A New Way to Read and Study the Bible in Michael Joseph Brown's They Don’t Tell You: A Survivor’s Guide to Biblical Studies

Michael Joseph Brown, unveils new ways to read and examine the Bible in his book, titled “What They Don’t Tell You: A Survivor’s Guide to Biblical Studies”. Although quite technical, the guide, not book, really goes into depth on the process of studying the Bible and its documents. Brown has a new and refreshing way of giving the reader this information that is necessary in a small group, or for a Biblical scholar. This guide is not meant solely for the biblical scholar and talks in detail about the difference between these two, because some may link the two together. Published by the Westminster John Knox Press, WJK for short, this book gives straight forward answers on the best way to thoroughly understand Biblical text. As you read on you will find out more about how they differ and why they appear so similar from an outside perspective. Brown has taken a wide variety of information, and made it into something interesting and extremely useful for the reader. In his own words, “What I have done is to ‘translate’ some foundational concepts in biblical studies into an idiom more people can understand” (xiii)

Brown does a fantastic job of arranging the chapters in an order in which readers can take the accumulated knowledge and apply it to the next step that they reach when working through the survival guide. The introduction really gets the reader off on a good start as they dive into the thick of WHAT THEY DON’T TELL YOU. This brief description introduces readers to the premise behind the whole book in terms of the goal of each chapter. Brown probably says it best when he writes that the introduction is “all the ‘stuff’ that has to be said” before he can communicate what it really is that he wants to get across. In Chapter o...

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...ening. I was challenged to deeper my faith through questions and further reading, so that I may fully understand what it is that God was doing in the lives of those in the Bible. I would highly recommend this book to a reader that wants to fine-tune their faith in a way that is personal to them. Brown is a wise man that made something quite scholarly into something a normal human being could understand. He left out all of the fancy, literary words that are typically found in biblical studies. I truly appreciated his dedication for the general public to grasp studying the Bible on a basic level. After a comprehensive reading of Brown’s guide book I feel as if I now have a diving board of which I may use to dive deep into the Biblical texts. I found the steps in Brown’s manuscript to be enlightening on the process by which I may fully understand Biblical Studies.