Before UCLA professor Bill Creasy started working on his doctorate in medieval literature, a friend warned him, "Don't waste your career being the world's leading expert on a third-rate Victorian poet. Choose a major author or a major work."
"So I chose God and the Bible," Creasy says. "God's a world-class poet."
By day, Creasy, 52, is a popular English professor at UCLA. By night--and early mornings and weekends--he's a tireless Bible scholar and teacher with a vision: to teach the Good Book cover to cover, verse by verse to as many people as he can.
"The curtain goes up in Genesis and goes down in Revelation. It's a very linear story," Creasy says. "You can't possibly understand Revelation without reading the 65 books before it."
Ten years ago, he launched his first Bible study in the basement of St. Paul the Apostle church in Westwood. Today he logs more than 2,500 miles a month driving across Southern California (plus flying to Arizona on Fridays) and teaching nine weekly Bible classes to more than 3,000 people.
In Orange County, he lectures Monday nights at a packed Trinity United Presbyterian Church in Tustin. In September at Mission Parish Church in San Juan Capistrano, Creasy will be starting a class that also will be broadcast over the Internet (http://www.logosmin.org).
Creasy uses rich storytelling, encyclopedic knowledge and a good dose of humor to teach the Bible as literature. His goal is to get his students "inside the narrative," just as they would with any book, instead of "standing outside the text."
"The people in the Bible are as real to me as you are," Creasy says. "And I think I make them come alive in class."
The problem that most people have studying the Bible, Creasy contends, is that they read it in bits and pieces.
"It's like listening to a Beethoven symphony a few bars at a time in random order," Creasy says. "It's pretty, but . . . "
When they do sit down with the book, they soon get stuck in the quicksand of ancient cultures, history and centuries of theological wrangling.
"Many people always wanted to read the Bible all the way through, but they bog down around Leviticus," says Creasy, who takes his students through the Bible in five years. "I'm a scout. I've been down the trail before."
In his lectures, he uses props (dressing up as a Roman legionnaire), maps and photos, anything to make the people and places of the Bible more real. Second-year students take a summer tour of Israel, a journey so popular that a lottery had to be set up to fill the 55 slots available for each of five trips.
