Tim Mackie
Where to hear and read about Tim Mackie1 episode or test
Tim Mackie is a biblical scholar and co-founder, with Jon Collins, of The BibleProject, a channel devoted to teaching people how to read one book, the Bible. The most useful lesson is to explain your material to a smart person who arrives cold, then write the script as the dialogue that follows.
Let me put those two stories together because they're talking to each other.
How to Read the Bible (Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, The Bible Project)
Tim Mackie: the story and the lessons
1Tim Mackie's path from a book to master to a text to share
Mackie once treated the Bible as a reference book to master. He remembers it as a dusty, individualistic book. He now finds it a friendship and a dialogue.
He came to see it as literary art that sets riddles in front of the reader on purpose.
Mackie gave up reading the Bible after Bible college. An older man from his church read Psalm 119 aloud at breakfast each Friday, and Mackie found it tedious. He despised the psalm.
It clicked only when he read it in community and with curiosity, and he began to feel the poet's delight.
Mackie trained for years in the original languages and the scholarship. He learned Greek, Hebrew and a little Aramaic. He also learned to follow a scholarly conversation that runs in German, French, Latin and English.
With Jon Collins he built The BibleProject, whose channel has over half a billion views. After 11 years of talking about the Bible, they still return to the same ideas and find more in them.
2How Tim Mackie and Jon Collins turn scholarship into scripts
Mackie prepares like a professor, then teaches a student who did no homework. He arrives with a stack of books and weeks or months of notes, and with about 75% of the conclusions. Collins comes in cold, sniffs out logical gaps and demands clear words.
Whatever Mackie assumed without noticing becomes visible, so the draft gets clearer before any viewer sees it.
They talk for hours before anyone writes a script. Five to fifteen hours of conversation, spread over days or longer, is normal for one topic. The wilderness series came from about 10 hours of talk.
The pipeline runs from notes to discussion to script, then to longer written material and more notes.
The scripts are written as dialogue so viewers may admit they don't know. Collins's questions are the ones he really felt while learning. Each script condenses hours of real conversation into minutes, and the two edit each other's lines.
Mackie says the format unconsciously carried the value of learning together. Collins: "it gives permission to the viewer to go yeah that's my question too".
Artists storyboard each script and expose where the argument is weak. In the wilderness script, artists saw a pattern that did not repeat in every scene, and the writers rewrote it. Some scripts reach draft seven. An artist's idea of two doors became the central image of the test video.
When a visual is murky, the cause is usually something unclear in the script.
Collins shrinks Mackie's paragraphs and taught him to say it once. Mackie writes longer and more explicit, and Collins comes through the shared document cutting each paragraph. Mackie recalls early script edits where every paragraph shrank.
Mackie's phrase for it: "like a lawnmower".
3How Tim Mackie reads the Bible as linked literary art
Mackie says biblical authors link stories through exact wording. Solomon asks for the "knowledge of good and bad" in 1 Kings 3 and God is delighted, which recasts Adam and Eve's tree as something to ask for, not grab. John 1:1 opens with "In the beginning" to send readers back to Genesis 1.
Mackie finds it annoying that many translations hide the phrase in Solomon's request.
The forbidden tree is a riddle that other stories answer. Humans made in God's image must rule the earth, so they need knowledge of good and bad. The text gives no reason for the ban and leaves the riddle open.
Solomon calls himself a child who does not know good from bad, becomes the most prosperous king, then fails. His story replays Adam and Eve's with a longer success.
Scripture sets passages side by side and never states the lesson. Adam and Eve saw the fruit and desired it. David on his roof saw a woman, desired her and took her. Theme studies place Adam and Eve beside Moses, Gideon and Jesus.
Zooming out shows patterns like a chiasmus in the Sermon on the Mount or the number 40. Mackie says that only works after the detailed work is done.
Riddles and metaphor teach better than direct instruction. Jesus taught in riddles on purpose in an occupied land. They were clear to those who wanted to follow and harmless to critics. Of thousands of sermons Mackie has heard, only a handful left a mark.
Metaphor forces the mind to join two things it would not normally join, so one text yields many layers.
Mackie shows Luke editing Mark, and John lighting few details. Set beside Mark, Luke cuts puzzling details, shortens stories and swaps in easier words for his Greek and Roman readers. Mackie likens it to how Collins edits him.
John is sparse and poetic, which Collins compares to a Rembrandt, mostly dark with a bead of light, so every lit detail matters.
4What Tim Mackie says about trust, mystery and reading together
Mackie puts trust in God above certainty. He first says he has zero certainty, then dials it back to say trust matters more. He says certainty comes from a wish to control outcomes, which Scripture does not treat as a virtue.
He reads the Bible's whole story as a botched quest for wisdom, with humans learning to trust God's surprising ways of teaching it.
Mackie calls the Bible's hard questions a feature, not a glitch. It asks who we are, where we are, what is wrong and who is behind it all. Knowing every answer in full would be like a dog learning algebra.
Careful work still clarifies exactly what you do not understand, so you can "make a lot of progress in understanding the thing you can't understand".
The ideal reader meditates daily and in community. The Hebrew word for meditate means to mutter quietly, so you read aloud every day, then talk it over with friends. Stories held in memory surface at decisions about parenting or work.
Mackie reads Psalm 1 with groups as literary art first, then asks what wisdom it holds for them.
Mackie warns against remixing a source until it becomes your own. Fluent believers rearrange verses like Lego blocks, which helps only when the result stays faithful. Rearrange too far and the result is your own creation that merely sounds like the Bible.
That dismantles what the authors meant. He adds that language is good when it faithfully represents scripture's language.
Mackie sees humans as co-creators with a relative status. Genesis 1 uses bara, a brand new thing, only for God, and asah, to make or produce, which humans can do too. He likes Dana Gioia's line "God creates, man assembles."
Mending a relationship or starting a business creates order out of chaos, but rests on gifts we never planned for or asked for.
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.
Mackie once treated the Bible as a reference book to master. He remembers it as a dusty, individualistic book. He now finds it a friendship and a dialogue.
He came to see it as literary art that sets riddles in front of the reader on purpose.
Mackie gave up reading the Bible after Bible college. An older man from his church read Psalm 119 aloud at breakfast each Friday, and Mackie found it tedious. He despised the psalm.
It clicked only when he read it in community and with curiosity, and he began to feel the poet's delight.
Mackie trained for years in the original languages and the scholarship. He learned Greek, Hebrew and a little Aramaic. He also learned to follow a scholarly conversation that runs in German, French, Latin and English.
With Jon Collins he built The BibleProject, whose channel has over half a billion views. After 11 years of talking about the Bible, they still return to the same ideas and find more in them.
Mackie prepares like a professor, then teaches a student who did no homework. He arrives with a stack of books and weeks or months of notes, and with about 75% of the conclusions. Collins comes in cold, sniffs out logical gaps and demands clear words.
Whatever Mackie assumed without noticing becomes visible, so the draft gets clearer before any viewer sees it.
They talk for hours before anyone writes a script. Five to fifteen hours of conversation, spread over days or longer, is normal for one topic. The wilderness series came from about 10 hours of talk.
The pipeline runs from notes to discussion to script, then to longer written material and more notes.
The scripts are written as dialogue so viewers may admit they don't know. Collins's questions are the ones he really felt while learning. Each script condenses hours of real conversation into minutes, and the two edit each other's lines.
Mackie says the format unconsciously carried the value of learning together. Collins: "it gives permission to the viewer to go yeah that's my question too".
Artists storyboard each script and expose where the argument is weak. In the wilderness script, artists saw a pattern that did not repeat in every scene, and the writers rewrote it. Some scripts reach draft seven. An artist's idea of two doors became the central image of the test video.
When a visual is murky, the cause is usually something unclear in the script.
Collins shrinks Mackie's paragraphs and taught him to say it once. Mackie writes longer and more explicit, and Collins comes through the shared document cutting each paragraph. Mackie recalls early script edits where every paragraph shrank.
Mackie's phrase for it: "like a lawnmower".
Mackie says biblical authors link stories through exact wording. Solomon asks for the "knowledge of good and bad" in 1 Kings 3 and God is delighted, which recasts Adam and Eve's tree as something to ask for, not grab. John 1:1 opens with "In the beginning" to send readers back to Genesis 1.
Mackie finds it annoying that many translations hide the phrase in Solomon's request.
The forbidden tree is a riddle that other stories answer. Humans made in God's image must rule the earth, so they need knowledge of good and bad. The text gives no reason for the ban and leaves the riddle open.
Solomon calls himself a child who does not know good from bad, becomes the most prosperous king, then fails. His story replays Adam and Eve's with a longer success.
Scripture sets passages side by side and never states the lesson. Adam and Eve saw the fruit and desired it. David on his roof saw a woman, desired her and took her. Theme studies place Adam and Eve beside Moses, Gideon and Jesus.
Zooming out shows patterns like a chiasmus in the Sermon on the Mount or the number 40. Mackie says that only works after the detailed work is done.
Riddles and metaphor teach better than direct instruction. Jesus taught in riddles on purpose in an occupied land. They were clear to those who wanted to follow and harmless to critics. Of thousands of sermons Mackie has heard, only a handful left a mark.
Metaphor forces the mind to join two things it would not normally join, so one text yields many layers.
Mackie shows Luke editing Mark, and John lighting few details. Set beside Mark, Luke cuts puzzling details, shortens stories and swaps in easier words for his Greek and Roman readers. Mackie likens it to how Collins edits him.
John is sparse and poetic, which Collins compares to a Rembrandt, mostly dark with a bead of light, so every lit detail matters.
Mackie puts trust in God above certainty. He first says he has zero certainty, then dials it back to say trust matters more. He says certainty comes from a wish to control outcomes, which Scripture does not treat as a virtue.
He reads the Bible's whole story as a botched quest for wisdom, with humans learning to trust God's surprising ways of teaching it.
Mackie calls the Bible's hard questions a feature, not a glitch. It asks who we are, where we are, what is wrong and who is behind it all. Knowing every answer in full would be like a dog learning algebra.
Careful work still clarifies exactly what you do not understand, so you can "make a lot of progress in understanding the thing you can't understand".
The ideal reader meditates daily and in community. The Hebrew word for meditate means to mutter quietly, so you read aloud every day, then talk it over with friends. Stories held in memory surface at decisions about parenting or work.
Mackie reads Psalm 1 with groups as literary art first, then asks what wisdom it holds for them.
Mackie warns against remixing a source until it becomes your own. Fluent believers rearrange verses like Lego blocks, which helps only when the result stays faithful. Rearrange too far and the result is your own creation that merely sounds like the Bible.
That dismantles what the authors meant. He adds that language is good when it faithfully represents scripture's language.
Mackie sees humans as co-creators with a relative status. Genesis 1 uses bara, a brand new thing, only for God, and asah, to make or produce, which humans can do too. He likes Dana Gioia's line "God creates, man assembles."
Mending a relationship or starting a business creates order out of chaos, but rests on gifts we never planned for or asked for.