Tags
atheism, Context, contextualization, Interpretation, Jesus, religion, Scripture, The Bible, The Holy Spirit
I always wonder what it means to ‘read the Bible’. The question comes to mind when people tell others to read the Bible; when they say they’ve read the Bible, and when they ask others if they’ve read the Bible. These questions and comments often seem intended to pack an extra bit of punch; something of value always seems to rest on them. But the phrase ‘read the Bible’ could mean anything from reading random passages to a kind of epic cover-to-cover journey. It could also mean reading specific (and very deliberately chosen) sections at length. Hell, it could mean a few other things too, but for me those are the ones that come to mind.
We could also talk about different versions of the Bible. It certainly matters what translation you look at.
The random passage reading approach is always interesting to me. People using this approach open the book randomly and read what’s in front of them in the belief that they may be led (perhaps by the Holy Spirit) to some significant passage that will help them resolve a question or a problem of some sorts. It’s a fascinating approach to reading, one which gives the process more than a little trace of divination.
…a bit like palm reading or crystal gazing.
Which reminds me that I’ve been told many times one must be guided by the Holy Spirit to interpret the Bible correctly. Whatever else this claim means, it usually also means that my own heathen reading skills won’t account for much on Biblical topics, at least not in the ears of the person telling me this. This may be a trip down the fallacy highway with stops in the Cities of Petitio and Ad Hominem-Circumstantial. It’s also a world in which spiritual powers and personal authority cut right across basic reading and reasoning skills, and parsing a simple sentence becomes an act of communion.
Do we want to get into the whole question of sola scriptura versus the authority of the Pope or some other religious authority?
No.
I mean, we could, but seriously, let’s not.
I sometimes wonder at the degree to which the simple physical act of opening the book could skew this divination-reading approach to the topic. I mean just how often would you land on one of the first or last pages when you try this? And if you did, would it be due to a conscious effort on your own part or guidance by …you know who?
Ah well!
What actually started me down this path was a slightly more mundane question. Do you read the whole thing or do you simply read parts? People often claim to have read the Bible. I think some folks are just bluffing really. It’s a big damned sleeping pill of a book, and I somehow doubt that some folks could actually make it from cover to cover. A much more interesting question though would be whether or not it’s actually worth it to do that? To just read the Bible cover-to-cover.
Now a serious Biblical scholar might get something out of such a reading; he presumably already knows a lot about the context behind the text. I’m talking about your average Jane just sitting at home with as much knowledge of the text, it’s language, and its relevant histories as regular life gives your average Jane. Okay, I know the average Jane is itself a tricky concept, so let’s just say that in my mind she’s a middle-class American with a high school diploma (and perhaps a college degree). She watches a lot of TV, and she’s been to church a few times in herlife; perhaps she even goes regularly. You can skew this Jane-image in whatever direction you like. The point I’m trying to make is that their daily lives haven’t prepared most people (including I’ll warrant most people who claim to have read the Bible) to understand what they are reading as they go skipping along the pages of scripture. Without giving necessary consideration to the linguistic and literary traditions encompassed in the book as well as the (often murky) historical context in which the texts were written and/or translated, I don’t see how any substantive understanding (inspired or otherwise) could come out of the epic cover-to-cover reading quest. People have enough trouble getting the cool parts from Shakespeare. I somehow doubt this even older text is more transparent on first or even a third pass. No, I can’t see reading the Bible working without a lot of side reading as you go.
And somewhere in there, I can’t help thinking this ceases to be about ‘reading’ and starts to become an exercise in ‘studying’.
I’m not just saying you can do some extra study to get more out of the Bible. What I’m saying is that the exercise of simply reading that text is a rather meaningless ritual without the studying. …Okay, so perhaps the ritual does have meaning (Holy Spirit and all that) but if it does have meaning, that meaning has little to do with what we conventionally understand to come from the act of reading. I am accordingly unimpressed when people tell me that they have read the Bible cover-to-cover. When people tell me they have read the Bible, I figure this is either a hollow exercise or an occult activity with principles quite different from those of conventional reading skills. When someone tells me that they study the Bible, well that might be interesting…
It might be.
An evangelical Christian might be tempted to think that this meditation is a trap of sorts, because of course that process of study leads one to an awful lot of perfectly mortal sources of authority. How can one truly learn the word of God if doing so requires one to make decisions about alternative translations, assess the historical context based on books written by mere mortals (some of whom may not even be Christian!), and make a number of choices oneself about how to frame the context of understanding any particular passage. Far from a discrete project, the effort to study-up on the topic if a potentially infinite regress. Most believers aren’t going to want to do that any more than the rest of us. In any event, this process will never lead to anywhere near the conviction that this or that moral principle is the absolute and unvarnished word of God. For myself, I’m comfortable with that, and I suspect there are a few liberal Christians that could say the same, but I don’t think the notion that the Bible is the infallible word of god survives this process. More to the point, I don’t think that notion survives any serious attempt to think about what it takes to understand an historical text like this.
That’s my spirit-unfulfilled 2 cents.
northierthanthou 
Cover to cover or in pieces, it’s still a load of mythological nonsense and bad ideas.
Couple things:
1. It is important to remember that the human authors of Scripture came from ancient and sophisticated story telling traditions. Like any good story-tellers, they leave some of the story for the reader to figure out – it is much more powerful that way. An example: in the Pentateuch, stories involving polygamy *always* contain a tragedy of some sort related to that second wife. It would be stupid story-telling to have the author say: ‘and thus, we know polygamy is bad’ – that’s not the way it works. A lot of problems and misunderstandings people have in reading the Bible come from looking at it as a collection of passages, rather than stories and episodes being told by master story-tellers. And yes, one needs to study some to appreciate this.
2. order matters. Reading from cover to cover isn’t really a good order for a Christian understanding. For that, you’d start with the Gospel of John, then the Synoptics, then the letters, saving Hebrews for last, and Revelation until after you’ve read Daniel. Why? Because John lays out the overarching theology of Christianity, the stories of Jesus’ life in the Synoptics are really hard to understand without John; then the Epistles translate that theology and those stories into day-to-day life. Hebrews relates all this back to the Old Testament. Daniel is the type for Revelation.
Anyway, it is study. Readings are best done liturgically, where they can both be seen in the context of Christian worship, and explained (one hopes) by someone who understands them better. Given that context, then personal reading makes sense. Otherwise, as you say, it’s really hard to get much out of a lot of Scripture.
Anyway, my 2 cents.
Just a word to fill out one of the issues you raised. We don’t have an “original” bible. Not even the New Testament, let alone the Hebrew Bible. Regarding the former, what religious scholars of history tell us is that Jesus and his followers were illiterate (as was most everyone else). They spoke Aramaic. The people who first wrote down the four gospel stories came later and didn’t witness any of the events of Jesus’ time directly. Early versions of the New Testament were in Greek, a language not typically spoken in the area of the events. No copy machines existed, so copies were made by scribes who made errors and added, subtracted, or changed things depending on how they approached the task. Hundreds of years passed this way. Nor do the four gospel stories agree with each other. I’ve never met a devout believer who cared at all about any of this. If they did, as you suggest, they might begin to have some doubts about the “word of God.” A rational approach to the topic cannot be expected to anyone who approaches the text as an act of faith. People believe because they want or need to believe. They think of reasons to justify their opinions AFTER forming those opinions, as is evident in the political arena, as well. There is actually a good deal of psychological research supporting this view of how people arrive at their opinions. We aren’t nearly as rational as most of us believe.
I have found it a pretty good predictor of the results of a “serious” reading of the bible. It often more then any other variable comes down too the mindset the reader takes into it.
If, like in my case you have real questions and some doubts creeping in, as you begin your journey into the book, your faith will crumble around you.
However, if like many ultra devout believers, like my brother, they go in simply looking for confirmation and NOT answers, confirmation bias takes over and it simply becomes an exercise in finding the parts that fit, and the parts that don’t are simply noise that are unconsciously ignored.
While MANY atheists are created by reading the bible, it is NOT the first thing that is needed for that to work, getting them from seeking answers and not just confirmation is the first and most critical item.
Obviously most do not carefully read the Old Testament because what the Hebrews did in many instances is exactly what ISIS is doing now and they did it because their god told them to do so, destroy numerous cities and kill everyone in them, including women and children. Occasionally, virgins escaped because this same god told the men to save them and marry them, thus forcing young women and girls to marry the exact same men who killed all the rest of their families. This is the same god usually referred to as God /Allah by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Is this the kind of world most westerners here want? I am beginning to think many actually do.
I’ve “read” the Bible many times over a very long stretch of time. By “read” I mean every writing within the the covers that are considered canonical and reading them from start to finish, no jumping around looking for the good stuff. But I have also read many times each of the so-called non-canonical writings including translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library. Fascinating, all of it. And I agree with your statement somewhere in your post that reading becomes studying. And that involves learning about ancient cultural and historical facts and more.
I’ll have to disagree with you that the Bible is a sleeping pill of book. There are some damn funny stories in there that a Chaucer could make even funnier. Genesis is loaded with them. Well, at least God doesn’t show up as a swan in any of them.
I’ve read the Book of Mormon (last winter, three times) and while the Bible has its faults, editorial defects, and deficiencies the BoM is no Bible.
I guess there are people who have read the Bible, like “A Really Small Farm” above. I have never met anyone who has actually read the Bible, or at least disclosed such to me. Not a single person in all my life. Ah, the company I keep!
I am an old Jew, in my late 70s. I have never read the bible in English. But I have read the old testament in Hebrew a number of times. If you’re interested, I would suggest that you start at the first page and read it right through, reading it with good sense, and all you’ve learned about life up till now, and trying not to have any prejudice or preconceptions. I think you’ll understand it quite well. But if you run into a passage that doesn’t make sense, it might be worth your while to try some commentary. There is probably more than enough on the internet. I see it as a valuable testimony regarding man… more than it is regarding god. In my eyes, learning about god is like learning about nature. We all do it in our own way. And none of us learns the subject from cover to cover.
psst that leafing and reading thing is called Bibliomancy ha
And I have read multiple versions of it cover to cover, the names and the cubits parts are hard to slog thru as i can’t visualize them and i often wonder if i am to take all of this literally, as some read the bible what this has to do with current times. However, it seems when i try to do the Socratic method with it all persons glare at me. so then I say uhm well aren’t i supposed to want to know it’s IN there and isn’t all of reading it a thing God is teaching me. And ‘they’ say no don’t be so literal. And I say OH you mean i can make up what God said in the infallible book? and they get angry and try to help me
So then i say but a lot of persons who wrote the things in the bible were truly nuts. And they say yes God used them. So i say ohhhhhhhhh ok well then i can get more current direction if i visit the psychotic ward, but how do i know which ones are sick and which ones bear truth.
I am so not being a jerk. I really mean these questions and it seems there are no answers. It’s a let down. It’s good for me to be understanding and not always be trying to be understood you know?
Back in my teenage years, I was really active in the youth groups of my liberal Protestant church. The lessons we had said all kinds of things about the bible, how it was god’s message, could improve your life, should constantly be consulted, etc. etc. (This wasn’t a literalist church, there wasn’t any emphasis on believing that the obviously mythological parts were literally true.) “Read the bible” was a constant exhortation, but the “bible study” sessions would only focus on a few carefully selected parts, and gloss over the rest. And we never really “studied” it, we’d just read a small extract and then discussed how it applied to our lives, or some such rubbish.
So I decided to read the whole thing for myself, and I started with the modern paraphrase translation. Once I got through that, I started over and read the whole KJV, just to be sure. This process actually took several years to get through. I started as a believer, not with any bias toward disbelief. Once I was done, I started thinking about the things that people were saying about this book.
“it will inspire you” – nope.
“It will help you as a guide to life” – also nope.
“It has the answers you need” – no it doesn’t.
“God will speak to you through this book” – that clearly hadn’t happened. It was a confusing inconsistent mish-mash. If that’s the way a god would choose to speak to me, then god’s a lousy communicator. And If I need to do an in-depth study of the culture and language of the time to be able to understand it, then that’s another weakness. If an all-powerful god wanted to get his message to humanity, you’d think he could come up with something better than this book.
“it’s all inspired by god” – seriously? There’s a lot of it that was clearly written by people trying to justify their own monstrously bad behavior by claiming “God commanded it”.
So going through the initial “ritual” of reading it without any outside study revealed the simple fact that it wasn’t anything like it was claimed to be. That was one important factor in my deconversion, and I’ve heard many similar comments from other deconverts. So I do recommend to christians that they read their bibles, cover to cover, because they will probably be surprised and disturbed by what they find there.
“People trying to justify their own monstrously bad behavior by claiming “God commanded it” Some things never change.
To paraphrase Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and religion.
When I was a child I made a couple of very weak, not-even-half-hearted stabs at reading the Bible.
I first tried just starting with Genesis and reading like a book (I read books voraciously as a child), but after all the Garden of Eden mythology I was bored with what seemed to be an interminable census report with some characters reported to live a few centuries longer than seems plausible.
Discouraged with this approach, I gave up on Bible reading until a few years later, when (at around the age of 10) I decided to try your “open-to-a-random-selection” more casual approach. Each time I opened it up, I was further discouraged. Most days I opened up to inane moralistic preaching. Then one day I made the mistake of opening up to King Solomon.
Solomon’s VERY FIRST priority as king was murder.
The same man Christians use as a metaphor of wisdom was so blood-happy he made his first kingly task the murder of other men.
I had to put the book down, not to re-open it until adulthood, at which time I firmly knew that I was opening a book recounting mythologies of hate, instead of expecting to reap wisdom or truth from it.
(I think this story is in Kings – but I really don’t know because as you can tell I do not know the Bible, since I want as little to do with this horrible thing as possible!)
Since then, I’ve casually learned that Solomon, had he existed, would have been (apart from a violent political tyrant) a serial rapist of the most horrifying kind.
I have an e-book version. Sometimes I read it on long car rides to Mr. Muse, raising and shaking my fist with each instance of “The Lord”, which of course makes us both laugh. I got it because a highly religious acquaintance kept saying “In the Bible it says this…” or “In the Bible, God did that…” and as they refused to produce proof, we started looking that stuff up. Usually, they were wrong.
I was blessed by the Holy Spirit to read and understand the Bible literally. As I’m sure you know, God wrote the KJV Bible, and all others are frauds. As all good Christians know (Matthew 10:34) “Think not that I [Jesus] am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” Or if you didn’t get your Jesus sword (I seem to have misplaced mine), there’s always Luke 22.36.
All Christians know that the Bible is TRUE, and they all have swords as demanded. Somewhere in all their reading, they seem to have missed that people don’t turn into angels when they die. Furthermore, angels don’t have wings (nor can they earn them). As we all know, if it’s not in the Bible, it never happened or it doesn’t exist.
Something nearly all Christians fail to appreciate is the beautiful feathers in their wings, something that God denied to angels. (Psalms 91:4) “He [the Lord] shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.” Couple this with (Genesis 1:26-27)”…So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them….” So, not only do humans have wings, God is a hermaphrodite. If the Bible says it, we know it is the TRUTH.
It seems a shame that you will never know how blessed you are to have wings.