We tell stories a lot. When we get home from work for the day, when we sit with friends around the table, and even when we gather for church each week on Sunday mornings. The books of the Bible are each their own story within the unfolding much larger story of God calling human beings to be who God had created them to be.
The past two weeks, I took a seminary class called Biblical Storytelling, in which several classmates and I explored with our professor the story of Jesus as told in the gospel of Mark. One of the big takeaways from our time together was that these books of the old and new testament, or the Hebrew and Greek scriptures, would have almost always been heard by audiences, not read. Reading the scriptures is a relatively new thing within the life of the church, and even in the ancient world of the Hebrew people before exile, only priests and scribes might have been functionally literate enough to read from the scrolls that we know now as the writings of the Hebrew scriptures.
Yet, even in our worship services and our gatherings, we often read the words of scripture rather then telling them to those gathered around us as the stories that they are. Next time that you are reading your Bible, take a moment to imagine what it would have been like to only have ever heard someone speak this particular piece of scripture around a table or a fire in the evening. Then if you’re feeling really brave, try telling the story to someone and see what changes about the particular scripture as you learn to tell it.
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