ABSTRACT
The books in the Bible form a collection of material of very different types, and in this chapter attention is paid to differences of genre. About half of the Bible consists of narrative—all the Old Testament books from Genesis to Esther, and the Gospels and Acts in the New Testament. Then there are prophetic books, often difficult to understand in a modern context: some contain predictions of disaster, others of hope for the future. Later Old Testament books include apocalyptic material, which can also be found in the New Testament (Revelation). Laws, which are embedded within the first five books of the Old Testament (the Pentateuch), are discussed against their ancient Near Eastern background. The Old Testament also contains a great deal of poetry, and the Psalms in particular are outstanding examples of this: their origin and use in ancient times has been the subject of much interest. Proverbs and related books (Job, Ecclesiastes) constitute the Old Testament’s ‘wisdom literature’, a kind of early philosophy. In the New Testament the major genes are the Gospels, whose origins remain obscure but which seem to represent the distillation of a long process of oral tradition, and the Letters or Epistles, both those of Paul and those attributed to other apostles. Here a problem is that some seem to be pseudonymous, which may raise difficulties for a religious reader.
