Reading the Bible. It's hard.

[DaRKMsOul18]

Never mind!

I decided not to give up.

 

[nowwhat]

The Bible is God's Word. It only works in conjunction with Him giving the reader understanding on-the-fly (so to speak). Without His Holy Spirit in you, it can seem a lot of gobbeldygook.

Experiment: Ask Him for understanding, with sincerity and maybe start with the Gospel of John.

 

[tree]

I would have said Proverbs, myself.

A good little book of accumulated wisdom
of the tribal elders.

 

[Fridgemagnetman]

Jesus compressed it down to two things.

Just do that.

 

[DaRKMsOul18]

All 3 of you are late to the party, I decided not to give up.

I will never give up on God.

But, I must lower my expectations, I can't just expect to understand everything.

I have recently, a few weeks ago, accepted Jesus into my heart. Now I must read the Bible, starting with the Gospel of Mark.

 

[DaRKMsOul18]

All 3 of you are late to the party, I decided not to give up.

I will never give up on God.

But, I must lower my expectations, I can't just expect to understand everything.

I have recently, a few weeks ago, accepted Jesus into my heart. Now I must read the Bible, starting with the Gospel of Mark.

Maybe it's because I'm reading it on my phone. Phones are not good for this.

 

[tree]

All 3 of you are late to the party, I decided not to give up.

I will never give up on God.

But, I must lower my expectations, I can't just expect to understand everything.

I have recently, a few weeks ago, accepted Jesus into my heart. Now I must read the Bible, starting with the Gospel of Mark.

I'm not late for anything.

This is what I was thinking, too:
"I can't just expect to understand everything."
That you were holding yourself to an unrealistic
expectation.

And that with time, you would modify your position.
Realize that it wasn't an all or nothing/pass, fail
sort of thing.

 

[DaRKMsOul18]

I read 2 chapters of the Bible and understanded them well, Jesus healed many people and got apostles to join him, is a quick summary of Mark 1-2.

 

[Propianotuner]

Jesus compressed it down to two things.

Just do that.

Then why the thousands of pages? They're unprofitable, extraneous overflow? Christians should get by on the cliff notes version? It's harmful to the Christian spirit to be "overly intellectual"?

Modern Christians really perplex me... Especially many of the American associations and denominations. There are quite a few centuries of rich and involved dialogue preceding these people with their KISS attitude, i.e. "keep it simple stupid".

If people were supposed to just keep it simple you'd think the Bible wouldn't have thousands of pages full of many extremely complicated subjects.

 

[pjcnet]

The Bible was written entirely by various human beings at a time of extreme superstition and yet it's treated almost like a God wrote it, it's also been altered so many times over the centuries and many things will have been lost in translations while sometimes making it easier for the current people to understand, although every time it's altered part of the original meaning is lost. I also believe that many of the stories were just that "stories" that had morals and meanings, E.g. the story of Noah's Ark, I very much doubt many of them were ever meant to be taken literally. Much of the Bible also contradicts itself in different books, for instance "thou shalt not kill" is supposed to be one of the most important of the 10 commandments, but it's perfectly okay for God to mass murder people if you truly took the story of Noah literally with the flood and what does that say about forgiveness that is also preached in the Bible?

Some of the Bible that is barely ever preached is actually an ancient law book that for instance lays out compensation owned for the loss of an animal that's stolen, obviously this is extremely outdated to say the very least, but people still see everything that is written in the Bible as something that must be followed, E.g. the ultimate truth. Please see Bible Gateway passage: Exodus 22 - Good News Translation for more. It's very sexist with the word "he" with an important exception. What about "“Put to death any woman who practices magic."? This is why women were tried and killed (in my opinion murdered in terrible ways) for allegedly practising witchcraft and why just women, it's extremely sexist to say the least, but the witch hunters were only following the word of the Bible and therefore must have being doing good and God's work? If this was still followed Spiritualism would still also be illegal under The Witchcraft Act in Britain as it used to be not even that long ago. This is just one example of how the indoctrination of religion can become extremely dangerous and again this totally contradicts "thou shalt not kill", these types of things are just a few of the Bible's many flaws, there's a few similar examples where the punishment is also death. The following is to make people respect and follow people high in power and there's no talk of exceptions, "Do not speak evil of God, and do not curse a leader of your people.", so in that case no-one should have spoken against King Herod or the leaders that allegedly put Jesus to death because they were the leaders of the people too? I could talk about Bible contradictions for ages.

 

[Observant]

@pjcnet

For me it isn't about the contradictions -- life is full of them. For me, it's the "Love and believe me or go to hell" aspect. How can true love exist when given an ultimatum like that?

Also, a lot of religious charitable people will perform an act of kindness and give the glory to God for riches in heaven, but I think it would be better to perform an act of kindness and say: "It's because I care about you" and expecting nothing in return.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for me (as a former Christian). But I will say that studying the bible for 5 years has helped me get to where I am today. It feels liberating.

 

[Dr. Smart]

I've never really gotten around to reading the bible, I used to be curious and wanted to have knowledge of it for use in debates but nowadays I'm less interested in arguing over a book that I already know is full of contradictions and outdated ideas on how the world works and how people should behave.

If your looking to read the bible and you notice a contradiction, or a point of confusion, or something you know is morally wrong don't just ignore it, make a note of it, and ask yourself why a perfect all powerfull god would allow this to be the version of his own message received.

 

[Progster]

I had a children's Bible that I read from cover to cover as a child. It was a good read, a fantastic story book, but nothing more. I do now realise that there is deeper meaning behind it than just stories, some may have some truth buried deep within the mythology, others are just too incredible to be true.

 

[Propianotuner]

Some pleasant brain food for reading and thinking in a thread about reading:

The Bible was written entirely by various human beings at a time of extreme superstition and yet it's treated almost like a God wrote it, it's also been altered so many times over the centuries and many things will have been lost in translations while sometimes making it easier for the current people to understand, although every time it's altered part of the original meaning is lost.

Hmmm... Let's take some of this stuff out of it's dense packaging and off of dusted, unseen shelves, as it's entirely common to see such perspectives as this but let's not kid ourselves: it's entirely too uncommon to see similarly thoughtful presentations to the contrary.

Not to sound caustic or condescending but your suggestion that so much has been lost in transmission is as unhelpfully oversimplified and misinterpreted for people unfamiliar with textual criticism, the history of literature, and historiography as much of what is churned out in popular science articles today. I'll endeavor to explain as much as I've had the pleasure to learn with clarity and brevity, but you'll have to forgive me as there's entirely more to cover than I ever could in a forum post; with that purpose in mind I sadly only have the time and space to cover some of the history of the NT text, leaving how we arrived at modern urtexts like the monumental academic achievement which is the Hebraica Stuttgartensia for another time.

While the fact absolutely stands that there are examples of impressively corrupted texts, the general truth remains that most textual variants in the NT happen to be examples of minor spelling differences, or in the case of later manuscripts typically written by a more experienced and educated amenuensis/scribe easily recognizable examples of monastic Byzantine scribes accidentally skipping lines (also prevalent was similar readings from other Gospels being instead written from memory while translating or copying the contents of the Synoptic Gospels) on account of their taxing, repetitive work done typically while a high ranking monastic clergyman such as an abbot stood at the head of the Scriptorium reading slowly from a carefully guarded source text.

A fact about academia which may startle a lot of careful thinkers today like yourself is that it's generally accepted that the Bible is perhaps the most well preserved text, and this is agreed to even by members of the famously skeptical and atheist/agnostic leaning Jesus Seminar such as Dominic Crossan and Bart Ehrman. This is because of the current state of methodology in the fields of historiography (the study of how history is preserved and communicated, and how to gauge the 'historicity' or veracity of any given historical fact), and textual criticism (the study of the transmission, preservation, and translation of literature throughout history) and the true nature of the actual body of biblical manuscripts studied by scholars today: it is an utterly enormous body of manuscripts unrivaled by any other historically important literary corpus and while there are variations we simply possess so much text and the relationships therein are fairly plain to see for disciplined researchers.

As stated before, there are exceedingly few variants that actually changed the syntactic or figurative content of a given excerpt and the one example that happens to still figure much in debates over textual criticism is an example from Hebrews of which it's more often than not considered questionable whether it does indeed have theological ramifications. What has been observed that is impressive for scholars so far as the quality of the text and the ability of modern translators to come up with a decent representation of what was given to the original audience, is how there are actually traditions which typically can be traced back to regions or groups by reference to the earliest examples and scribes were persistent and stubborn enough that the variants remained virtually the same across tremendous time spans.

The primary traditions are the Western, Caesarean and Byzantine texts. The Western tradition hails back to early texts which managed to find their way all the way into further stretches of the Empire such as Spain in the first three centuries. The Caesarean text is more well represented in the earliest Near Eastern manuscripts originating mostly from Palestine and Syria. The Byzantine tradition on the other hand is mostly credited to the efforts of scribes in Alexandria, Egypt.

So, to sum things up: most alterations are minor spelling differences and simple errors (with a vanishingly small portion that constitute more of a problem as well as historically isolated incidents of interpolation still under dispute, for reference see the Johannine Comma); these textual variants have been remarkably consistent throughout time to the point that they are considered scribal traditions; and to cap it off there is no more heavily copied and preserved literary collection than the NT so modern scholars have little trouble comparing the bulk of manuscripts as a whole when conducting their research or producing modern translations.

 

[Propianotuner]

I also believe that many of the stories were just that "stories" that had morals and meanings, E.g. the story of Noah's Ark, I very much doubt many of them were ever meant to be taken literally.

The whole modern Western preoccupation with whether or not something is to be taken literally/verbatim is sadly one of the most egregious examples today of anachronism when people read what is unquestionably the most influential ancient literary collection in the world.

For starters, the expressions 'literal' and 'literally' themselves are detrimental to understanding here because such concepts were foreign to ancient and classical period thinkers in the Near East. For a piece of text to be purely communicating concepts either verbatim or allegorically would have been regarded as sterile and virtually meaningless to the original audience for the text. Authors often could shift from one mode to the next as they transitioned from one account to another seamlessly and they used clear methods to cue their reader into which relevant contemporary genre they were writing in so that readers had accepted guidelines for navigating the question we now pose today of "is it literal or not". To write artfully and expressively was considered a requirement for effectively communicating ideas in literature, and it has to be remembered that in a world with extremely limited numbers of literate people texts had to be written with oral transmission in mind for the masses.

Let's take the Creation account and the story of Noah's Ark as easy examples here and look at the literary devices from the perspective of an ancient Mesopotamian as best we can:

-The Creation account seen in the first chapters of Genesis is a classic example of a Creation stories, and "if it's not literal it's not true" is frankly a tone deaf way of looking at it that has only been dominant in recent history. Throughout the bulk of Judeo-Christian history it was variously understood as either allegorical, verbatim, or a mixture, and the earlier we look the more prevalent allegorical readings are.

Today it's exceptionally clear to scholars outside of Protestant circles, especially American Protestant circles (who have historically entrenched social and theological reasons for their conclusions, taking less seriously the wealth of historiographical and linguistic indications to the contrary and cherry picking scant material from the same disciplines to support their ideas about literalism), that the Creation account was composed with contemporary, Mesopotamian Creation stories in mind, which were as a whole composed as allegories less interested in scientific questions about nature and more interested in using rhetorical devices and imagery familiar to a Near Eastern mind in order to express theological concepts.

Also there are linguistic aspects of the text that actually render it impossible to understand the Creation account in Genesis as saying, just to name one example, that either everything or the Earth was made in seven twenty four hour periods, or even what we can understand as seven contiguous time periods. Why would I say that? Well to name merely one example the word yod is used of the first day of creation, when yod doesn't literally mean "24 hour period", it means "the cycle of the two main celestial bodies, the sun and then the moon". Yet here we have it being used for "the first day" in which according to the text there isn't yet a moon.

In all reality it's hard to say that the Creation account was meant to be chronological at all. It's broken into a theology of the creator and then after that a take on anthropology.

-In looking at the account of Noah's Ark it's very worth noting two things:

*The language of the account doesn't literally require one to understand it as a worldwide event. What's people today typically see translated as "the whole earth" or some similar rendering is a translation of a phrase using erets, an extremely loose and figurative term which can either refer to a landmasses from the size of a field to the size of a country or more literally to mud/earth. Why flood the whole globe when it's quite clear from the account that only people in a certain region of the Middle East (it's unknown where Eden was supposed to be because some of the landmarks given are lost to time, but others are definitely known and that gives us enough information to understand that it is indeed supposed to be in Mesopotamia, i.e. modern day Iraq, as the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are mentioned) are being talked about as the people in the world so far?

*Hyperbolic language for dramatic effect was stock in trade for ancient Near Eastern literature, and can be seen in contemporary Mesopotamian, Babylonian, and Assyrian cuneiform tablets. "All flesh", "the whole earth" and so on were rarely meant to be taken verbatim and were phrases meant to express the gravity of a situation.

 

[Propianotuner]

Much of the Bible also contradicts itself in different books, for instance "thou shalt not kill" is supposed to be one of the most important of the 10 commandments, but it's perfectly okay for God to mass murder people if you truly took the story of Noah literally with the flood and what does that say about forgiveness that is also preached in the Bible?

Nowhere does the Bible say that God is under the same moral compunctions as people. On the contrary biblical authors went out of their way to make it explicitly clear that God has profoundly different responsibilities and justifications for His actions. Masses of people are also most notably killed in the book of Joshua, in the form of ethnic cleansing.

While obviously as an agnostic and simply as a thinking person I have a dim view of ethnic cleansing, what you're pointing to as a contradiction hardly has the appearance of one. Even during the ethnic cleansing it was made clear that killing wasn't normal acceptable behavior, it was presented as a wartime necessity (see the well known debate over killing vs murder in the Ten Commandments) and combatants were required to separate themselves for ritual atonement for an extended period before rejoining society. There's always a clear cut difference between what is okay for God to do and what is okay for people to do.

As for what it says about forgiveness I'm curious to hear you answer your own question, my friend.

Some of the Bible that is barely ever preached is actually an ancient law book that for instance lays out compensation owned for the loss of an animal that's stolen, obviously this is extremely outdated to say the very least, but people still see everything that is written in the Bible as something that must be followed, E.g. the ultimate truth.

Which people are you speaking of who see it this way? That one person is instructed to do one thing at one time and another person is instructed to do something else... does that indicate ultimate, general truths? Of course not. Genre and context have to be taken into account. If something isn't presented as "this is a general, moral instruction" vs "I want you to do this" there's no reason to think that a legal code contemporary to Hammurabi's Code was ever supposed to apply today, and there are only certain Christian groups who see it that way.

This is just one example of how the indoctrination of religion can become extremely dangerous and again this totally contradicts "thou shalt not kill", these types of things are just a few of the Bible's many flaws, there's a few similar examples where the punishment is also death.

Sounds more like people in England who knew little about the real workings of the mind of an ancient Near Eastern person who lived centuries upon centuries before.

The following is to make people respect and follow people high in power and there's no talk of exceptions, "Do not speak evil of God, and do not curse a leader of your people.", so in that case no-one should have spoken against King Herod or the leaders that allegedly put Jesus to death because they were the leaders of the people too? I could talk about Bible contradictions for ages.

Many people can talk about it for ages, but there are a few real contradictions which merit academic attention and these aren't examples of one. Really folks, there's choicer hanging fruit than what usually is presented as a skeptical perspective on Christianity and Judaism today.

 

[Myway]

I find reading the Bible hard too, but I set little goals. Like ten minutes a day or less to start. Then as time goes on, you find that you want to read more. At least in my case, that’s what it was. I love the New Testament. It has a lot of great stuff in it. I also like Psalms and Proverbs.

 

[VJCJ0628]

I find the scripture true there are many in regard to seeking God, for instance, if you seek me with all your heart and all your soul I will be found by you. Also, Jesus gave some examples of how to pray using several like the woman who kept knocking, there are other like Proverbs 26:2-4

There is definitely a principal of travailing, and truth-seeking, And also there is the intent, I do find many come to the word of God with the intent of either feeling better or trying to find something that aligns with there current moral or Ideas. People who do this tend to take scripture out of context to fit there won meanings, Rather than its own intent, which is like trying to overthrow God, Which people have been trying to do from the beginning.

However if one is willing to really seek God with all there heart and look for truth even when it is against one own preconceived thoughts to seek to know the truth no matter what the cost. That person will find the truth and will understand over time,

Some things come quicker some take more time. As Jesus said to For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him., I found this to be true, when I am given a little light and I don't except, Then I am not given more but when I do accept & follow through with that truth, Wheather I a likte it or not, Then I am given more light

Jesus also said to Nicodemus, you must be born again, to see the spiritual things, If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?

So If one accepts smaller truths, more will be given as one accepts more truth the more spiritual things one will understand, The less one accepts truths, the less they understand as it is written, "
And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables:

12 That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them"

Really seeing is a miracle of God as much as being reborn, There is much written about being blind to the truth and I have seen this to be true, In myself and in many others I have encountered. Besides the accounts in the word itself.

 

[Starfire]

I find reading the Bible hard too, but I set little goals. Like ten minutes a day or less to start. Then as time goes on, you find that you want to read more. At least in my case, that’s what it was. I love the New Testament. It has a lot of great stuff in it. I also like Psalms and Proverbs.

Why don’t you get it on audiobook if you struggle reading for more than 10 minutes, then you can listen to it when you want.

 

[Myway]

@Starfire thats a great idea. Never thought of audiobook. I will have to see about that.