Welcome to this site

I am an early-sixty-something, retired Methodist minister, on the list of supernumeraries in the Cornwall Methodist District.  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, some of which I still do in the Encountering Theology programme of SWMTC and Exeter university.  I also still do quite a bit of that sort of thing around the south west and further afield, as well as in the Diocese of Truro and the Methodist District, 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.

Some of the pages of this site are still in the process of being put together, and new things are being added all the time, or as frequently as someone who has now retired can find a bit of space to do it.   

We have noticed that sometimes after uploading items they don't seem to appear on the site on some computers.  If you think something should be here and it isn't, try using the button on the end of the web address bar which looks like a broken or torn rectangle (it's called the 'compatibility view' icon) and that should reveal what is on the site but which some computers conceal.

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 bcjimages.com