I've just completed reading the Bible for the umpteenth time now. I'm really not sure how many times I have read it straight through now, but I suppose it is more than 12. I do not say this with any great pride, rather as former president George W. Bush commented upon his re-election, "I'm humbled."
Now while I appreciate 'the dangers' of coming onto this ostensibly religious forum and encouraging people to read The Bible all the way through, I am doing so anyway.
You see. I am a reader. I remember reading 'My Grandfather's Farm' all by myself in the middle of second grade, and since then I haven't looked back, as it were. I have read about a novel or some other sort of book at the rate of about one per week for decades now. It is my chiefest pleasure and literally my raison d'être, so I know of which I speak when I say The Bible is a book like no other. As you must know, it is really a collection of books encompassing history, genealogy, legend, philosophy, love poetry and of course, prophecy.
I have said I go through approximately one book per week, and War and Peace, which contrary to popular belief is not the longest novel ever, took me two weeks. I loved it. A very enjoyable book that lives up to its title. The Bible, however, takes me about six and a half months (minimum) to read. I have read it in bits in a yearly scheme and so taken a whole year, and I have read it when I could, sometimes 60 pages or more in a single afternoon, sometimes nothing for a week or more and end to end it will take six to eight months. This most recent reading was seven and a half months, I began October 1st, 2013.
So those of you who dismiss The Bible as myth and fancy, I think, really must read it through at least once before thinking so. I notice in my earlier posts in which The Gospels and their historicity are discussed, many of you use The Gospels and The Bible as if they were synonyms. This is somewhat akin to calling the last half chapter The Return of The King in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the entire book along with The Hobbit and all of Tolkien's other works. It just won't do.
There is simply too much there for anyone, who hasn't even read it (!), to explain away its origin and purpose.
Here are some of my impressions that I find noteworthy. Despite having been written over 1500 years and despite that several writers are known to have written different parts of it, The Bible hangs together as if it were by a single author (guess who?). While there are clearly discernible separate writing styles, and I could see without being told that The Gospel of Luke and Acts must be by the same writer, the whole has a unity as if directed, well, from on high. Please! Unless you have read it through yourself, perhaps more than once, and in different editions, you probably will not see this!
In a one-year Bible that has daily reading of Old and New Testament, sometimes along with a bit from Psalms and Proverbs there is fairly often a strange concordance, as if some higher power saw one-year English translations coming thousands of years before there even was such a language. For instance, I will read the Psalm wherein soldiers are playing dice to divide the persecuted one's robe. Then a few minutes later, there will be the same event in the Gospel reading.
Or I might read the well known Luke 4 verses:
On the same day that very chapter of Isaiah was the Old testament reading - written 700 years earlier.
And knowing that in the synagogue the scripture Jesus read was also a weekly Bible reading of a sort and that there was no way He could have known that that verse of Isaiah would be the reading at that particular synagogue at that particular place on that particular day, and that He would have the temerity to say the verse referred to Him! Who would dare!
And how could any one make something like this up? And then have them come out on the same three pages of a daily reading in an unknown language two thousand years in the future?
Now while I appreciate 'the dangers' of coming onto this ostensibly religious forum and encouraging people to read The Bible all the way through, I am doing so anyway.
You see. I am a reader. I remember reading 'My Grandfather's Farm' all by myself in the middle of second grade, and since then I haven't looked back, as it were. I have read about a novel or some other sort of book at the rate of about one per week for decades now. It is my chiefest pleasure and literally my raison d'être, so I know of which I speak when I say The Bible is a book like no other. As you must know, it is really a collection of books encompassing history, genealogy, legend, philosophy, love poetry and of course, prophecy.
I have said I go through approximately one book per week, and War and Peace, which contrary to popular belief is not the longest novel ever, took me two weeks. I loved it. A very enjoyable book that lives up to its title. The Bible, however, takes me about six and a half months (minimum) to read. I have read it in bits in a yearly scheme and so taken a whole year, and I have read it when I could, sometimes 60 pages or more in a single afternoon, sometimes nothing for a week or more and end to end it will take six to eight months. This most recent reading was seven and a half months, I began October 1st, 2013.
So those of you who dismiss The Bible as myth and fancy, I think, really must read it through at least once before thinking so. I notice in my earlier posts in which The Gospels and their historicity are discussed, many of you use The Gospels and The Bible as if they were synonyms. This is somewhat akin to calling the last half chapter The Return of The King in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the entire book along with The Hobbit and all of Tolkien's other works. It just won't do.
There is simply too much there for anyone, who hasn't even read it (!), to explain away its origin and purpose.
Here are some of my impressions that I find noteworthy. Despite having been written over 1500 years and despite that several writers are known to have written different parts of it, The Bible hangs together as if it were by a single author (guess who?). While there are clearly discernible separate writing styles, and I could see without being told that The Gospel of Luke and Acts must be by the same writer, the whole has a unity as if directed, well, from on high. Please! Unless you have read it through yourself, perhaps more than once, and in different editions, you probably will not see this!
In a one-year Bible that has daily reading of Old and New Testament, sometimes along with a bit from Psalms and Proverbs there is fairly often a strange concordance, as if some higher power saw one-year English translations coming thousands of years before there even was such a language. For instance, I will read the Psalm wherein soldiers are playing dice to divide the persecuted one's robe. Then a few minutes later, there will be the same event in the Gospel reading.
Or I might read the well known Luke 4 verses:
He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him.
He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."
On the same day that very chapter of Isaiah was the Old testament reading - written 700 years earlier.
And knowing that in the synagogue the scripture Jesus read was also a weekly Bible reading of a sort and that there was no way He could have known that that verse of Isaiah would be the reading at that particular synagogue at that particular place on that particular day, and that He would have the temerity to say the verse referred to Him! Who would dare!
And how could any one make something like this up? And then have them come out on the same three pages of a daily reading in an unknown language two thousand years in the future?
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