The Bible is the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity, and the reference edition presents the King James Version of 1611, the most influential translation in English. It is a library rather than a single book.
Genre
Religious Scripture
The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, forming part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra at the moment before battle begins.
The Book of Enoch, usually called 1 Enoch, is a collection of five Jewish apocalyptic books gathered under the name of Enoch, the patriarch of Genesis 5 who walked with God and was not, for God took him. Written in stages during the Second Temple period, it presents Enoch as a righteous scribe who is shown the secrets of heaven, earth and the coming judgment and writes them down for his son Methuselah and for a remote generation.
The Rule of St Benedict is a concise manual for forming a stable monastic community. It opens by calling the monastery a school for the Lord’s service and asks what kind of person desires life.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) is the dream-allegory of Christian fleeing the City of Destruction with a burden on his back, seeking the Celestial City through Slough, Wicket Gate, Hill Difficulty, Vanity Fair, and Doubting Castle. Written by a tinker-preacher in prison, it became the English-speaking world’s most widely read religious narrative after Scripture.
Published in Munich in 1937 under the one-word title Nachfolge (following, or discipleship), The Cost of Discipleship is Bonhoeffer's attempt to recover the plain command of Jesus to follow him from a Lutheran church that had, he believed, turned grace into a doctrine requiring nothing. Its first chapter sets the terms for the whole book with the contrast between cheap and costly grace.