WHO IS JESSICA GREEN?
I don’t know about you, but historically I often found the Bible – God’s word – dry and hard to engage with. That was until, in a moment of real desperation and hopelessness, I felt led to embed these ancient words in my life in a new way. Having trained and worked as an actress on the stage, I decided to apply that skill to learning scripture; not learning by rote, but learning so that I could see the stories and pictures in my mind.
The result: it brought the dry written words back to the spoken context in which were originally communicated. Words and phrases that had never before made sense or felt connected for me, suddenly came alive as I began to realise that they were a communication from one person to another; God-inspired people who desired to communicate His inspired words to others. I found that I began to see, understand and engage in passages in an entirely new way. I started to see more fully an author’s thought process and their heart of love and passion to communicate to their audience. As I began to connect the words back to real people and real events and real (however fantastical they may seem to us) interactions with God, they became vibrant and full of new understanding and joy. This “learning of scripture” has become a habit that I have found hard to shake.
The content on this website is motivated firstly by my desire to share spoken renditions of Bible passages more widely, and secondly to share insights that I have learned along the way. My hope is that what you find here would increase a hunger for God’s word in you and provide the motivation for you to dive deeper into it for yourself.
why learn scripture?
Learning scripture is an ancient tradition. Memorising the Torah was a central part of Jewish education in Jesus’ time, and still is today for many. For me, as I learn a passage, I find I am able to appreciate the arc of the story more fully: gradually it filters down from my head to my heart and comes alive. The small, usually skipped over details, come into sharp focus; the boring parts come alive; the confusing, hard to understand parts begin to have greater clarity; I begin to see how this particular passage connects into other passages. And most precious to me, the parts which I might have previously understood as being harsh or unjust, the bits that I might have instinctively pulled away from, become saturated with the heart of love and compassion of our incredible life-giving, kind and generous God.
TRANSLATION
Most of the scriptures shared in the videos are either learned from my old New Living Translation (NLT) Bible, that I have had beside my bed for 20 years, or The Passion Translation (TPT) by Dr Brian Simmons. Just a few are from the ERV (Easy Read Version) and NIV (New International Version). I have, in recent years, been drawn to The Passion Translation and therefore used it for much of my learning, most notably the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7) and the birth of Jesus as told by Luke (Luke 1-2).
For me the TPT brings arresting freshness to old familiar words, as the translator attempts to use the structure of the Greek while leaning into the wonderful poetic implied meaning inherent in the Aramaic. If you are unfamiliar with it you will find it on Bible Gateway or on Amazon. However, I would encourage you to read these stories for yourself in your own Bible or on-line, in whatever translations you like. Read and dig into them, ask the Spirit of God to lead you and teach you to discover, or re-discover, for yourself new understanding and inspiration. Don’t just take my word on anything – enjoy discovering for yourself and allow the Spirit of God, the “great educator”, to be your teacher.
© JESSICA GREEN I 2021