Reading The Bible

Discussion in 'Religion' started by Arne Saknussemm, Apr 15, 2014.

  1. Arne Saknussemm trying to figure it all out Valued Senior Member

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    I've just completed reading the Bible for the umpteenth time now. I'm really not sure how many times I have read it straight through now, but I suppose it is more than 12. I do not say this with any great pride, rather as former president George W. Bush commented upon his re-election, "I'm humbled."

    Now while I appreciate 'the dangers' of coming onto this ostensibly religious forum and encouraging people to read The Bible all the way through, I am doing so anyway.

    You see. I am a reader. I remember reading 'My Grandfather's Farm' all by myself in the middle of second grade, and since then I haven't looked back, as it were. I have read about a novel or some other sort of book at the rate of about one per week for decades now. It is my chiefest pleasure and literally my raison d'être, so I know of which I speak when I say The Bible is a book like no other. As you must know, it is really a collection of books encompassing history, genealogy, legend, philosophy, love poetry and of course, prophecy.

    I have said I go through approximately one book per week, and War and Peace, which contrary to popular belief is not the longest novel ever, took me two weeks. I loved it. A very enjoyable book that lives up to its title. The Bible, however, takes me about six and a half months (minimum) to read. I have read it in bits in a yearly scheme and so taken a whole year, and I have read it when I could, sometimes 60 pages or more in a single afternoon, sometimes nothing for a week or more and end to end it will take six to eight months. This most recent reading was seven and a half months, I began October 1st, 2013.

    So those of you who dismiss The Bible as myth and fancy, I think, really must read it through at least once before thinking so. I notice in my earlier posts in which The Gospels and their historicity are discussed, many of you use The Gospels and The Bible as if they were synonyms. This is somewhat akin to calling the last half chapter The Return of The King in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the entire book along with The Hobbit and all of Tolkien's other works. It just won't do.

    There is simply too much there for anyone, who hasn't even read it (!), to explain away its origin and purpose.

    Here are some of my impressions that I find noteworthy. Despite having been written over 1500 years and despite that several writers are known to have written different parts of it, The Bible hangs together as if it were by a single author (guess who?). While there are clearly discernible separate writing styles, and I could see without being told that The Gospel of Luke and Acts must be by the same writer, the whole has a unity as if directed, well, from on high. Please! Unless you have read it through yourself, perhaps more than once, and in different editions, you probably will not see this!

    In a one-year Bible that has daily reading of Old and New Testament, sometimes along with a bit from Psalms and Proverbs there is fairly often a strange concordance, as if some higher power saw one-year English translations coming thousands of years before there even was such a language. For instance, I will read the Psalm wherein soldiers are playing dice to divide the persecuted one's robe. Then a few minutes later, there will be the same event in the Gospel reading.

    Or I might read the well known Luke 4 verses:

    On the same day that very chapter of Isaiah was the Old testament reading - written 700 years earlier.

    And knowing that in the synagogue the scripture Jesus read was also a weekly Bible reading of a sort and that there was no way He could have known that that verse of Isaiah would be the reading at that particular synagogue at that particular place on that particular day, and that He would have the temerity to say the verse referred to Him! Who would dare!

    And how could any one make something like this up? And then have them come out on the same three pages of a daily reading in an unknown language two thousand years in the future?
     
    Last edited: Apr 15, 2014
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  3. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    I love to read too, which is why I find the Bible torture. It's quite possibly the worst book ever, with the exception of a novel my aunt wrote.
     
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  5. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    You may be the first person I've ever encountered that's read it through, cover-to-cover, even once. I've known a number of people who have read it in its entirety, but never in one shot, straight through.

    I tried doing it once, way back when I was a teenager. I got as far as the 'begats'. Most people stop there, I guess, if they aren't highly motivated. I've probably read the majority of it at one time or another in the years since, but never all at once.

    Of course I'm not a Christian, so it's not my holy book. I do have academic interests in religious studies, but they are focused in other directions these days.

    I have no objections to you talking about it at all. It seems like a good thread topic.

    Reading it cover-to-cover might be a valuable thing to do, for a certain kind of Christian I guess. What advantages to you see in reading it that way?

    Do you think that the structure of the old testament, its being a whole collection of what were once separate books, composed at different times, in a variety of different genres, lends itself to cover-to-cover straight-through reading?

    The Quran is organized by surah length, which suggests that it probably isn't designed to be read cover-to-cover. The books of the Pali canon have a variety of 'organizing' principles such as sutta length, topic, number of items of doctrine discussed and so on. I think that the Pali canon is as it is for mnemonic reasons, to aid the monks who specialized in memorizing chunks of it.

    So I wonder how common it was for the ancients to organize their religious texts as we would the chapters of a novel, for straight-through narrative continuity.

    Handwritten books were rare treasures in ancient times. Most people rarely saw them and many couldn't read them if they did, being illiterate. So books were read out loud, or commonly portions of them were memorized and then recited, in various ritual and liturgical contexts. I think that in many cases these large religious collections were designed to be used in smaller chunks.

    'Myth and fancy' might be a little harsh, but I don't think that the Bible reveals any of the secrets of the universe or anything like that. That's one reason why I'm not highly motivated to read it these days.

    I suppose that one can say 'don't say that you don't believe it until you read it' about every religious scripture out there. And there are lots and lots of scriptures. (The Mahayana Buddhist scriptures are so vast that I doubt that anyone has ever read them in their entirety.)

    But it seems that with the exception of academic scholars perhaps, people aren't typically motivated to read scriptures unless they already believe in them in some way.

    And there's the expression of your own faith in the Bible. I acknowledge it, but your faith doesn't really interest me.
     
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  7. Gremmie "Happiness is a warm gun" Valued Senior Member

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    Or, Anita Meyer's book... I KNOW, you remember her.
     
    Last edited: Apr 15, 2014
  8. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    I'm still working on Genesis. Didn't God lie? He said Eve would die if she ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but she didn't.
     
  9. quinnsong Valued Senior Member

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    I have read it once through and it took several months if I recall(I too like to read),Psalms and Job were my faves in the Old Testament. Psalms for the simple fact that it flowed rather easily and Job because the story fascinated me. Out of the new The Gospel of John and bits of Corinthians were my faves, not because I am a fan of Paul by any means but because of some of the verses regarding agape love. After many years and books later I would recommend you read A Confederacy of Dunces over the Bible, as far as literary value.I will say this the Bible, is much easier to study than the Veda texts, all those gods gets a bit confusing.
     
  10. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe whoever was writing this down misunderstood God-speak for Hebrew. Maybe God said to Eve "I'm going to build my church on top of your dignity" and they got screwed up in the interpretation. People do make mistakes after all. God probably speaks too fast, even if you know Hebrew in shorthand as adapted for clay and stylus. But one thing's for sure--there was plenty of clay lying around. How else would he have made the Neanderthals, Homo Erectus and Ardi? Not to mention the daughters-in-law needed to begin all the begattin'.

    I got stuck when I went to look for the location of the alleged crime. Fortunately they tell us to head for the confluence of four rivers. But I got lost since at least one of them runs through the Red Sea. Of course the Lord works in mysterious ways so maybe the tree was under the Red Sea. We know God didn't have GPS or Google Earth so maybe he didn't realize he put the tree there. He probably made Paradise out of an underwater city like Atlantis, only way before that, somewhere between Ethiopia and the Arabian Peninsula. It probably got destroyed when Moses parted the waters and let them crash down on the Egyptians. That magic rod probably got its powers from the angel-monsters God left guarding Paradise. That was another thing: what were they guarding? Could it be that Jacques Cousteau could come along in a submersible and steal the magic? One thing is for sure. It takes an awful lot of details to ever even get started trying to figure this story out.
     
  11. Trooper Secular Sanity Valued Senior Member

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    She didn't die? Eve is still alive?

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    Holy shit! I did not know that.
     
  12. Gremmie "Happiness is a warm gun" Valued Senior Member

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    I think she lives next door to me... At least this woman looks old enough to be her. Even saw her eating an apple the other day...

    BTW... Welcome back Trooper.
     
  13. cluelusshusbund + Public Dilemma + Valued Senior Member

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    The most Bible readin i ever did was in the 7th grade when our home room teecher made us take turns readin a verse to the class each mornin.!!!

    I was suckered by the hype into readin "The Satanic Verses" which was much mor readable than the "Bible"... but surly worse than you'r aunts novel.!!!
     
  14. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I bought a copy of The Satanic Verses back when Muslim clerics decreed its author be killed. I figured that the book had to be interesting. Wrong. It was terrible, I never finished it, and ended up donating it to a library book sale.

    (If those Muslim clerics were really smart, they would have decreed that anti-Muslims should read it. That way all of Islam's enemies would have died of boredom.)
     
  15. elte Valued Senior Member

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    I read the whole Catholic bible twice. The first time was also reading the study footnotes, and the second time was just the scripture text. It was a lot of time trying to get faith, and that was before I had access to the free ideas we can get since the Internet computer age.
     
  16. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    I read it through once... about 30 years ago. Genesis has some very good allegory, not so good on facts. Ecclesiastes is my favorite old testament book. And James is my favorite from the new.
     
  17. Trooper Secular Sanity Valued Senior Member

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    Luke contains four direct Isaiah quotations, so what? Where does it say that it was on the same day?

    Thanks!
     
  18. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    When I was in my mid to late 20's living in heart of the US bible belt, I read the bible all the way through, to debate the well versed but friendly locals. I had my own ideas, as a young agnostic and scientist, but I could not back up my ideas by quoting bible verses. The group expected a religious version of providing references like I would in science; I had to provide bible based references. I read the bible through so I could play.

    As I got to the end of the bible, in Revelations, I had figured out what I believed to be a clue, to solve the mystery of prophesies. Revelations said (paraphrase), if you add or take away anything that is written, the curses of prophesy will come to you. Most interpretations of the symbols add their own words, like I had been doing with collective symbolism, thereby being in violation of the warning. What I figured out was, the warning was not a warning, per se, but rather this was a clue as to how one could solve the mystery.

    Logically, one way to satisfy both conditions of the warning/clue, was to outline the entire bible and gather all the bible prophesy quotes. This way I would add nothing to take away anything. These were now like the pieces of a puzzle all mixed up in the box, having been scattered all over the bible. Using only these quotes (will not add or takeaway anything) I would rearrange all the pieces until they would tell a story. At that time, I had a large working knowledge of collective human symbolism. This was connected to reading and studying the collective works of Carl Jung. This allowed me to easily combine bible symbols into groups, which was useful for the puzzle. My approach began around the four horsemen, due to the cross=4 in Christianity. Like any puzzle, one can begin anywhere or in several placed at once, and then move from there as long as the piece fits.

    I was able to complete my version of the puzzle, in about 6 months. I am not saying mine is the only solution. I was still a scientist at this point thinking in terms of a challenge of my ingenuity. However, the finished product was very compelling to read. But by doing so, the words and sequence of events, triggered a major tweak in my brain's operating system for a lack of a better description. My mind become a microcosm of the events of prophesy, like a mystical psychosis, following its own path, with me, caught in the currents.

    Luckily I was knowledgeable of symbolism (signs of the times) and was of good heart, so I avoided sone bad choices that could have drowned me. I was never the same again, since process led to a purging of my working memory. After it ended I was like a child in paradise, but alone. I had to learn from scratch, through internal generation, so I could return to the world. I became uniquely odd but resourceful and creative because of it.

    In tribute to the Easter Season I will present my original outline to show how I solved the puzzle.

     
  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    W.H. Auden once claimed a love of the lists of names in the Old Testament of the King James Translation of the Christian Bible as a characteristic and sign of the true poet, at least in the English language. He wasn't obviously wrong, about that.

    As far as delving into deep and mystical comprehension of some reality beyond what all good storytelling and mythmaking traditions bequeath (which is fully enough for mortal man, IMHO), if you aren't working in the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, with a serious study of the forerunning myths and languages (Gilgamesh, etc), you're being obviously silly rather than subtly so.
     
  20. quinnsong Valued Senior Member

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    Oh the tale of Gilgamesh so much more detail than Genesis and he had a boon companion of the non Eve type.
     
  21. Arne Saknussemm trying to figure it all out Valued Senior Member

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    It helps me to see the unity of the thing, and what a strange and grande unity it is, a look at the mind of God! OF course, a mere mortal cannot grasp such a mind, so He mercifully puts a bit of it in manuscript form. It reminds me of the story where He places Moses in a boulder cleft and let's Moses see His back as He walks by. Because to see God face to face is to die. As C.S. Lewis put it, "When we shout 'author author' after a play, it means the play is over."

    As I have said, when you read the whole thing you can see the unity despite, or maybe even because, of the different ways God chooses to express Himself. It's akin to the way He allows the Hebrews to conquer Israel. Sometimes they must slog through a battle, other times they merely had to circle a city seven times and give a great shout, "and the walls came a tumblin' down." There's a tremendous richness of experience told of in the Books of The Bible. We see that God's ways are so much larger and complex than a mere man's. Also He is the main character and the hero of the Bible is God. He's the only character who is on stage beginning to end.

    I've been caling it 'straight-through reading, and you all know what I mean, but is it really that when I am reading it over months or years? My own moods and circumstances differ as I read. So it doesn't 'lend itself' to straight through reading, but who would expect it to? How would that even be possible?

    Part of what I was trying to express in my original post is how sometimes my daily circumstances oddly ( I will not say 'miraculously') fit to my daily reading. For instance, once we had spent the day moving house, and our new place was full of the swept-out musty smell of house moving and new house cleaning. I am sure you know this smell, and yet as I sit here now, I can't quite recall it. But when we smell it, we remember it well from the last time we smelt it. In the early evening I sat in my new reading spot to read my daily chapters, and it was the part where the priests clean out the Temple during Josiah's reign and discover "an ancient scroll". I could smell what the Temple must have smelt like that day!

    '
    You're right. And as late as the 1600's rich men would be willed their deceased father's collection of three books! What riches!

    We, however, are blessed to live in the Information Age, what the plow and the steam engine did for earlier people, the microchip has done for us. Have you checked out Project Gutenberg?

    Like I said, I am only human, my daily readings are in chunks similar to what you term ritual and liturgical sizes.

    '
    Whoa ho! I certainly disagree with you there, brother! Christian in The Pilgrim's Progress first words in that book are,"Eternal life!"

    I know you don't believe in such, but let's not get into all that right here.

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    Last edited: Apr 16, 2014
  22. Arne Saknussemm trying to figure it all out Valued Senior Member

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    I recommend an audio script in modern English, or whatever language you are most fluent in (English, I presume). These last two days I got thru half of Genesis in this way.

    http://www.biblegateway.com/resources/audio/

    Of course she did die, eventually, although it is not directly stated as in Adam's case because she was "merely a woman". In any case, what is meant is that Adam and Eve would have been immortal beings living in a state of perfect grace, had they not eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

    I don't take this story as literally true. Another advantage in reading and rereading The Bible is that what is allegory and what is historical (more or less) becomes clearer, although I won't say I have THAT all figured out!

    It's just like I don't subscribe to Eve's being the property of Adam, and all those other Old Testament ladies being mere chattel. I live in a different place and time where we (generally) take a different view.

    It's our good friend Mark Twain who gives Eve a deserving epitaph in his Diary of Adam and Eve. When she passes away in that tale, Adam remarks, "Where ever there was Eve, there so was Eden."
     
  23. Arne Saknussemm trying to figure it all out Valued Senior Member

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    Good and tasteful choices those. For better or worse, the fact is Christianity took the so-called Pauline route rather than the Jacobean (that of James, the brother of Jesus). The world would be a very different place if it had been otherwise. Perhaps an early brand of communism would have reigned, the church as it is described in Acts where all the brothers and sisters shared all they had with one another, even taking their meals together.

    So you know James' view, and in one of his letters, Paul goes to Jerusalem to meet James. it would be interesting to know what transpired. I have no idea, of course, but I kind of imagine Paul dominating and settling James' hash, so to speak, and telling him how the chips were going to fall. But who knows?

    As for Ecclesiastes, the Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft terms it the the key book of the Bible - it almost comes off as atheistic. It is the book that ask all the hard questions that the rest of the Bible (the keyhole, as he terms it) answers.
     
    Last edited: Apr 16, 2014

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