A guide to reading the Bible in context
Your Bible Life is a growing guide on how to learn what the Bible is all about, especially if you don’t really believe everything it says.
Get started →History, geography, chronology, authorship, literary structure. Documented, sourced, and left open — these pieces hand you the evidence and stop there.
Michael’s own argument, labelled as such: that the Bible is man-written and God-inspired, and why he finds the evidence substantiating. Counter-arguments engaged, not dodged.
The first article, and the question the rest of the site branches off.
At the very minimum, the Bible is a book written by 40 different people over thousands of years, providing a detailed historical account of events that shaped the world as you know it today. At most, it is the written word from the God that created you and everything in existence.
Read the article →Not by book order. Pick the reason you haven’t read it, and the site takes you from there. The four branches are named in the first article; none of them is written yet.
Maps, routes and chronologies you work through rather than read at. Both open in a new tab.
Every place Acts names along Paul’s route, in the order he reached it. Pick a journey and step through it — each stop lights up on the map as you read what happened there, with the letters he wrote from or to that city tied back to the moment.
Open the itinerary →The order of the biblical story, entry by entry, from the garden to the birth of Isaac. This is narrative sequence rather than a dating claim, and it stops early — the spine the rest of the site will eventually hang off still needs building out.
Open the timeline →The 66 books by author, genre and period — sorted every way except the order they sit in on the shelf, with what is documented and what is disputed kept apart.
The genealogies drawn out, so the names stop being a wall of text and start being a family you can follow from Adam to Joseph.
Named here so the shape of the site is honest about what exists and what doesn’t.
Routes through the text that aren’t Genesis to Revelation. The books aren’t in chronological order, and pretending otherwise is where most reading plans lose people.
Occasional notes on a sermon that explains a passage well in its context, in Michael’s own words, each one crediting the speaker and linking out to the episode rather than reproducing it.
Bring a question, get an answer that shows its working and links to the reading behind it. Held back until there are enough readers to make it worth opening.
The questions that actually come up about this site — what it is for, who writes it, what it will and won’t argue.
Virtually everyone has heard of the Bible and been introduced to it in some way. Many have a hard time believing some of what it says, but would agree that there is some truth to it. How do you determine what is true and what isn’t?
We hope to guide you through a process of exploring the Bible in a less intimidating way, so you can decide for yourself what you believe or don’t believe. Context is important, and it is easy to take the Bible out of context. There are 66 books in the Bible, and an aggressive reading plan could help you read it in a year — but that won’t give you time to digest what you have read. You don’t have to start at the beginning and read to the end; after all, the books aren’t even in order.