Jon Collins
Where to hear and read about Jon Collins1 episode or test
Jon Collins is co-founder of The Bible Project with Tim Mackie, and comes from a career making animated explainer videos. The thing most worth learning from him is to write as the curious beginner who does no homework, so every gap in the explanation shows up before the audience meets it.
it gives permission to the viewer to go yeah that's my question too
How to Read the Bible (Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, The Bible Project)
Jon Collins: the story and the lessons
1Who Jon Collins is and how The Bible Project works
Collins built a Bible teaching channel around his animation skills. His earlier career was making animated explainer videos, and The Bible Project team was built around that skill. The channel has over half a billion views and is devoted to reading a single book well.
He and Tim Mackie are its founders. After 11 years of talking about the Bible, they still return to the same ideas again and again.
Collins plays the outsider to Mackie's scholar on purpose. Mackie arrives with years of study in Greek, Hebrew and a little Aramaic. Collins comes in cold, so he cannot take any assumption for granted.
Mackie arrives with about 75% of the conclusions, and the rest is discovery during the conversation.
Collins did not grow up with forced Bible reading. At Bible college in his early 20s he saw believers he admired recombine verses and concepts like Lego blocks. He wanted to learn how to do it himself.
2How Collins writes scripts as the curious student
Collins writes scripts as a dialogue between expert and beginner. He turns his back and forth with Mackie into the script, using the questions he really had while learning. The beginner voices the doubt viewers are too embarrassed to say, so they feel permission to not know.
They have made hundreds of videos this way, each a condensed version of hours of real conversation. They also edit each other's lines, asking whether the viewer would really not know something.
Collins acts as the student who refuses to do the homework. Mackie preps like a professor with a stack of books, then teaches Collins, who deliberately does no reading. Collins sniffs out logical leaps and undefined words, and asks how Mackie got from one step to the next.
Their wilderness series came from about 10 hours of talk before they had a script they felt great about.
Collins talks the material through for hours before writing anything. The pipeline runs from notes to discussion to script, then on to longer written content and more notes. They spread five to 15 hours of conversation over days instead of one sitting.
The discussion is where they find the gaps and the questions that shape the final piece.
Collins reverse engineers how he came to understand something. He asks what question created the tension that finally got resolved, and what one thing Mackie said that shook something loose. Those moments become the spine of the script.
The reader's path then mirrors the writer's own learning. "What was the question that was creating tension that ended up getting resolved?"
Collins mutes the feeling that he already understands. He says the brain tricks him into feeling he gets things he does not. After 11 years on the same material he still asks questions as if he does not know, and often finds the topic deeper than he thought.
His safe place for conversation is "I think I know, but I probably don't know."
3Jon Collins's rules for clear writing
Collins assumes readers are smart and supplies the missing context. He quotes YouTuber Cleo Abram: people overestimate how much context others have and underestimate their intelligence, so do the opposite. His belief is that if he can reach clarity after drilling an expert, anyone can.
Collins taught Mackie to say it once and say it simply. When they co-edit a shared document, Mackie writes longer and more explicit while Collins shrinks each paragraph. Mackie recalls first or second script edits where every paragraph shrank.
Mackie's image for it: Collins came through "like a lawnmower".
Collins lets storyboards expose weak logic in his scripts. Artists storyboard each finished script, and their questions show where it was unclear. In the wilderness script, a pattern did not fully repeat across the stories, which the writers had missed.
Murky visuals usually trace back to a script problem, so they rewrite, and some scripts reach draft seven. An artist's idea of two doors became the central image of their test video.
4What Collins draws from the Bible's craft
Collins pairs two stories and lets the reader compare. His example is Adam and Eve seeing, desiring and taking the fruit, set beside David seeing, desiring and taking a woman from his roof. Nothing in the text says to compare them, and the depth comes from the reader doing it.
The team mirrors this in video by composing each story's visuals in parallel.
Collins says changing a metaphor changes minds more than argument. He holds that we understand anything through metaphor, so adopting a new metaphor teaches something new. A language full of metaphors like "give me an overview" shapes how we think.
He points to the camera pulling back whenever a prophet has a revelation, a visual metaphor for seeing the whole.
Collins refuses to smooth out a mystery for the sake of mastery. His explainer background aims at mastery, but a video on the Spirit of God felt wrong if it removed the mystery. Careful work clarifies exactly what you do not understand.
Their video shows the Spirit has form, as an advocate and a person, yet the mystery grows. "You can actually make a lot of progress in understanding the thing you can't understand."
Collins likens John's Gospel to a Rembrandt: light only what matters. He describes John as mostly dark with a small bead of light, so every detail the light touches is important. He took the image from Mackie's lecture series on the Gospel of John.
For a writer, the lesson is to show readers only what carries meaning and let the rest stay dark.
How to Read the Bible (Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, The Bible Project)
Two founders explain how they turn dense scholarship into short scripts anyone can follow, and what they learned about craft from the Bible's own authors. The habit worth hearing is writing the script as a dialogue between an expert and a curious beginner who never does the homework.
Collins built a Bible teaching channel around his animation skills. His earlier career was making animated explainer videos, and The Bible Project team was built around that skill. The channel has over half a billion views and is devoted to reading a single book well.
He and Tim Mackie are its founders. After 11 years of talking about the Bible, they still return to the same ideas again and again.
Collins plays the outsider to Mackie's scholar on purpose. Mackie arrives with years of study in Greek, Hebrew and a little Aramaic. Collins comes in cold, so he cannot take any assumption for granted.
Mackie arrives with about 75% of the conclusions, and the rest is discovery during the conversation.
Collins did not grow up with forced Bible reading. At Bible college in his early 20s he saw believers he admired recombine verses and concepts like Lego blocks. He wanted to learn how to do it himself.
Collins writes scripts as a dialogue between expert and beginner. He turns his back and forth with Mackie into the script, using the questions he really had while learning. The beginner voices the doubt viewers are too embarrassed to say, so they feel permission to not know.
They have made hundreds of videos this way, each a condensed version of hours of real conversation. They also edit each other's lines, asking whether the viewer would really not know something.
Collins acts as the student who refuses to do the homework. Mackie preps like a professor with a stack of books, then teaches Collins, who deliberately does no reading. Collins sniffs out logical leaps and undefined words, and asks how Mackie got from one step to the next.
Their wilderness series came from about 10 hours of talk before they had a script they felt great about.
Collins talks the material through for hours before writing anything. The pipeline runs from notes to discussion to script, then on to longer written content and more notes. They spread five to 15 hours of conversation over days instead of one sitting.
The discussion is where they find the gaps and the questions that shape the final piece.
Collins reverse engineers how he came to understand something. He asks what question created the tension that finally got resolved, and what one thing Mackie said that shook something loose. Those moments become the spine of the script.
The reader's path then mirrors the writer's own learning. "What was the question that was creating tension that ended up getting resolved?"
Collins mutes the feeling that he already understands. He says the brain tricks him into feeling he gets things he does not. After 11 years on the same material he still asks questions as if he does not know, and often finds the topic deeper than he thought.
His safe place for conversation is "I think I know, but I probably don't know."
Collins assumes readers are smart and supplies the missing context. He quotes YouTuber Cleo Abram: people overestimate how much context others have and underestimate their intelligence, so do the opposite. His belief is that if he can reach clarity after drilling an expert, anyone can.
Collins taught Mackie to say it once and say it simply. When they co-edit a shared document, Mackie writes longer and more explicit while Collins shrinks each paragraph. Mackie recalls first or second script edits where every paragraph shrank.
Mackie's image for it: Collins came through "like a lawnmower".
Collins lets storyboards expose weak logic in his scripts. Artists storyboard each finished script, and their questions show where it was unclear. In the wilderness script, a pattern did not fully repeat across the stories, which the writers had missed.
Murky visuals usually trace back to a script problem, so they rewrite, and some scripts reach draft seven. An artist's idea of two doors became the central image of their test video.
Collins pairs two stories and lets the reader compare. His example is Adam and Eve seeing, desiring and taking the fruit, set beside David seeing, desiring and taking a woman from his roof. Nothing in the text says to compare them, and the depth comes from the reader doing it.
The team mirrors this in video by composing each story's visuals in parallel.
Collins says changing a metaphor changes minds more than argument. He holds that we understand anything through metaphor, so adopting a new metaphor teaches something new. A language full of metaphors like "give me an overview" shapes how we think.
He points to the camera pulling back whenever a prophet has a revelation, a visual metaphor for seeing the whole.
Collins refuses to smooth out a mystery for the sake of mastery. His explainer background aims at mastery, but a video on the Spirit of God felt wrong if it removed the mystery. Careful work clarifies exactly what you do not understand.
Their video shows the Spirit has form, as an advocate and a person, yet the mystery grows. "You can actually make a lot of progress in understanding the thing you can't understand."
Collins likens John's Gospel to a Rembrandt: light only what matters. He describes John as mostly dark with a small bead of light, so every detail the light touches is important. He took the image from Mackie's lecture series on the Gospel of John.
For a writer, the lesson is to show readers only what carries meaning and let the rest stay dark.