Christian Articles & Holy Land Guides

Somewhere between "I should really read the Bible" and actually opening it sits a real obstacle: nobody hands you a map. Genesis to Revelation sounds thorough and turns out to be a hard place for most beginners to start. This guide gives a practical, judgment-free way in — where to begin, how much to read, what to do with a confusing passage, and how to keep going once the initial motivation fades.

Tobit, Judith, Sirach, Maccabees — names that sound unfamiliar to many Christians, yet these books have been read, copied, and debated for over two thousand years. This guide explains exactly what the Apocrypha and Deuterocanonical books are, which titles the terms actually cover, where they sit in Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Bibles today, and why three different names exist for what is, substantially, the same body of ancient texts.

In 1947, Bedouin shepherds discovered ancient scrolls in a cave near Qumran on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. Further searches revealed manuscripts and fragments from eleven caves, preserving biblical texts, other Jewish writings, and community documents from the centuries around the time of Jesus. This guide explains what the Dead Sea Scrolls contain, how they changed the study of the Hebrew Bible, and what they do — and do not — prove about Scripture.

Catholic and Protestant Bibles share the same 27-book New Testament, but their Old Testaments differ. This guide shows the seven additional books in Catholic Bibles, the additions to Esther and Daniel, the terms deuterocanonical and Apocrypha, and the history behind the 73-book and 66-book canons.

No council ever sat down and voted the Bible into existence. The biblical canon took shape across centuries as Jewish and Christian communities received, read, copied, debated, and defined collections of sacred books. This guide traces that history from ancient Jewish Scripture through the four Gospels, disputed New Testament books, Athanasius, Hippo, Carthage, the Reformation, and Trent — including why the Council of Nicaea did not choose the Bible.

The Bible unfolds across a compact but extraordinarily varied landscape: coastal plains, hill country, deserts, rift valleys, lakes, rivers, and strategic roads linking Egypt with Syria and Mesopotamia. This guide explains how the physical geography of Galilee, Samaria, Judea, the Jordan Valley, the Negev, and the wider eastern Mediterranean shaped biblical history.

The Bible was written across centuries in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek. This guide explains where each language appears, why the linguistic setting changed over time, what language Jesus most likely spoke, and how the Greek New Testament preserves teaching first heard in a multilingual Jewish world.

No original manuscript of any biblical book is known to survive. What remains is a vast manuscript tradition stretching from ancient Judean Desert scrolls to major Greek codices and thousands of later copies. This guide explains how biblical texts moved from oral tradition and composition to scribal copying, scrolls, codices, textual variants, and modern scholarship — and what that evidence can and cannot tell us about the preservation of Scripture.

The Septuagint is the ancient Greek translation tradition of Jewish Scripture that became central to Greek-speaking Christianity. Learn how it developed, what the Letter of Aristeas claims about its origins, how New Testament writers used Greek Scripture, and why the Septuagint still matters for understanding Christian Bibles today.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tell the story of Jesus from four distinctive perspectives. This guide explains what the Gospels are, when they were written, how they relate to one another, and why Christianity preserved four canonical accounts rather than one.

The Bible is not one book but a library of sacred writings shaped across many centuries. Learn how its books, authors, languages, canon, history, and biblical geography fit together.

Most Christians have held a Bible without stopping to ask why it is divided into an Old Testament and a New Testament — or what “testament” even means. This guide explains what each contains, how they fit together, how the biblical canon developed, and why Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Bibles do not all contain the same number of books.