Welcome to this site

I am an early-sixty-something, retired Methodist minister.  I have spent much of my working life teaching the Bible, especially the Old Testament, in church groups, theological Colleges and Courses and for the adult education departments of the universities of Birmingham and Exeter.  I still do quite a bit of that in my current honorary post as Canon Theologian of Truro Cathedral. 

This site contains books, articles and lectures which I have written over the years and which I think are still worth reading, and I am making them available here so that they can be read and used by anyone wanting to try to make sense of the Bible.

There is, currently, a huge amount of non-sense written about the Bible.  Some of this comes from those who attack it.  Most of it comes from those who think they are defending it.  These 'defenders' often call themselves 'Bible-believers' and their opponents, like me, usually call them 'Fundamentalists'.  I deplore every form of Christian fundamentalism, old and new, because it takes the Bible literally rather than seriously.  I believe that we must take the Bible very seriously indeed, which means understanding what the Bible is and how we got the various Bibles we have, and then reading them with full academic rigour.  At the same time I get cross with some academics who seem to write only for each other.  For that reason I have tried over the years to write and teach in a way that is accessible to normal human beings, as I hope you will find if you look at the stuff in the following pages.

This site is still, however, in the process of being put together. New things are being added almost daily, and we hope to have the initial construction of the whole thing finished by the autumn, after which we will obviously add new items as and when they are written.  

The image above is of the footbridge crossing the River Coe and the path heading up into Coire nan Lochan en route to the top of Bidean nam Bian, the main munro on the south side of Glencoe.  It's a pic by my daughter Carolyn, more of whose work can be seen at www.bcjimages.com