FARMINGTON – Henderson Memorial Baptist Church is beginning a new Bible study course starting Wednesday, Aug. 13. The free course is open to the community. All are welcome.

“The Story of the Bible” is a 24-session course based on a lecture series by Luke Timothy Johnson, the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Ga.

The Bible study course will include lecture and discussion. Those attending will learn more about the process by which the Bible came into being.

Since the invention of the printing press, the world’s consistently best-selling book has been the Bible. Since 1815, it has been printed an estimated 5 billion times. By the end of 2005, it had been translated into 2,043 languages.

Compiled over centuries, the Bible is considered to be both a divinely inspired message and the work of human authors. Throughout its history, it has grown from a collection of stories and teachings shared through oral tradition to a founding text for three of the world’s great religions.

Johnson will trace the development of biblical texts across millennia, by taking participants on a journey from the farthest reaches of ancient history through antiquity and the Middle Ages up to the present.

Attendees will learn about the many forms the Bible has taken and the ways history, scholarship and technology have helped shape the tradition, as well as the Bible’s influence on history and culture.

The journey will go inside medieval monasteries where scribal monks copied scripture into illuminated manuscripts. It will into the caves of Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls lay hidden for hundreds of years and examine how the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem forever changed the way the Jews read their sacred texts.

“The Story of the Bible” is a lecture course on DVD by the Teaching Company. Classes will be held from 7 to 8 p.m. Wednesdays at Henderson Memorial Baptist Church, 110 Academy St. For more information, call the Rev. Susan Crane at 778-2163.