A decade ago, once my parents no longer were in a position to drag me around against my will and waste precious time out of my weekend, I stopped going to church without a second thought. By that time I had been to my fair share of Sunday School classes and had heard all the standard stories about arks and animals and men being swallowed by fish and walls being knocked down by trumpets. I was vaguely aware that all of these stories came from a book called The Holy Bible. Where in The Bible? I didn’t particularly care. What period of history were they set in? I dunno, really old times in some desert country I’ve never been to. I didn’t consider it worth thinking about. As far as I was concerned there were a lot of other religions that had mythologies that were much more interesting. If I had been born a viking, for example, I could have learned about ice giants and Ragnarok and Valhalla and all sorts of cool things. The Bible? Just a bunch of little boring morality plays about why you need to love your neighbor and be obedient and stuff peppered with a few out-of-date laws that in today’s culture range from head-scratching to outright offensive. Hard pass. 

For years that remained my opinion on the matter. When Covid struck, however, and I found myself with an overabundance of time and an underabundance of things to do I decided that maybe I should actually try sitting down and seeing what was inside The Good Book for the first time in my life. What I ended up reading in there was nothing like what my Sunday School classes had presented to me. Sure, those stories that we’ve all heard were in there, but rather than being the silly little morality plays that I’d always been taught I saw drama, conquest, political power struggles, monsters, heroes, and lots and lots of very flawed men. 

For example, you know that Noah guy? The one with the ark and all the animals that came two by two? He ended his life as a drunkard. And he cursed his son’s entire bloodline. In Sunday School they didn’t mention that part. 

When I finally finished I was stunned. Why had nobody ever told me about this? Not only were the stories so much more interesting than what I’d been led to believe, but I’d never even been taught some of the best stories in there. The Book of Esther alone would make for an unbelievable television miniseries. More importantly, though, nobody had ever told me how it all tied together. The sixty-six books of the Christian bible, though not all presented in chronological order, still tell a complete story from the beginning of time to the end of the world that you can’t get just by hearing parts of it in isolation. It’s fascinating stuff, and if pastors and priests had been teaching it properly there should never have been a droopy eye in Church. 

That’s why I’m writing this, to share all the cool stuff about The Bible that I was never told. I’m hoping that people will approach this with an open mind. A lot of people are very hostile to The Bible, saying that it’s sexist and homophobic and that we as a society have grown past the need for it. I would like to remind those people that they most likely read stories about the petty, violent, rapist gods from far less relevant religions all the time and enjoy them. I’m not here to try to force you to believe anything. I’m here to tell you what’s actually in this book we’ve all heard of that you’ve been missing. 

In this book I’ll be making the case that The Bible, despite being the most distributed book in the history of the world, has been criminally overlooked by pop culture and that far too few people actually know how it works and what the actual story of the Christan faith is. Church leaders everywhere have failed to show people just how awesome and intricate The Bible can be. I’ll be trying to change all that. This is where I’ll make the case that the bible is absolutely fascinating, and that you’ve been doing yourself a disservice by not reading it. 

I hope you enjoy!