SPCK - The One Hour Bible: From Adam to Apocalypse in sixty minutes

The Bible is the worlds bestselling book. Full of memorable stories, inspiring poetry and timeless wisdom, it has influenced the lives of billions around the world and across the centuries. Yet even those who read it every day will readily admit that its not always an easy read, and few people manage to read it all the way through.

Why is that? Well, for a start the Bible is very long: most versions of it contain at least 770,000 words roughly 600,000 in the rst section, known as the Old Testament, and 170,000 in the second section, or New Testament. (Those gures apply just to the Protestant Bible; the ofcial Roman Catholic and Orthodox Bibles are even longer.)

But as well as nding it very long, if youre new to the Bible youll soon discover that its contents are just too complex to read comfortably from cover to cover. There are long lists of names, collections of laws, regulations for worship and detailed building instructions; there are histories, chronologies, poems, prayers, proverbs, parables, prophecies and visions; there are Gospels, letters, memoirs, theological reflections, speeches, hymns, and a mysterious form of writing known as apocalyptic.

All these different writings were collected and edited by a range of authors priests, prophets, poets, sages, apostles over more than a thousand years. The earliest parts of the 39 books that make up the Old Testament were probably written around three thousand years ago, while the 27 books in the New Testament were probably completed by the end of the rst century ad .

Because of this huge diversity, many people prefer to follow a gradual, step-by-step approach to the Bible, taking a few passages at a time and spreading their reading over several months or years. But the disadvantage of that approach is that you can easily end up losing sight of the wood because youre too busy studying the trees! You can end up with a view thats fragmented, disjointed, lacking a sense of how different people, places and events t together into the bigger picture.

Thats where The One Hour Bible comes in. Whatever your present level of acquaintance with the Bible, this little book will enable you to stand back and view the epic sweep of the Bibles entire narrative arc from the majestic opening of the book of Genesis to the nal stirring words of Revelation.

In roughly an hour (give or take a few minutes, depending on the speed at which you choose to read it), you will journey along the highways and some of the byways of the Bibles grand narrative. And on the way youll encounter some of the Bibles most powerful and enduring teachings including quotations from the spiritual wisdom of Jesus, preserved for us in the Gospels.