I have not mistakenly written “introduction” as “introducing.” In Bible studies, especially in commentaries, “introduction” refers to introductory materials to a book, such as author, dating, structure, background, genre, outline, etc. Those are not what I will be talking about in this post. Rather, I am introducing my approach to book study. Specifically, I will talk about the difficulty of introducing introductory materials and how we might do it differently.

Introductory materials are very much needed in studying a book in order to thoroughly understand the book. Partly because of the way the Bible and its authorship have been challenged in the past 200 years, introductory materials can get quite complicated by themselves. As an example, the “introduction” chapter of one commentary has 130 pages,¹ clearly much longer than the book of Ephesians itself. In my printed Bible, the book of Ephesians takes only 4 pages.²

And we are talking about just one commentary. There are more to read if we are to do a serious study. And then there are 66 books in the Bible.

I have no doubt that many or most Christians will not read a 130-page introduction to the book of Ephesians in their whole life. This is not even a question of right or wrong, or good or bad. It is just a reality.

So these “introductory materials” can be taught as introduction only to formal students. For most others, these have to be incorported differently in the study of the book itself. At the end, however, these introductory materials (i.e. the author, dating, structure, background, genre, outline, etc.), still need to be brought up to the conscious mind. Otherwise a person might have a good study on a book but never learn the concept or the method of bible interpretation. Admittedly such learning-yet-not-learning might be happening most of the time, but we ought to change that.

I can go on and on, but I am afraid it will get too technical or too abstract to many people.

So I will stop here. I hope I haven’t lost anybody. Please stay, as we will go directly to the book of Ephesian next. All these will become very clear eventually, even if they might not be to you right now.