"A Guide to Bible Basics" (Tyler D. Mayfield)

TITLE: A Guide to Bible Basics
AUTHOR: Tyler D. Mayfield
PUBLISHER: Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018, (288 pages).

One of the biggest challenges among many Christian communities is the Bible literacy rate. People are not only unable to read their Bible well, many are not even reading it on a regular basis! The reasons for such unwillingness to read the Bible could also be due to the sheer volume of books. Reading through the Bible is a daunting task, given that many of the books come from an ancient era totally foreign to many of us. This is where Bible handbooks come in useful. With brief overviews, introductions to each Bible book, what its themes are, maps, charts, and various illustrations to illuminate the background for reading, it is hoped that not only will this make the Bible clearer for the modern mind, it also makes it more enticing for more readers to plunge into the Word for themselves.

Author Tyler D Mayfield takes pains to categorize the Bible books according to popular literary genre, to give us a birds-eye view of how the Bible is arranged. While they are not necessarily in chronological order, the Bible books are arranged in a mix of chronological and genre perspective. Some of the other highlights include:

• Explanation of each literary genre;
• Synopsis of book;
• Content outline;
• Key characters and places;
• Important quotations;
• Key concepts;
• Major events;
• Illustrations to help readers visualize the landscape;
• Charts that guide readers through the dense list of chracters;
• etc

My Thoughts
What I like about this book is the consistent framework used throughout the guide. From introduction to the main themes before the remarkably brief commentary, readers could easily open up to any Bible book and get a sense of what and where it is heading toward. This is useful as a reference as well. One does not need to read the book from beginning to end just to benefit from it. I remember those years using the Walk Through the Bible series way of learning the Bible using fun facts and clever acronyms. This Bible book tones down on the fun and focuses more on the key structural concepts. It is written more to provide guide rails for readers to get a better handle of the contexts necessary for general reading. Its usefulness as an interpretation book is limited because it is way too brief. Imagine summarizing an entire chapter into simple a short phrase. That would be gross reductionistic.

The way I would recommend using this book is basically as a bird's eye reference. Given our modern audience's tendency to tweet snippets and share bit-size information, this guide certainly fits the cultural expectation of communicating the Bible short and sweet. In other words, don't use this book as a main Bible handbook. Use it as a "quick view" or a rough outline of the Bible scene. I realize that some of the modern study Bibles would already have the Bible basics embedded. Having said that, this Bible Basics guide is meant more for those without such study Bibles, and at a cheaper price too! Using this guide has an advantage over Internet searches, primarily because it saves us time from having to decipher the multiple sources of information on the Internet. At least we know that this book comes from a well-known publisher and a credible published author.

A note about the cover. At first, the book cover to me appears too unattractive and unimaginative. However, as I think about the purpose of the book, it ought to be without bells and whistles, and focus on just the "Bible Basics." Many modern Bible handbooks come with plenty of photographs, illustrations, tables, pictures, and so on. While these are good, they do a fair amount of distraction from the main thing. I take it as a good reminder to remain focused on the task at hand, to guide people to understand the basics and not be derailed by aesthetics.

This book is a good beginners' level companion to a regular Bible.

Tyler Mayfield is the A. B. Rhodes Associate Professor of Old Testament and Faculty Director of the Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Rating: 4 stars of 5.

conrade

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This book has been provided courtesy of Westminster John Knox Press and NetGalley without requiring a positive review. All opinions offered above are mine unless otherwise stated or implied.