The new challenge

I've spent January looking back at last year, and my journey through the Bible. Now I've decided to venture in to at least partly uncharted territory.

Between the Old and New Testaments lies a period of 400 years. Sometimes called a period of silence. The spiritual dark ages of Israel. But it's not true to say that nothing was happening then. Lots did happen, and lots of books were written. Jewish thought was developing - their ideas about God, about life after death, and about the Messiah were being formed and reformed as empires fought over the land flowing in milk and honey. Here's a quick introduction.

Did you know that they had a Messiah during that time, who led his people to independence from the Imperial power? Did you know that there is a book with a dog in its title? Or another female hero of the faith like Esther or Ruth?

Collectively, these books are known to Protestant Christians as the Apocrypha. We don't read them, and we regard them as not having the same authority as the Old and New Testments. Catholics call them the Deutero-Canonical books, the second canon, and in their lectionary they do read them, or at least parts of them.

I have never read the Apocrypha through in its entirety, I read much of it while I was at theological college, but to be honest I wasn't concentrating very hard - I was more concerned with learning all sorts of other things.

There isn't an easy to use reading plan, at least partly because there isn't universal agreement about what is actually in the Apocrypha! So I'm going to be using my NRSV, which contains all these extra goodies. Counting it all up, I have around 195 chapters to read, and I intend to do roughly one a day, roughly five days a week.

So I should be finishing around November time!

Stay with me on this new journey, and please share your thoughts with me as we go. It'll be different to last year, but hopefully fun and rewarding in its own way. First instalment coming up tomorrow!