Bible summary.
I found this on a forum I occasionally lurk on . I like it. I have no real idea about some of the history/theology of it, but there are a some great phrases. By Richard Briggs.
"A wandering Aramean was my father. He went down into Egypt, to and fro about the walls of the great city, ferrying household gods to distant parts, and handed down a tale to be told every year at the festival of weeks. Agrarian nomads were we, spinning tales of escape from slavery, of miraculous intervention through sea and desert, meeting up with other clans whose gods were also enthroned in powerful myths of long-distant familial strife and the cosmic calming of chaos. We settled into a dispersed confederation of tribes, a loose amphictyony indeed, trickling into a green and pleasant land, with the occasional hot-head judge rallying us around. Then the prophet Samuel inducted Saul as king, with grave misgivings, while David transformed Salem into his outpost of monarchy. It didn't last: the line split this way and that, and spokesmen of Yhwh, a heretofore little noticed warrior God of El's pantheon, suggested that (a) ethics and (b) monotheism would sort us out. We toyed with it: some were keen, and urged cult-centralisation as the key, while others set up ecumenical committees under every green tree. The Deuteronomists tried to consolidate the new orthodoxy, using the tried and trusted Marxist methods of seizing the means of production, and issued a brand new prototype `book of the law' in the reign of Josiah, performing several public readings to rapt response. But before you knew it the Assyrians and Babylonians had scattered us all around the fertile crescent. Exile. The glory of the Lord was seen back-pedalling out of the temple, the city lay deserted, and we struggled to write edifying songs in a strange land. If only we had worshipped more zealously. If only we hadn't intermarried. And then suddenly, Cyrus was sending us back, into the lion's den once more. While Nehemiah reconstructed the city, Ezra reconstructed our heritage, published a new 5-book special edition of the traditions, and gathered a large number of other scrolls in honour of the `prophets'. After that it was Ptolemies and Seleucids hacking up the land until the trashing of the temple in 167BC, whereupon the Maccabean resistance opened up new possibilities of Israelite self-determination. These we contested into and through the Roman occupation, looking for a wide range of messiahs to meet the ultimate parish profile, until Jesus of Nazareth arrived proclaiming the year of the Lord's favour, clearing out the temple, and enacting the blessing to the nations which, before Abraham was, I am, ungrammatically, but pointedly. The lame were seen walking, by the blind, who were now seeing. It was chaos: was this the one who was to come, or were we waiting for another? And then he threw himself at the mercy of Pilate's Jerusalem, and the wheel of history turned, and crushed him. Betrayed with a kiss, by those he came to save. Crucified, dead and buried. Except then he wasn't: the women went to the tomb and they saw angels, and then it all gets very confused, - except for this one thing: no body. And the other thing: he started appearing to people again. And then he was gone, just before the tongues of fire started appearing, and revival broke out at Pentecost. For a brief glorious period there was church growth with no committees. Saul didn't like it, thinking this was just the kind of in-house factionalism that would compromise the requisite purity of the house of Israel, so off he went to Damascus to raise hell, but ran into the blinding light of heaven, and his heart was more than strangely warmed. Reconstructed as an apostle to the Gentiles, and with the zeal of a convert, which some said he was, he set about constructing a new gospel of faith not works, later refined to covenantal nomism, and with a narrative substructure to die for. Other Jesus followers, encouraged by their local communities, thought it worth setting the record straight with gospel accounts of his life and deeds. Luke tried to hold it all together with some mediating revisionist history, and as the Roman Empire co-opted the whole known world into the imperial cult, the story fragmented off into disparate attempts to respond to persecution. And now I too am a wandering apocalypticist, dreaming of the tree of life from before the world began, and wishing that Jesus would indeed have come back soon, as he promised, though Peter once told me that a day is like a thousand years. What a day it has been."
"A wandering Aramean was my father. He went down into Egypt, to and fro about the walls of the great city, ferrying household gods to distant parts, and handed down a tale to be told every year at the festival of weeks. Agrarian nomads were we, spinning tales of escape from slavery, of miraculous intervention through sea and desert, meeting up with other clans whose gods were also enthroned in powerful myths of long-distant familial strife and the cosmic calming of chaos. We settled into a dispersed confederation of tribes, a loose amphictyony indeed, trickling into a green and pleasant land, with the occasional hot-head judge rallying us around. Then the prophet Samuel inducted Saul as king, with grave misgivings, while David transformed Salem into his outpost of monarchy. It didn't last: the line split this way and that, and spokesmen of Yhwh, a heretofore little noticed warrior God of El's pantheon, suggested that (a) ethics and (b) monotheism would sort us out. We toyed with it: some were keen, and urged cult-centralisation as the key, while others set up ecumenical committees under every green tree. The Deuteronomists tried to consolidate the new orthodoxy, using the tried and trusted Marxist methods of seizing the means of production, and issued a brand new prototype `book of the law' in the reign of Josiah, performing several public readings to rapt response. But before you knew it the Assyrians and Babylonians had scattered us all around the fertile crescent. Exile. The glory of the Lord was seen back-pedalling out of the temple, the city lay deserted, and we struggled to write edifying songs in a strange land. If only we had worshipped more zealously. If only we hadn't intermarried. And then suddenly, Cyrus was sending us back, into the lion's den once more. While Nehemiah reconstructed the city, Ezra reconstructed our heritage, published a new 5-book special edition of the traditions, and gathered a large number of other scrolls in honour of the `prophets'. After that it was Ptolemies and Seleucids hacking up the land until the trashing of the temple in 167BC, whereupon the Maccabean resistance opened up new possibilities of Israelite self-determination. These we contested into and through the Roman occupation, looking for a wide range of messiahs to meet the ultimate parish profile, until Jesus of Nazareth arrived proclaiming the year of the Lord's favour, clearing out the temple, and enacting the blessing to the nations which, before Abraham was, I am, ungrammatically, but pointedly. The lame were seen walking, by the blind, who were now seeing. It was chaos: was this the one who was to come, or were we waiting for another? And then he threw himself at the mercy of Pilate's Jerusalem, and the wheel of history turned, and crushed him. Betrayed with a kiss, by those he came to save. Crucified, dead and buried. Except then he wasn't: the women went to the tomb and they saw angels, and then it all gets very confused, - except for this one thing: no body. And the other thing: he started appearing to people again. And then he was gone, just before the tongues of fire started appearing, and revival broke out at Pentecost. For a brief glorious period there was church growth with no committees. Saul didn't like it, thinking this was just the kind of in-house factionalism that would compromise the requisite purity of the house of Israel, so off he went to Damascus to raise hell, but ran into the blinding light of heaven, and his heart was more than strangely warmed. Reconstructed as an apostle to the Gentiles, and with the zeal of a convert, which some said he was, he set about constructing a new gospel of faith not works, later refined to covenantal nomism, and with a narrative substructure to die for. Other Jesus followers, encouraged by their local communities, thought it worth setting the record straight with gospel accounts of his life and deeds. Luke tried to hold it all together with some mediating revisionist history, and as the Roman Empire co-opted the whole known world into the imperial cult, the story fragmented off into disparate attempts to respond to persecution. And now I too am a wandering apocalypticist, dreaming of the tree of life from before the world began, and wishing that Jesus would indeed have come back soon, as he promised, though Peter once told me that a day is like a thousand years. What a day it has been."