can someone please tell me Bible lore/srs
like just the comprehensive story of the bible (Im not trying to sound like this is a joke,I'm being so fr rn)
edit: I found a anime version of the Bible...should help mypea brain for now
Necessary caveat: there are a lot of different versions of "the story of the Bible" dependent on how it's interpreted and what's emphasised. There would be significant differences between the story I'm about to tell and the story that, say, a Presbyterian or Methodist would tell - the one I'm going to tell is wildly different from the one a Jewish person would tell. In particular, I'll be drawing from books such as Wisdom of Solomon and 1 and 2 Maccabees that aren't in Jewish or Protestant Bibles, and those sections will be in red to highlight that. So, here goes my Orthodox layman explanation of the story of the Bible, drawing heavily on The Whole Counsel of God, a collection of exegetical essays by Fr. Stephen DeYoung, a priest and biblical scholar, On the Incarnation of the Word, a book about the reasons for and importance of the Incarnation by St. Athanasius of Alexandria, a 4th-century Egyptian bishop considered one of the greatest theologians of Christian history by pretty much all branches, and volumes 1 and 2 of Exposition of the Orthodox Faith by St. John of Damascus, a 7th century Syrian monk noted for his work in synthesising and summarising classical Eastern Christian theology:
In the beginning, God created the world, because He was good (or, more accurately, was Goodness Itself) and so naturally inclined to self-giving and thus creating beings to share the world with - immaterial ones (angels), material ones (animals) and humans. God consists of three divine Persons united by their shared essence, eternal coexistence, subsistence in one another and unified action; the Father, the primary one, the Son (or the Word), begotten of the Father in a mystical manner, and the Holy Spirit, proceeding in a mystical manner from the Father. Humans are particularly important because they possess the image of God, the ability to (partially) grasp the will of God and do it on earth, as well as the likeness, which is actually doing the will of God ("do angels possess the image of God?" is a whole rabbit hole we don't need to get into).
However, not all is right with the world - some of the angels are envious of humans because humans are designed for change and growth (particularly being changed by the energies of God - called theosis) whereas angels are essentially static beings. Thus, a third of the angels rebel, and introduce sin to humanity - humans cooperate, and thus are expelled from the presence of God, and are sentenced to be vulnerable to death, which is both punishment but also a mercy, because it makes them particularly malleable and so able to repent, something which the demons, who have used up the very little capacity for change they have, cannot do. Humans continue cooperating with demons, and produce the nephilim, tyrants begotten of demonic sex rituals, and so God sends the Flood to wipe the slate clean. Finally, humans begin building a temple to the demons in Babel, and so God breaks them up into nations to limit the evil they can get up to and withdraws from the world, because His presence is torment for the wicked, and leaves things to the angels - trouble is, this creates more demons, because the governing angels fall to the temptation of being worshipped. Violence, oppression and the worship of demons ensue.
(How does this fit with scientific understandings of prehistory? That's an issue with a lot of conflicting views. I have opinions on it myself, but for the sake of time, I'll just say I and most Orthodox do not take a literalist approach to these passages - if you want to know more, you can send me an ask or DM.)
The story picks up again with Abraham, a man selected by God to be the ancestor of a nation that worships Him, not demons, and told to leave the city of Ur and become a nomad as part of that. The rest of the Book of Genesis is the story of his and his descendants travels through the Levant and Egypt. The most relevant for us is that his grandson, Jacob, gets into a wrestling match with God at one point, and afterwards is renamed Yisrael (Wrestles with God), better known by its anglicised form Israel, which becomes the name of the nation begotten of him.
Jacob's son, Joseph, settles in Egypt with his clan, and they grow into a nation, but they get enslaved by Pharaoh, acting as a proxy for the coalition of demons otherwise known as the Ancient Egyptian pantheon. However, God appears to Moses in the desert to make him into a prophet to proclaim judgement on Egypt - God judges Egypt and its gods, delivering punishment after punishment on Egypt without even token resistance from the Egyptian gods, and leads the Israelites out into the desert. They arrive at Mount Sinai, and God gives them a law code, including priests to offer sacrifices for the purification of the people, but they immediately break it; anyway, a whole lot of stories ensue and they eventually arrive in the land of Canaan, destroy the idols and the kings (and the demons those two represent) of the land and settle there. On an important note, through all this time, it's been important that Israel be "a light to the nations" which teaches them about the worship of the true God - the plan was never "save Israel and f*ck them Gentiles".
In Israel, the Israelites keep getting defeated in wars brought on as judgement for their idolatry, and so they ask for a king to give them military strength; God accepts, and they get one. Eventually, we get David, the greatest Israelite king, who writes a decent portion of the Book of Psalms and will be ancestor to the Messiah, the King of Israel who will become ruler of the world and be light to the nations and deliverer of the Israelites. Afterwards, a temple is built to God, but the Israelites (who later split into Israel and Judah; Israel got most of the people but Judah got Jerusalem, the capital, and the temple in it) turns out to be no morally better with a king than without one. Despite repeated divine warnings via the prophets (as well as promises about the Messiah), they continue being sinful until divine smiting; Israel is conquered and enslaved by the Assyrian Empire, and is lost forever, while Judah (from which we get the word Jew) gets conquered and enslaved by the Babylonian Empire, but survives and gets its land back under the Persian Empire. They rebuild a temple, which gets desecrated later on by Antiochus Epiphanes (king of the Seleucids, one of the successor states to Alexander the Great's empire), but the sons of priest Judah Maccabee take it back and rededicate it. Anyway, the Romans come along later and conquer it.
Fast-forward a hundred years or so and Jesus of Nazareth is healing, exorcising and teaching about the Kingdom of God in the Roman province of Judea, and is also the Messiah. Much more than that, He's God, which was necessary to solve the initial problem of humans becoming severed from God - he solves it by uniting human and divine nature in one person. It had been believed by many Jews for some time now that there could be multiple divine persons - for example, the Wisdom of Solomon has Wisdom, a divine emanation credited with everything done by God in the Old Testament - but it was controversial idea, and the idea of such an emanation becoming a human was particularly offensive. Hence, Jesus acquired a lot of enemies, and is killed by the Romans on recommendation from some Jewish religious leaders - this, however, was necessary to fulfil the divine plan, because Jesus descends into the underworld, binding death and liberating all the righteous dead and bringing them up to Paradise, the presence of God. Having done this, He resurrects, and reappears to His disciples to found the Church, which will finish solving the problems of death, sin and demons, and which will be united across the world through consuming the Eucharist, the sacrament that, through mystical means, is His Body and Blood.
The Church heads off across the Mediterranean and evangelises, thus bringing Gentiles to the worship of the true God, and continues despite opposition from the Roman emperor. Early on, there's a dispute about whether Gentile converts should be circumcised, and the answer is no; the Messiah has come, and so Gentiles can worship God without needing to become Jews, and so insisting that they become Jews is an implicit denial that Jesus is Messiah. Their great victory comes in the saints, who upon dying and ascending to Heaven replace the demons (that is, the pagan gods) in the cosmic scheme. The Church also deals with sin through the sacraments of baptism and confession. Finally, Christ will return some day to resurrect all the dead, putting an end to death; based on their repentance, and hence their closeness to God, people will spend eternity in Heaven, the presence of God experienced as joyful, or Hell, the presence of God experienced as painful. For now, the dead are in Paradise or Hades, since without their bodies they cannot fully experience God (humans are necessarily embodied beings); upon the Resurrection, the dead will from there enter into Heaven or Hell.
