Unexpected interest

I seem to have accidentally fallen into a new hobby/obsession/fanaticism. Any of you who feels you know me quite well may find yourselves shocked by this, but I can’t get enough of Bible history!

It’s all Nathan’s fault. We were having a chat on Christmas Day, covering all sorts of seasonal topics like ‘Christian Hijacking of Saturnalia’ and ‘Grains of Truth Hidden Within Spiritual Superstitions’ (those were my phrases, not his). I probably shouldn’t be surprised by this, bearing in mind he’s a vicar, but he really knows his stuff. He was telling me all about the disagreements within the Gospels, and how John is a bit of a ‘wild child’ of the group (again – my words, not Nathans,) who embellished stuff and edited it and mixed it around and filled in some gaps. I thought EVERY Christian person took every word in The Bible as being a direct word from God, but he explained to me that an important part of his training was learning to accept that the books of ‘The Good Book’ were written by individual humans – who may or may not have made mistakes, or had their own agendas – and that studying the differences as well as the messages within was crucial to being able to produce decent sermons and to lead your congregation effectively. The more questions I asked, the more information he gave me, and the more I became fascinated. At one time, I would have viewed the Bible as a glorified packet of toilet paper, written as a way of massaging a couple of egos and controlling everyone else, but now I’ve started to see it as an interesting puzzle and an incredibly important historical document. It may not tell The Life Of Jesus and The Rules Of God (as I used to think) but it may tell us an incredible lot about the birth of religion and how it shaped human development two thousand years ago.

So - I’ve become a bit obsessed with it.

I want to know WHO wrote WHAT and WHEN, and what their motivations may have been. I want to know why certain words were chosen, whether they were misinterpreted when translated, and how much of it stands up to investigation.

Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, there is a whole wealth of material available, written by all sorts of people and covering all sorts of specialities and viewpoints. I just put ‘Bible History’ as a search topic within the Books section of Amazon and it tells me there are over 40,000 titles. I just put ‘Bible study’ into Google and it came up with over 380 million results!

I’m not saying I’m going to read it all, but I’m going to give it a damn good go.

RC 8-1-20