As a result, it pays careful attention to both the historical and the canonical context of the book, repeatedly highlighting the way that Revelation takes up and re-uses Old Testament imagery. From the beginning, it sets out the three main genres of Revelation-as apocalypse, prophecy and letter-and puts each of those in a brief historical and cultural context. The ‘whiteboard animation’ is engaging, and actually includes some detailed information that is passed over in the script, so it is worth paying careful attention to, and watching a couple of times if you are not very familiar with the text of Revelation. There are lots of things that I really liked about these two videos. These illustrate the typical ‘whiteboard animation’ style that they use for individual books of the Bible. As with other longer books, this is split into two parts, the first looking at Rev 1–11 and the second at Rev 12–22. In exploring, I naturally turned first to their book videos on Revelation. Their short, introductory video is a good place to start in seeing what they are aiming for: They met at Multnomah Biblical Seminary, which is evangelical and premillennial, but the the videos deliberately avoid ‘tribal’ readings (as they explain in this interview) and offer a broad, theological reading of the texts. It is produced by a crowd-funding collaboration between Tim Mackie, who has a PhD in Old Testament, and Jon Collins, who studied theology and then went on to be an animator. The Project is essential a collection of animated videos on their YouTube channel which offers not only introductions to all the books of the Bible, but explorations of biblical themes and ideas, and really good material on how to read the Bible. I am not sure whether lots of friends are using it and just haven’t mentioned it-or whether it remains an undiscovered secret on this side of the pond. I think I had been aware of The Bible Project very vaguely in the past, but for some reason only looked at it more carefully when someone told me how helpful they had found it in the last few days.

Bible project timeline