Blogging the Bible: Preliminary Remarks

First: The idea of blogging the Bible isn't original. David Plotz did a great job of it at Slate (Hebrew Bible only). Those Bibles that are divvied into a year of readings were an inspiration... though I hope to make my way through both Testaments faster than that. I'm reading a Revised Standard Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: in it, the length from "In the beginning" (Genesis 1:1) to "Amen" (Revelation 22:21) runs to 1,500 pages. So at 50 pages a day, a fellow could polish off the book in a month. Which I have no intention whatsoever of doing. So let's say I intend this to take me more than a month, and less than a year.*

[*ed. note: After taking a cracking start at this project, I hung it up for fully a decade before returning to it in 2019. So much for "more than a month and less than a year". Also, as I learned more about the Bible I have expanded upon the multiple versions I'm reading, and side-books I'm consulting. So by now, my main text for the OT is the JPS Tanakh - and in that version, the one "old" testament by itself is 1,500 pages.]

Enough for insipid preliminaries. How about two non-insipid preliminaries? (1) Why am I reading the Bible? And therefore (2) How do I propose to read it?

Why am I reading the Bible? All my life I've been astonished by how ubiquitous but yet hidden this book is. It is claimed earnestly and often that the Bible is the ground of all morality, the basis of civilization, the instruction manual for life, and - under any definition - far and away the most important document in existence. Apparently about half of American adults call it "totally accurate in all of its teachings." For what it's worth, there's a copy in every hotel room in the Western world (the Gideons have distributed half a billion Bibles in the past ten years alone), and the average US household is said to own three copies. You certainly can't watch television at 3am, or die with dignity after entering a persistent vegetative state, without rubbing elbows with this book. But for all that, what are these "totally accurate" teachings of the Bible? And how many of us have even truly read the thing?

Selected passages and spoon-fed ministerings won't do. After all, if this is a sacred document passed down by God, then surely every bit counts. Say what you like, but the Bible is is not short, and it is not straightforward (if it was intended as an instruction manual, then perhaps God could have benefited from a class in technical writing). Of course, you'd never guess the Bible is a complex document by listening to TV preachers at 3am. If they're any guide to Biblical exegesis - which I hope they aren't - the 1,500-page tome boils down to (a) ten commandments, (b) John 3:16, which combine into the stupefying pronouncement that (c) the same loving father who made us all in his own image will commit you, personally, to eternal torture unless you... Unless you what? We'll want to get that one right; there's certainly enough riding on it.

Well, unless you accept the doctrine - because unlike other religions, with more cultural or ethnic bases of admission, being Christian necessarily and sufficiently means accepting a set of propositions. Among them is to accept the complete accuracy of the Bible. But the practice of Christianity, as we find it relayed to us, consists of much more. We're to subscribe to the Trinity, the church, its sacraments, to witnessing and mission-making, the opposition to abortion and homos, and denial of evolution, and Republican-party membership. There's a blizzard of stuff all essential to being Christian today, at least in America, and the bulk of it is not in the Bible. Very little about Satan in there, for instance, and the hell and afterlife it hints at (they are only hinted at) tend to jibe badly at best with the tale we're told by megachurches.

"Accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior" - even as wildly popular a phrase as that one is nowhere to be found in the Good Book. It's shocking, how tenuous the link is between Christianity as observed around us, and its foundational document. That goes in both directions. Regardless of sect, there's plenty of stuff in Christian practice that's not in the Bible, and plenty of stuff in the Bible wholly dropped from Christian practice.

So that's something I want to look into by reading the Bible. What's in the thing, come-again? Very few of us are bothering to check, including those of us who claim loudest to be cleaving close to its every word.


How am I reading the Bible? Literally, or literarily?  Our evangelico-fundamentalist friends insist the book be taken word-for-word at face value, in the form God intended it be read (translated to English at the time of Shakespeare from Hebrew and Greek medieval manuscripts).

But! Cross-eyed literalism is also insisted on by the "New Atheists"... or at least I'm told... who ignore the profundity and subtlety of religious mystery in order to rack up "gotcha"s. Well, I admit I'm as entertained by Biblical "gotcha"s as the next atheist. But I'll seek to get more than that from the experience of reading the Bible.

I just finished Karen Armstrong's The Bible: A Biography, and would like to take to heart the thoughtful and contemplative exhortations of this good and serious person. The Bible has given much to many over a long time; and though an outsider myself, I'd like to come to as clear an understanding of the Bible on such terms as these as I can.

If I may expand: I may not believe the universe is ultimately anthropomorphic (which I call atheism), but that doesn't deprive me of the empathy and moral sense which are the bequest of our common humanity, nor the yearning to connect with something beyond myself. If you want to call these things spiritual, okay. And it is in that line that I intend to let my "exegetical attitude" take its own shape in the actual reading of the Bible. This is neither to say I want to pretend at appreciation for a lot of falsehoods, dogma, and wooly absurdities just to seem ecumenical and inoffensive. I reserve the right to make fun of dumb shit. So whatever balance making-funnery finds against reverence, it will find as I go, I guess.

I do believe the Transcendent is degraded as sought through consultation with a magical man in the sky. Let alone a creepy magical man who orders relentless deaths and seems more obsessed with our sexual behavior than we are ourselves. So while bearing in mind the peace and enlightenment so many have sought in the Bible, neither can I ignore that it is laced throughout with threats, ignorance, violence, superstition, tribalism, and undeniable falsehood: all the stuff you'd expect from a bronze-age text written by a people spending their time variously as desert nomads and as prisoners in a barbarian empire. In other words, I don't blame what's wrong with the Bible on the Bible, or the people who wrote it. They were living in 200 BCE, give or take 400 years, for Pete's sake. But I do blame people alive today - and who should have been apprised of such things as electricity, the germ theory of disease, and the sphericity of the Earth - who trick themselves through cognitive dissonance and willful ignorance into believing this book is the last word on anything. Anything whatsoever. Truly, the Bible is a book full of mystery. The mystery is: why does anybody take this book seriously? Let's see what we can see.