Before Tara-Leigh Cobble, the author behind The Bible Recap: A One-Year Guide to Reading and Understanding the Entire Bible (Bethany House), became Baker Publishing Group's best-selling author... Before her Bible Recap podcast moved to the top of the Apple podcast popularity chart in January, besting NFL stars Travis and Jason Kelce's New Heights show... Before she prompted Bethany, which had published Bible studies occasionally in the past, to revive and expand on this category with eight titles under her name, releasing over two years, beginning in April... Before all this, "I was a repeat failure at Bible reading. Cobble freely and publicly admits to PW, her Recap readers, and her vast social media audience. "I'd get lost and confused, reading it in bits and pieces."
Everything changed when a pastor friend prevailed on her to stop hopscotching through Scripture and instead read it straight through, looking for the connecting thread—the character of God in every passage. Cobble discovered she could find traces of Jesus, even in Genesis, where she saw the Holy Trinity in verse 1:26. That's where, she writes in the book, "God refers to himself in the plural form: 'Let us make man in our image.' '' Cobble calls this proof that God the Spirit and God the Son were always side by side with God the Father. "Jesus doesn't just show up on the scene when he's born in a manger in the New Testament."
A singer with four albums, Cobble eventually turned her full attention to sharing these insights. It occurred to her that if she—someone who had a Bible in hand all her church-going life—didn't see God shining out from the text, others probably missed out as well. She launched an international discipleship network, D-Group, in 2009 for people to study the Bible together and wrote a handful of memoir-style books about developing a deeper faith.
Then she kicked it up a notch. "I was self-employed at the time and when you are self-employed you have to hustle to make things happen so I started a little daily Bible Recap podcast on January 1, 2019, trying to reach as many people as possible. I was doing it out of my home with a $100 headset and microphone, using a packing box as a 'studio.' About 19 days in I started getting emails from publishers."
One of them was Jeff Braun, senior acquisitions editor for non-fiction at Bethany House, a BPG imprint. "I was listening from day one of the podcast," Braun tells PW. "She was talking about how people want to read the Bible in a year and get bogged down. In the podcast, she would hold your hand and explain things and keep the focus on the character of God. It wasn't too deep or too shallow. I thought, 'Gee, people would really like this in written form.'"
Indeed, they do. The Bible Recap, released in November, 2020, has grown into a suite of accompanying books with audio and video companions, a journal and guide and a God Shot collection. All told, Cobble's work is approaching 400,000 in sales across all platforms in just over three years, Braun says. When Dwight Baker retired as BPG CEO in 2023, he recalled how much he loved "the excitement of watching a writer emerge and reach a wider audience" and highlighted Cobble as an example.
One Cobble fan raved on her Facebook site that Cobble was offering accessible "distilled theology" with her 12-minute-a-day Bible reading plan accompanied by an eight-minutes-to-read recap putting it all in context. Each recap ends with a succinct "God Shot" summary spotlighting signs of God in the passage and concludes, "Jesus is where the joy is." She tells PW, "Christians love to end things with an application point. I don't want people to feel burdened by something, to feel like they've failed to understand. That's why I created the snapshot. This way, every day with the Bible becomes a treasure hunt and you find that things that once seemed dark are actually drenched with joy."
She is ever eager to reach wider audiences under her ministry umbrella. Cobble founded Israelux in 2014, a company offering teaching tours led by her to the Holy Land and portrayed last year in a lavish 350-photo coffee table book, Israel: Beauty, Light, and Luxury (Bethany), which included devotionals. She launched a daily 90-second radio show three years ago with snippets from The God Shot. In January, she added The Bible Recap Kids' Devotional (with games and activities included because, Cobble says, "I knew that kids were listening in with their parents or reading along with them."
Noting that the D-groups also read Bible studies by many popular Christian curriculum writers, Cobble decided to begin writing her own curriculum with teams of experts to support her. She doesn't claim to be a Bible scholar but, Braun notes, "she is so trusted that this is kind of a no-brainer, a natural step for her."
In April, Bethany will launch Knowing Jesus as King: A 10-Session Study on the Gospel of Matthew, which is billed as the first in The Bible Recap Knowing Jesus Series. Studies on Mark, Luke, and John will follow in 2024 then she will look to the next four books in the New Testament in 2025. Meanwhile, Braun says, her success is drawing other scholars and teachers such as Zach Windahl (The New Testament Made Easy, out now) to publish with Bethany.
Cobble keeps her personal life out of the picture. Her chipper bio shares only that she dabbles in flying trapeze, lives in a Dallas high-rise, and has "no spouse, pets, or children—or anything else that might die if I forget to feed it." She tells PW, "I am the least interesting thing about my life. And I am very disinterested in my opinions. I want my time to be spent on who God is."
