has anyone here ever actually read the whole Holy Bible?

But if you have that context, there's a hell of a lot of interesting stuff there. It isn't the least bit like picking up Hemingway or anything, though.

Comic books and root beer, I think.

Best version of Revelations ever.

I agree completely, Orbit, although I might underplay the mystic part and we might prioritize the rest differently. It's a tricky subject to really get the most out of, no matter what your motivation.

and if the actual bible is more trouble than its worth, as seems to be the consensus so far, are there any good books about the bible?

Remember that the various books (well, maybe not the Epistles) are based on oral tradition that someone only later wrote down. Presumably people familar with these texts reviewed the transcripts, but it's possible that some of these contain filler that no one would delete for fear of mutiliating the Word of God.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000003S1M.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

Sorry.

There are obviously lots of Good Books about the Bible. What are you interested in? A general overview? Something fair and balanced, or something more critical? The history in the Bible? The history of the Bible? Summaries of each book? I think we'll need specifics if you want help on books to read.

Getting back to the original subject at hand, yes, I've read the Bible (the real deal!) about two or three times. The last time was some seven years ago, sure, but I did read all the way through the Bible. In one of my religion classes from a long time ago (well, as far back as sophomore year of HS), you really struggled if you hadn't read at least 3/4 of the Bible, it was that tough. And like Ned, I too remember the Good News Bible from when I was a wee little tyke. I especially remember those drawings. Hm. I wonder if I still have that.

p.s.: The fact that I've actually read the Bible the whole way through proves handy when I'm shooting down one of those evangelical Protestants who think Catholics aren't true Christians and that we're going to hell.

All right, starting at the top. For the Bible itself, get the Oxford Study Bible -- few editions of the Bible have worthwhile notes or introductory essays, but this one is good, and the translation is good. It has the apocrypha as well, if I remember right.

I would also -- and of course you can get these things from libraries, many of them are not cheap -- get a Jewish translation (such as from the Jewish Publication Society) of the Tanakh (another word for Old Testament, sometimes preferred because "Scriptures" sounds like a religious endorsement and Jews would rather not consider it "Old" vs. a Christian "New" Testament). Translation issues always bring in doctrinal influences -- even the Revised Standard Version or the Scholars' Version of the Gospels, and it's a good idea to have both the Jewish and Christian-or-at-least-Christian-influenced views at hand.

The Bibles are mostly to have on hand so you can flip through and read the passage you're reading about in the other books I'll get to (doing this in chunks because I need to leave shortly and might not finish).

poor kid.

There is a book called "David" or "King David" which I don't remember the author of because it was a loaner and I've just returned it (naturally), but it's one of the only ones out there right now: it's ostensibly an examination of "what we can know" about King David of Israel (who may or may not have existed; my thesis said no, but I didn't finish my thesis). Along the way, it lays all the David stories of the OT out, points out weird discongruities between them (two different people kill Goliath; only one of them is David), and by necessity talks a good deal about the historical Israel and its place in the world.

Revelations sucks pretty hard, its horribly written even for the bible and its author is basically shitting himself silly with paranoia. I think it was Daniel that was much cooler even if the apocolypse wasn't as descriptive.

Fourth -- The Oxford History of the Biblical World. All the Oxford books related to this field are good, but this one is the best overview of the Biblical era. I don't remember offhand if it covers a couple of the things I think should be covered, so I'll just state them real quick and be all controversial and shit:

* There was never an Exodus, and the transformation from Canaan to Israel was the result of internal religious conflicts as a minority group of henotheists or monotheists -- those either advocating the worship of the God of Abraham over others, or insisting He was the only God (the OT displays both views) -- came into power and spent hundreds of years struggling to fight resurgences of polytheism. There is no evidence of a widespread exodus from Egypt, which archaeologically speaking is like saying there's no evidence of a bull in a china shop: it's a good indication that there was no such bull.

That isn't a universally held opinion, but it's growing in strength as more and more evidence accumulates to support it.

Who Wrote the Bible? isn't excellent, but if the above leaves you wondering, it's not bad. The other things I have here are things like Judaism: Practice and Belief 63BCE - 66 CE, which is an excellent book but not easy going.

i read it when i wz at college

also i just remembered it wz called "king jesus"

so possibly not what tep had in mind after all

Real quick overview of the Jesus Era: John Dominic Crossan's Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography is better than his longer books on the subject because it was written later and he absorbs some of the criticism of his earlier work. Crossan is probably the best in the field when it comes to accessibility, which is why his critics hate him so much. Some Marcus Borg, even though he largely agrees with Crossan, will balance that out.

Archbishop John Shelby Spong (Sprong? Why do I always forget which it is? Because his name is a sound effect, that's why) has a number of more 20th-century-mystical books about these issues. The history, when it's there, is either not great or taken from the other sources I'm mentioning. But the viewpoint is interesting, particularly from an Anglican of significant rank.

Avoid Elaine Pagels like the plague.

that reminds me: kate the saint where is my book about SATAN plz?)

it wasn't graves, i got confused (see above)

please continue talking about the bible, i'm off to work

i like the non cannonical gospels, find them moving and useful, enjoy their contexts and think that they are worth going into.

Who Wrote the Old Testament? might in fact be the one I'm thinking of. I wish I had more room to make my bookshelves organized :/

I'll do my best to slam Pagels (actually, it isn't a slam, as you'll see; her shadow is worse than her substance) in a bit, just got home and am depressurizing.

Revelations, Job, Daniel, Exodus = Classic

They fall into two categories.

First: her influence on academia. Pagels has published more work on gnosticism than anyone else; many scholars I otherwise respect, when they come up against gnosticism, just parrot the Pagels line and have done with it, even when the rest of what they're dealing with fundamentally disagrees with Pagels's assumptions.

And because she's so spammy and so well-known among laypeople, it's too frequently necessary to address her even when she isn't actually important to your discussion: she's the loudmouth in the back of the town meeting who keeps bringing up "them damn kids who keep stealing my pumpkins!" Except that over time, the loudmouth makes friends and they keep mumbling, "Goddamn kids, stealing Ted's pumpkins, wtf?" (p.s. all these people are Ally.)

The other major problem is her methods, which are crap. Pagels made her name on gnosticism, and she has stretched that butter thin enough to rip through several slices of bread. The general shape of her work goes like this:

1) Ideas X, Y, and Z are Gnostic ideas.
2) Texts are considered Gnostic if:
a) they contain ideas X, Y, Z
b) they originate with a community which identifies itself as Gnostic
c) they are used by a community which identifies itself as Gnostic
3) Ideas used in Gnostic texts are themselves Gnostic, and can be plugged into #1.

Even if you don't know what "Gnostic" is you should be able to see the glaring holes in that argument, and those holes are the essence of Pagels's work. She defines "gnosticism" both too vaguely and too specifically -- it was a fringe movement, and for the most part it wasn't even a movement, it was an approach which crossed boundaries of faith not because it's some transcendental religion which encompasses pagan faiths, Judaism, and early Christianity, but because it's simply a way to approach religion. Any religion. It's like attaching an "ism" to "going to a house of worship." Dualism, for instance, isn't inherently gnostic, nor is gnosticism inherently dualistic (which is the first mistake made by many writers tackling things in Pagels's wake). "Gnosticism" as a term is less specific than "Christian" is even today -- even if you include the whole spectrum, from the Orthodox and Catholic churches to American fundamentalists to Mormons.

There were specific systems of belief which were held by specific Gnostic groups; the shoddy scholarship surrounded Gnosticism too often tries to use independent systems of belief, from different Gnostic groups, to fill in blanks -- i.e., Group X thought A and B, Group Y thought C, so most likely they all thought ABC. That reasoning doesn't hold with non-Gnostic groups; there's no reason it should with Gnostic ones.

She will often take a text -- the Gospel of Thomas, say, or some of the Pauline epistles -- and, because it was used by some Gnostic groups, tag it as Gnostic, and then examine it from a Gnostic point of view in order to further describe Gnosticism. Again, there are so many errors with that logic I feel dumb pointing them out. People used texts. They frequently used them for purposes the author did not or could not intend (look at the handling of the Old Testament by Christians, where hardly anything has the same meaning it does for the parallel-developing Judaism).

The end result is a layers upon layers of muddying in the study of early Christianity/followers-of-Jesus-ism, gnosticism itself, and religions contemporary with rabbinical Judaism and early Christianity.

The worst thing about Pagels, really, is her effect/reputation, more than her work. I think every field has at least one person like that (arguably Turner for American history, although I like Turner so I don't want to say that).

I think I have a fairly good handle on what the God of the Holy Bible is all about at this point. I don't believe the real meaning is that there is a personal deity out there in the heavens who schizophrenically fluctuates between love and hate, gives people free will and then damns them to eternal torture. That is a combination of allegory and ill-conceived scare tactic meant to keep greater numbers of people on "the path", which is very much the same path other religions offer that seems to fall mostly on deaf ears again and again.

a) It means no calling your father a wino or your mother the old lady, even if they are.
b) It means to love your mother, even if she hollers at you, and try to understand she is tired from working all day. It means to try to love your father, even if you don't know him or where he is.
c) Maybe the others are OK, but this one is a real gasser -- honor my father and mother -- to hell with that, man!

Okay, I don't think I finished the Koran either but I only tried to read that online so it doesn't count and it wasn't boring coz it's very succinct.

I tried one of those Bible in a year reading plans but there was too much reading each day and once I missed a day or two there was too much catching up.

Most textbooks, actually, are pretty good surveys, especially if they were published in the last ten years or so. Ehrman's (spelling's not quite right there) on the NT is often available at chain bookstores.

I may be compiling a brief annotated bibliography on Christian doctrinal issues at some point; I'll post a pointer here if I do.

Well, disclaimer of sorts first: if not for Holy Blood, Holy Grail, I probably wouldn't have written my vampire book. That doesn't mean I thought it was good, though :)

I think there's something to be said for raising the question of whether the Grail-seekers were looking for an actual cup or not, and I think it's entirely possible they were looking for descendents of Jesus -- that just fits the Medieval mindset really well. That doesn't mean I'm willing to believe that Jesus's kids settled down in France, though :) (And is it in HBHG, or one of the books that references it, that you get the whole 'the Secret Masters of the World are descendents of Christ, zog zog zog' thing?)

When I'm feeling really bitchy about the History Channel, I usually compare them to HBHG, which is not actually fair.

I do remember the French Illuminati thing, I think it *was* in HBHG.

I've "read" the Bible around nine or ten times, all before I was 15, so I'm pretty sure I missed a lot. And come to think about it, I'm pretty sure I skimmed through the geneology sections "x begat y begat z etc) and Psalms nearly everytime. Song of Solomon is hilarious in retrospect, but to a sheltered kid growing up in an evangelical/apocalyptic household, "How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince's daughter! the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman/ Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies./Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins" was prepubescent schwing!worthy.

I'd like to go back through it again, though, for WTF thrills. Going through bits of Job recently, I was astonished that I never had noticed that Job, supposedly the only good man in Sodom, was so unhesitant in offering his daughters to the mob of, erm, Sodomites at his door to satisfy their sexual desires. When I was younger, I don't even think I really ever understood that the mob at the door wanted to ravish the nether regions of the visiting angels. I just thought they wanted to fight or something.

reading from the beginning of Genesis through to the end of Revelations is not worth doing and makes neither religious, literary, nor historical sense.

What would be the sensible way to read it?

I'm still partial to duetronomy's INSANE LAWS, it makes new england look like... well, whatever new england isn't.

Deauteronomy 25:11-12

(11) If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, (12) you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.

This is the kind of shit you really gotta read through the whole thing to pick out. That said, I've only read the good bits-- funner parts of the old testament, most of the gospel, revelations, job, etc etc etc. Everyone focuses on the boring bits, like... Paul's Letters To The Who Gives A Fuck, but the insanity of shit like Deut or Numbers or Rev is where the action truly is.

xpost, Sundar, the best way to read it is to read chunks at various times. Some stuff is so tertiary to the relevant stuff, that you should save it to the end or something. Example: Genesis and Exodus go first, maybe en Leviticus (its been a long time since I cared), but Deut/Nums are silly. The four gospels almost make more sense if you read them all at the same time, because it's four accounts of the (almost) same events. You can't read paul's letters in order. Psalms and Song can go at the end, because they're just nice little tings to say. Isaiah and Jeremiah should be read before the gospel, because they are the ones who say the gospel will happen, so it's kinda relevant, i guess.

LOL i spelled Deuteronomy wrong, like, EVERY TIME

i've read a lot more than is probably healthy. during sunday service as a kid i used to zone out and read either the hymn book or the bible, looking for stories with some violence or adventure or something, of which there's precious little. i couldn't be punished for not paying attention, getting it straight from the horse's mouth and all.

That wasn't Job, that was Lot.

Yeah Job got boils and shit, and his wife turned against him and he still kept the faith.

Isn't the more WTF part of the Lot story where his daughters can't find any good men, so two nights running they get him black-out drunk and hump him while he's passed out?

Yeah, that is messed up. No one's ever THAT blacked out, c'mon.

Plus, that proves that relying on the ol' "I was blacked out!" excuse was lame, even thousands of years ago. I'm sure he just told his buddies that later to save face.

I haven't read a lot of the OT. What's the point reading most of Numbers, Chronicle, Deuteronomy...

tried to read the whole lot in series aged about 12. This was a stupid and futile idea. Stopped somewhere in Numbers, which is essentially a Hebrew Domesday Book.

agree with all those who mention context above; what's the point of reading Revelation if you don't have a grounding in OT apocalyptic prophecy first?

I find the development of the canon to be a far more interesting topic than the actual content; "why did only four gospels make it?" and so on.

I can't help thinking that it would have been far better had the Council of Nicea stopped at the Gospel of John and not included the epistles as, well, Paul is a Tory (discuss).

I've read (or been read to) most of the old testament, and dipped into sparse parts of the new testament.

I actually found The Silmarilion by Tolkien harder going.

Which book is the Lot story in?

Genesis.

I dip into the OT occasionally, the good bits. Isn't a lot of NT just epistles and letters and instructions on how to set up a church and whatnot?

You want to read some bloodshed, check out those Mormon additions.

I read the OT when I was in my borderline Asperger's phase during my early teens and compulsively reading everything (although given I have a profoundly autistic sister, it's probably not even borderline).
There are some good bits i.e. Song of Solomon, God totally fucking Job's head up for a bet. There are some utterly mental bits i.e. most of it, but particularly the Apocrypha. And there are some just plain boring bits - Exodus is really tedious.

I've also read the NT - O Level Religious Education at a Roman Catholic Convent School will do that for you; we did a really close reading of Mark (along with a bunch of doctrinal stuff - no wonder Catholics are all either lapsed into atheism or rabidly devout; there really doesn't seem to be any middle ground) and a cursory reading of the rest. John is truly trippy reading, as is Revelation. The Epistles that were actually written by Paul (as opposed to those textual evaluation shows weren't but still get included in the NT) show him to be a really nasty piece of work.

I hate Paul.

I read it a few times, skipped the "begats" but I really dug Leviticus and the laws -- not in a "pearls of God's holy wisdom" way but more a fascination with the minutiae. Franky I prefer the OT, it's a cracking good dynastic story on par with, say, James Michener.

I haven't read even half, but a lot more of the NT than OT. The OT is very strange to me, lots of "WTF? Why is this included? What is it supposed to MEAN?" moments, so I wouldn't try to read it straight through. Only with the team effort of a bunch of books and some other people to talk about it with.

I hate Paul.

No Paul, no Christianity tho... debatably

I'm not too bothered about that, really.

I was just thinking about this illustrated children's version of the Bible I had. It was pretty huge for a children's book, but obviously the overall story was truncated.

Someone should do a graphic novel version of the Bible, or at least the parts that would lend themselves to the format.

...and after a quick Google search, I see there are dozens of comic book style versions of the Bible.

I still see that blue children's bible book in every doctor's office I visit.

i read the bible cover to cover when i was a kid - my parents were non-religious and it was really, really lame way of rebelling

when i was a kid, i was told that you had to believe in god to really understand the bible. that "scholars" would take it at face value and analyze it from a wrong perspective (a "scholarly" one, i suppose) and make fun of it - just like you sinners are doing now!

any way, i've read a lot of the bible. i grew up with religion, but secretly had a hard time believing any of it, and it was close reading of the bible as a teenager that sealed it and convinced me that everyone around me was completely insane - even the people who seemed way more mature and more intelligent than me.

that said, there are some good stories there. i still like the whole jesus-birth thing, with the wise men and all that. no need for the bible when Jesus of Nazareth does it so much better, though. the British jesus in that movie is cool and somewhat of a bad-ass. my friend and i used to have who-would-win-in-a-fight debates between jesus of nazareth, rambo, and conan the barbarian.

http://www.rejesus.co.uk/expressions/faces_jesus/facesj_media/b_jesus_nazareth.jpg

I've read the NT a couple of times and am fairly familiar with Genesis, Exodus, and the "Chronicles" section of the OT.

Some of the illustrated children's Bibles out there are really beautiful. I was obsessed with mine in seventh grade, when I also discovered the similar glories of Greek mythology.

I don't understand all the qualifiers in the responses here. Just enjoy it like any other uneven big book.

Well, it's fair to say that you understand the Bible differently if you believe in God than if you don't, if only because you approach it differently, with different goals and assumptions in mind. "Just enjoy it like any other uneven big book" is not the way a lot (probably the majority) of Christians or academics treat it, so it's not crazy that some of them think that there are right and wrong ways to understand it.

Also, I think Jesus Christ Superstar is the best source of religious teaching, not Jesus of Nazareth. JCS wasn't exactly badass but he had some awesome songs.

only that musical dared to imply that he might not be God or who people said he was! but it does rule...

I agree with those who suggest that it's better to read some stuff about the Bible before plunging into the text itself. Because the text itself doesn't give you many clues as to what the hell is going on or why any of it is being written like that.

But if you grew up vaguely religious (and Christian), then you can probably get through the New Testament without much difficulty -- it's much shorter than you'd think, and there are a lot of odder bits than you'd probably imagine, even before you get to Revelation. Like, say, Mark. Mark is a very odd gospel. But it's still probably better to know something about the issues at play in first century Judea if you want its oddness to make some sort of sense.

Which NT book is it where Jesus goes to the island with the crazy man possessed by evil spirits? And Jesus drives the spirits out of the crazy man and into a pack of wild boars? And then the farmers get all mad because now their boars are possessed?

Because that part was really great.

has anyone read all those other religious texts - the koran, the book of mormon, et al? how do they compare to the bible, readability-wise?

Oh, dude. I was in a thing called "Bible Bowl." For YEARS!

Whoa-HOH yeah not only have I read the entire KJV Bible, I've read all the Mormon scriptures: Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, & Pearl of Great Price. So I think I win the "most inured to potent soporifics award" if nothing else.

BOOK OF MORMON:
Starts out okay, Nephi is told by God to cut a guy's head off and take his sword. So: blood. Then a bunch of boring shit where Nephi's family is like "oh shit how we gonna get out of Jerusalem." This lasts about 80 pages. They try and get their family silver like FOUR TIMES. Nephi's brother's didn't have enough faith to attain their family's silver, they get chided by an angel.

"How we gonna get to promised land?" asks Nephi's family. Answer comes from God: magical UFO-shaped boats lit up by rocks that god's finger touched and guided by a compass that only works when the passengers are good. Nephi's brother's keep being dicks, takes forever to get to: South America.

Intermission: the book of second Nephi basically is Isaiah, with Nephi in between saying intermittently, 'I did often read to my children the words of Isaiah, for they are the words of God." Reruns, basically.

Nephi is a good guy in South America. His brothers Laman & Lemuel form bad guy splinter group the Lamanites who are "cursed with a dark skin" so the Nephites know not to marry them (son of Cain curse is a big Mormon thing too). AND kind of the rest of the book is wars between the Lamanites & Nephites. Alma, the largest book, is 240 pages and is all straight-up like Braveheart fanfic.

Other bits of note: Ammon is watching the king's sheep, someone tries to steal the king's sheep, Ammon cuts all the arms off of the thieves. He brings the pile of arms to the king (who is an heap-big 19th century Indian in every sense, it's south America duh) and uses this as an opportunity to explain Great Spirit is actually Jesus.

But mostly it's seriously alternating good Godly king/bad lamanite king chapter after chapter. Tedious!

In the end Jesus comes to South America, people believe in ZJesus 80 years, then they kill each other until the last Nephite in New York state on a big pile of the corpses of his peers lamenting "why why why oh man."

Mark Twain on the BofM:

"Wherever he found his speech growing too modern -- which was about every sentence or two -- he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as 'exceeding sore,' 'and it came to pass,' etc., and made things satisfactory again. 'And it came to pass' was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet."

OTM Clemens!

"it reminds me of the book of mormon." - harold bloom, on why he can't get through "lord of the rings"

http://b7.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/00442/75/22/442452257_l.jpg

Here I am with THE LAST NEPHITE. It was a pretty sunset at least.

Didn't these people know they brought their faith with them over from Europe?

Cute socks!

What a great thread! I tried to read the whole Bible because my mom wanted me to. My brother and I read it together, we skipped some of it and felt guilty. I had to take a Pentateuch class in h.s. We also read the entire New Testament to each other but we had that in school. We also used to play "church" with our friends where we open to a random section of the Bible and read it aloud, much hilarity.

I've only read Revelation all the way through.

How does it end?

Shh, no spoilers!

...but Snape kills Dumbledore.

How does it end?

Not too well for Jesus, but there's a twist!

I tried once when I was a kid, but the old-school language in King James bored me and/or went over my head. Probably still would today. I went like three pages

My brother and I LOVED Revelation, we'd study that one together a lot. We did the creepy prophecy books too. We also tried to listen to LPs backwards!

the bible reads like a christopher tolkien when you'd hope for a jrr tolkien tbh

You have just won life.

it's a project for brandon sanderson, maybe?

or yknow whatever that guy's name is

'mary tugged her braid, her face getting ever redder. the cheek of the man!' as this angelic messenger tries to get her to have rand al'thor's kid by proxy

I've just found out that Bart Ehrman, whose textbook on the New Testament I recommended upthread, has a bunch of books out and forthcoming on the childhood and early adolescence of the Christian church (okay, that's my terminology, not his). Based on his New Testament and Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, I feel comfortable recommending the rest of his stuff. He's an apocalypticist in the Jesus matter, iirc, and I'm very much not -- but that's an issue of opinion and interpretation, and not something I'd condemn anyone over.

Has anybody else here read Ehrman? I'm reading Ehrman's "Jesus: Apocalyptic Preacher of the New Millenium" and finding it fascinating (and brisk) thus far. Admittedly, I haven't foraged this deeply into such topics before, so I have a lot of ground to cover, but I enjoy how he breaks down the beliefs shared by much of his scholarly community in ways easy for laymen to read.

If anybody else has read Ehrman here, are the other books of his you recommend? Or other authors on the same topic?