Tenak, is not one single book but a collection of scrolls.

All written in different literary genres over the course of a thousand years.

By contrast, the New Testament collection were written and in their finished written form

within half a century, about five decades.

The Hebrew Bible was masterfully assembled into a literary hole to tell one unified story,

the story of God and humanity.

How humans are meant to be God's image, his partners in ruling the world, how we rebelled

from this calling and how God is using the nation of Israel to bring us back to that calling.

That through Israel will come a true image of God, the true human.

So Jesus explicitly says on multiple occasions that who he is and what he's doing is announcing

the arrival of God's reign in rule over Israel and over the nations.

And that all of this is bringing to climax and fulfillment a long story that was preexisting

what Christians call the Old Testament.

The New Testament begins with four biographies of the life of Jesus, all showing that Jesus

was God Himself become human to rescue us.

After that we get a biography of the early church and then a large collection of first-century

letters written by the leaders of the Jesus movement for the early churches spread out

throughout the Roman world.

...