BibleProject
A nonprofit animation studio making videos that teach people how to read the Bible as literature.
Where BibleProject comes up1 episode or test
BibleProject, a nonprofit animation studio, built a channel with over half a billion views by teaching one book. Scripts start as five to 15 hours of dialogue between scholar Tim Mackie and curious beginner Jon Collins, then artists storyboard them, sometimes pushing scripts to draft seven. Lesson: learn by explaining to a newcomer, trim hard, and let visuals expose weak logic.
- 1Tim preps like a professorBooks and weeks or months of notes
- 2Teach Jon, who arrives coldHe catches leaps and undefined words
- 3Talk 5 to 15 hoursSpread over days to find gaps
- 4Write script as dialogueBeginner voices the viewer's questions
- 5Artists storyboard itTheir questions expose unclear arguments
From Tim Mackie and Jon Collins on BibleProject's process
What was said about BibleProject
1How a BibleProject script gets made
Scripts come from a scholar teaching a curious beginner who skips homework. Tim Mackie preps like a professor, with a stack of books and weeks or months of notes, then teaches Jon Collins, who deliberately arrives cold. Jon catches logical leaps and undefined words and asks how Tim got from one step to the next, so Tim's hidden assumptions surface before any viewer sees the draft.
Tim arrives with about 75% of the conclusions, and the rest is discovery. Tim describes Jon as a "hyper curious insistent student who won't do any homework." The method sits on Tim's years of Greek, Hebrew and some Aramaic, plus scholarship in German, French, Latin and English.
Talk the material through for hours, spread over days, before writing. The pipeline runs from notes to discussion to script, then to longer written material and more notes. Five to 15 hours of conversation per topic is normal; the wilderness series took about 10 hours before they had a script they felt great about.
The talks are spread over days instead of one sitting, and that is where they find the gaps and questions that shape the final piece. The channel built this way has over half a billion views, all devoted to teaching people to read one book.
Write the script as a dialogue so the beginner voices the viewer's doubts. Jon writes scripts as back and forth between himself and Tim, using the questions he really had while learning. The beginner's voice says what the viewer is too embarrassed to ask, giving them permission not to know.
They edit each other's lines by asking whether a viewer would really not know something or really have that question. They have made hundreds of videos this way. Jon: "it gives permission to the viewer to go yeah that's my question too."
Build the script around the question that created tension and resolved. Jon drafts by reverse engineering how he came to understand the topic: which question created tension, and what one thing Tim said that shook something loose. Those moments become the spine, so the viewer's path mirrors the writer's own learning.
Quote: "What was the question that was creating tension that ended up getting resolved?"
2Storyboarding as a second test of the script
When a visual feels murky, the script behind it is usually the problem. Finished scripts go to artists, whose questions while storyboarding show where the argument was unclear. In the wilderness script, artists noticed a pattern set up early did not repeat in every story, which the writers had missed, and some scripts reach draft seven after this round.
Visuals also generate ideas: an artist's proposal of two doors became the central image of their test video. The team was built around Jon's earlier career making animated explainer videos. The same check works without artists by reading a draft aloud to a fresh listener and noting their questions.
Visual parallels can carry the comparisons the text leaves unstated. Theme videos place Adam and Eve beside Moses, Gideon and Jesus in matching compositions, so the visual parallelism expresses the literary parallelism. Sound, pacing and pauses, such as overlapping plot lines that build tension and then land on one unified story, work on feeling as well as thought.
The idea comes from how the Bible itself teaches: poetry sets two lines side by side and asks you to compare them, and stories echo each other through exact wording, such as Adam and Eve seeing and desiring the fruit and David seeing, desiring and taking.
3Jon Collins's rules for clear writing
Give readers the context they lack and trust their intelligence. Jon quotes Cleo Abram: people "overestimate how much context people have and underestimate their intelligence. Do the opposite." Lay out the context, then trust the reader to follow.
His reasoning is that if he can reach clarity after drilling an expert, anyone can.
Say it once, say it simply, and cut every paragraph. When they co-edit a shared document, Tim writes long and explicit and Jon shrinks each paragraph. Tim recalls early script edits where every paragraph got smaller.
Tim: "you would come through and just was like a lawnmower."
Switch off the illusion of knowing before you write. Jon says the brain tricks him into feeling he understands, so he mutes that feeling and asks questions as if he does not know. After 11 years on the same material, they still find topics deeper than they thought.
Their safe place for conversation is "I think I know, but I probably don't know."
4Leaving the mystery in
Explain what can be known and name the rest honestly. Jon's explainer background aimed at mastery, but smoothing out the mystery felt wrong for a video on the Spirit of God. That video shows the Spirit has form, as an advocate and a person, while the mystery grows rather than shrinks.
Tim says careful work clarifies exactly what you do not understand, and calls the Bible's difficulty "not a glitch. It's a feature."
Leave a puzzle on purpose to start a longer learning journey. Tim says biblical authors, and Jesus with his riddles, chose indirect communication over making everything clear the first time. The videos are meant as small visual interpretations that send people back to the text.
Jesus explained a riddle only to those who pressed him. Tim's view is that metaphors force the mind to join two things it would not normally join, so one text yields many layers.
How to Read the Bible (Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, The Bible Project)
Its channel has over half a billion views and is devoted to teaching how to read one book. Scripts come from scholar Tim Mackie teaching Jon Collins, who plays the curious beginner, over five to 15 hours of talk, then artists storyboard them and sometimes push scripts to draft seven.
Scripts come from a scholar teaching a curious beginner who skips homework. Tim Mackie preps like a professor, with a stack of books and weeks or months of notes, then teaches Jon Collins, who deliberately arrives cold. Jon catches logical leaps and undefined words and asks how Tim got from one step to the next, so Tim's hidden assumptions surface before any viewer sees the draft.
Tim arrives with about 75% of the conclusions, and the rest is discovery. Tim describes Jon as a "hyper curious insistent student who won't do any homework." The method sits on Tim's years of Greek, Hebrew and some Aramaic, plus scholarship in German, French, Latin and English.
Talk the material through for hours, spread over days, before writing. The pipeline runs from notes to discussion to script, then to longer written material and more notes. Five to 15 hours of conversation per topic is normal; the wilderness series took about 10 hours before they had a script they felt great about.
The talks are spread over days instead of one sitting, and that is where they find the gaps and questions that shape the final piece. The channel built this way has over half a billion views, all devoted to teaching people to read one book.
Write the script as a dialogue so the beginner voices the viewer's doubts. Jon writes scripts as back and forth between himself and Tim, using the questions he really had while learning. The beginner's voice says what the viewer is too embarrassed to ask, giving them permission not to know.
They edit each other's lines by asking whether a viewer would really not know something or really have that question. They have made hundreds of videos this way. Jon: "it gives permission to the viewer to go yeah that's my question too."
Build the script around the question that created tension and resolved. Jon drafts by reverse engineering how he came to understand the topic: which question created tension, and what one thing Tim said that shook something loose. Those moments become the spine, so the viewer's path mirrors the writer's own learning.
Quote: "What was the question that was creating tension that ended up getting resolved?"
When a visual feels murky, the script behind it is usually the problem. Finished scripts go to artists, whose questions while storyboarding show where the argument was unclear. In the wilderness script, artists noticed a pattern set up early did not repeat in every story, which the writers had missed, and some scripts reach draft seven after this round.
Visuals also generate ideas: an artist's proposal of two doors became the central image of their test video. The team was built around Jon's earlier career making animated explainer videos. The same check works without artists by reading a draft aloud to a fresh listener and noting their questions.
Visual parallels can carry the comparisons the text leaves unstated. Theme videos place Adam and Eve beside Moses, Gideon and Jesus in matching compositions, so the visual parallelism expresses the literary parallelism. Sound, pacing and pauses, such as overlapping plot lines that build tension and then land on one unified story, work on feeling as well as thought.
The idea comes from how the Bible itself teaches: poetry sets two lines side by side and asks you to compare them, and stories echo each other through exact wording, such as Adam and Eve seeing and desiring the fruit and David seeing, desiring and taking.
Give readers the context they lack and trust their intelligence. Jon quotes Cleo Abram: people "overestimate how much context people have and underestimate their intelligence. Do the opposite." Lay out the context, then trust the reader to follow.
His reasoning is that if he can reach clarity after drilling an expert, anyone can.
Say it once, say it simply, and cut every paragraph. When they co-edit a shared document, Tim writes long and explicit and Jon shrinks each paragraph. Tim recalls early script edits where every paragraph got smaller.
Tim: "you would come through and just was like a lawnmower."
Switch off the illusion of knowing before you write. Jon says the brain tricks him into feeling he understands, so he mutes that feeling and asks questions as if he does not know. After 11 years on the same material, they still find topics deeper than they thought.
Their safe place for conversation is "I think I know, but I probably don't know."
Explain what can be known and name the rest honestly. Jon's explainer background aimed at mastery, but smoothing out the mystery felt wrong for a video on the Spirit of God. That video shows the Spirit has form, as an advocate and a person, while the mystery grows rather than shrinks.
Tim says careful work clarifies exactly what you do not understand, and calls the Bible's difficulty "not a glitch. It's a feature."
Leave a puzzle on purpose to start a longer learning journey. Tim says biblical authors, and Jesus with his riddles, chose indirect communication over making everything clear the first time. The videos are meant as small visual interpretations that send people back to the text.
Jesus explained a riddle only to those who pressed him. Tim's view is that metaphors force the mind to join two things it would not normally join, so one text yields many layers.
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