Texts are Always with You: Christians and their Bibles

What Christians call the Bible is a cultural, ideological, ritual, and spiritual depository of a people who live din West Asia. Although Christians perceive it as the Book (in spite of the implied plural meaning in Greek), it is a composition of several books, embodying the collective and individual divine-human encounters of two communities - Jews and the early converts to the Jesus movement in the Mediterranean region. The Bible has two testaments, to which the adjectives Old and New are prefixed. These adjectival prefixes give the impression that the one is outdated, archaic, and no longer applicable, and the other is recent, interesting, and relevant. As cultural holdings, both are ancient and belong to a distant past, and are products of an alien culture