66 Books One Story: A Guide to Every Book of the Bible

by Paul Reynolds

If you’ve read the Bible, you probably know some of the important battles, a good chunk of the life of Jesus, maybe a Psalm or two – but what do you know about the minor prophets and the epistles? Do you have some loose ends that need tying up? This is where a book like this helps. The Bible has one author – God – so we need to see the Bible as a whole, as God’s Word. Every book of the Bible is the breath of God and the plan of Salvation spans all of Scripture. In this Bible overview each book of the Bible is summarised; background given; themes and theology explained.

240 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2013

Reviews

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

My wife asked me to read this to evaluate it as a possible addition to our homeschool resources. It is an attempt to do a child-level overview of each book of the Bible and the message of each one. It does a pretty good job, and I like the effort put into tracing the larger story of salvation through each book individually. Most of the explanations and vocabulary choices seem to be about a second- or third-grade level: I'm pretty sure that it's a little young for our 11-year old, but probably about right for the 7-year old. I liked it overall, but I had a couple of thoughts about ways that the author structured the book: not necessarily terrible, but not the way I would've done it.
1. Each book, whether it's Obadiah or Jeremiah, gets the same approximate number of words for a summary, so the stories in Acts get super rushed through, while Obadiah and Philemon get almost verse-by-verse commentary. It felt a bit uneven and awkward.
2. The author didn't try to summarize Psalms, just picked 2 Psalms and summarized them. This was one way to approach it, but I don't think those two really encompassed everything that's in the Psalms, as thorough as he was with the rest of the Bible, I was surprised how sparse that felt.
3. The application questions were pretty good, but got repetitive after awhile, because there are several books that have very similar messages. Maybe this would be less noticeable doing it over the course of several weeks, compared to reading straight through in 2 days, like I did.

Overall, I had a few minor structure reservations, but overall the message is good, the summaries are pretty accurate, I feel, and I liked it.

[Bracey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book for a family that needs a basic rubric of the books of the bible. The explanations are basic and provide useful themes for each book of the bible. The author is coming from a baptistic viewpoint but nevertheless the material is generally solid.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

Each chapter gives a short introduction to the book of the Bible it is covering. Next it gives an overview which consists of paraphrases of key Bible texts from that book.I didn't think that was the best way to do an overview. It seemed choppy and didn't give a very good overview. It would have been more accurate to call that section Snippets and to have another section with an overview. I also didn't really like the way the paraphrases were done. They seemed overly simplified. The next section in each chapter was on lessons from that book of the Bible. Each lesson had its own Bible references, questions for thought and also pointed back to one of the verses given in the "overview". Then came a section called Salvation Thread which showed how this book pointed to Jesus. This was probably my favorite section of them all and the one that was best done. The chapter closed with a key verse from the book (e.g. Exodus had Ex. 6:6). Each chapter was about 3 pages long. The book seems better suited for a Bible study then for reading it straight through. I didn't read the whole book, but what I read seemed accurate. It certainly would be simple enough for a child to understand for the most part, but I didn't feel like it would be something that would resonate with children. If I was going to use it, I would probably just use the introduction and the salvation thread sections and skip the rest of it. There are a good number of pencil sketches throughout the book.