About a week and a half ago I finished doing something I’ve said I should do all my life.
I finished reading the Bible.
Old and New Testament, all 66 books and 800,000+ words, from “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth” to “The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.”
Of course, this obviously requires a few qualifiers. I grew up primarily in a Methodist church, so I’m speaking of the Christian Bible. To be more specific, the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). The NRSV is the revision that I grew up reading, even though it, like every translation of the Bible, has its proponents and detractors. I did not include the deuterocanonical / apocryphal books.
(And even though I said I read it all, I’m pretty sure my eyes glazed over quite a few begats in the genealogies…)
Purpose
The revision of the Bible I read is “The New Oxford Annotated Bible” (NRSV), a hefty volume roughly the same size as my dictionary and some of my older programming manuals. At over 800,000 words, it’s comparable in length to the entire Harry Potter series, or the Twilight saga, or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings mythos.
(Though I’m pretty sure it’s still dwarfed by Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, which took more than a lifetime to write, and probably takes just as long to read.)
So why did I choose to read this?
Shrug. It’s just always been a bucket list item since I was a child. I am not particularly religious, but was raised in a Methodist (and later Wesleyan) church. It seems sensible that at some point in my life, I should read the canonical book of my religion.
Besides, the Bible has been a major influence on Western literature and thought for centuries. Not reading it seems as handicapping for appreciating Western culture and civilization as not seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey would be for appreciating modern science fiction.
Methodology
My reading plan was a 52-week program I found online with a quick Google search. The attribution is to Michael Coley, with a provided URL of http://www.Bible-Reading.com.
This plan divides the Bible into seven categories: Epistles, The Law, History, Psalms, Poetry, Prophecy, and Gospels. As might be expected, the plan is for one reading a day (usually three or four chapters of a book), seven days a week, for fifty-two weeks.
I actually started in January, and finished just before my birthday at the end of June, by covering several days’ worth of reading each evening.
Thoughts
Reading upwards of twenty chapters per evening is a fast pace, and probably diminished my enjoyment of the process, but I also felt motivated to get through it at a rapid pace.
If you’re looking for a deep theological exploration, this blog post isn’t it. I have no formal training in theology.
My favorite book as a child was always Revelation, the last book of the New Testament. Its vivid apocalyptic imagery always captured my imagination. Strangely, I found myself not particularly interested in the other prophetic books, with the exception of the bizarre imagery in Ezekiel.
Nor did I really enjoy the History books, which seemed packed full of genealogies of people rarely mentioned again. Kings and Chronicles seemed more like a historical survey, often summarizing the rule of a king in less than a paragraph, and ending with wording to the effect of “and aren’t all his deeds recorded in the annals of the kings of Israel?” Well, I don’t know, book author: I don’t have a copy of the Annals of the Kings of Israel on my bookshelf (and if I did, I bet the archeologists and religious scholars would be beating down my door).
I was surprised to find that I enjoyed reading the Psalms and Poetry books, particularly Ecclesiastes. I also enthusiastically read through the books of The Law, which seemed to have more history than the actual historical books, and provided a window into ancient Hebrew religious practices.
Overall, I’m glad I’ve finally read it, and will conceivably do so again, though perhaps not with the same reading plan. One of the drawbacks of this plan is that it confuses the chronology: these books span many centuries, and I was left with a muddled picture of which kings came after which other kings, and how the historical events fell into the timeline.
However, the categorized approach of this plan has benefits over a straight front-to-back reading, which I had tried in my youth, only to lose interest somewhere around the beginning of Leviticus. There are also odd (or perhaps planned) congruities between the categories, sometimes with a mention of a ruler or event in the Law or History segments (theoretically on Monday or Tuesday) with a follow-up mention in the Prophecy, Gospels, or Epistles segments later in the week.
So if there’s a takeaway from this, it may be that your enjoyment in reading the Bible may vary greatly depending upon your approach to reading it.
pmcoltrane 