Tim Mackie: Telling The Grand Story Of The Bible With Awesome Videos

Showing how each book of the Bible is designed and how they fit into the overall Biblical narrative, Tim Mackie and his team animate the Bible.

This is part of a series which I'm calling "Interesting Voices".  You can see the whole series here.  They run the spectrum from conservative to progressive, little known to well known.  They may or may not already be familiar with mirror-reading. I may or may not agree with them theologically, but regardless, I think they are interesting voices speaking to the Christian community today.  The purpose of the series is to both raise awareness of mirror-reading and to introduce you to these voices.

Tim pastors at Door of Hope Church in Portland. He has his PhD in Semitic Languages and Biblical Studies.  He's also a professor at Western Seminary. You can check out his website here.

I first discovered Tim when I ran across his "Bible in Five" series of videos.  They consist of Tim and a transparent dry eraser board as he explains each book of the Bible.  Check out the video below as he tackles Matthew:

Tim has begun the process of upgrading those videos by teaming up with Jonathan Collins and starting "The Bible Project".  From a quality production point of view, these videos are brilliant!  The New Testament videos are of the animated white board variety (more of a parchment board than white board).  Here's one on Hebrews:

The Old Testament videos are even more animated with some sound effects thrown in.  Here is the video on Numbers:

Tim Mackie And Mirror-Reading

Tim does mirror-read in his video on 1st Corinthians.  He even catagorizes in terms of the problems and Paul's response.  My only complaint is that he doesn't touch on the reason for the problems:  What were the false teachings that caused the Corinthians to think it was okay to do the things they were doing.  You can check out the video below.

Besides 1st Corinthians, Tim doesn't do much mirror-reading.  He does set up some basic background info at the beginning of the videos for the epistles.  However, when it comes to the narrative books there is virtually no mirror-reading.  I believe narratives can be mirror-read.  I do some mirror-reading with the Pentateuch in this episode on my RE2 podcast.

Questions For Tim Mackie

I’ve listed a couple of open questions to Tim below. I welcome a response from Tim, whether as a guest post or simply in the comments below.

1. What are your thoughts on mirror-reading?
2. Did you want to respond to anything that I've written above?

Questions For My Readers

What do you think of Tim? Do you enjoy his videos? Who else do you think is an "interesting voice"?