Introduction

This website is designed for faculty teaching and students taking Freshman Preceptorial, though others are certainly welcome to use it. It covers Genesis and Matthew (not Mark because the Gospel of Matthew is far more important than Mark as a cultural source and because Matthew makes many more explicit references than Mark to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, for example in the Sermon on the Mount, often considered a summary of Christianity). This site assumes no previous familiarity with Scripture, but it often goes into more detail than may be required for the inevitably hasty coverage of the Bible generally given in FP 10 classes. Its approach is consistently secular, i.e., it treats the Bible as a human artifact, and (unlike most current Bible websites) it ignores the age-old category of sacredness or revelation. It is not hostile to biblical religion, but draws upon a long tradition (going back to the 17th century) of trying to find a body of facts and observations about the Bible that any fair-minded reader would admit as true (if not necessarily the final word about the incredibly complex and diverse texts in question). There have been more commentaries written on the Bible (starting with the greatest of them all, the Talmud) than on any other book in the world. None, least of all this brief one, can make any claim to completeness, and all of them are indebted to previous exegetes.

--Peter Heinegg