My dad was raised in something like the Presbyterian faith. He's not very religious. Mom is Catholic. My siblings and I were raised in this tradition. We Catholics are known for our lack of emphasis on the Bible in our religion. I was a little familiar with the Bible through the programming of the History Channel, but even I knew this wasn't how the Bible really is. Still, I never read much of it until after I left for college. Once though, in high school, I went to a lecture a non-denominational protestant friend invited me to at her church that discussed what I now know to be the Hebrew Bible, but which was at this time and in this setting fittingly called the Old Testament. Actually, Professor, you would have enjoyed it. They taught this sequence of hand gestures that represented certain things in the Bible, and it helped you to remember the order of all the events. I wasn't too familiar with the Bible, so it was difficult to remember it, anyway. Also, at that point I had decided that it would be better for me to read the Bible on my own. I thought I could remember it better that way and that it would be more meaningful. Come on. I was young. I could do anything. I was invincible. I was naïve. That summer I tried reading the Bible for the first time. I started at the Beginning. This was not because it's a very good place to start, but because I knew enough to know that Genesis was a bunch of stories--something I could handle. I skipped over who begot whom and which people know each other, but otherwise I read into Leviticus. I decided that this part wasn't something I was interested in and that it wasn't worth working through. I also decided to take a break from my Bible.
Not much later I came back to it. I enrolled in some religion classes here at MSU. Most of them were my favorite classes I had. I almost majored in religion. Sometimes I didn't do too well because I can't physically write fast enough to do as well as I'd liked to on the tests. Still, I realized the Bible classes I took were a good fit for me. I liked the historical approach we took towards the material. I'd never been exposed to that. Not even the History Channel does it. I'm Catholic. I don't read the Bible for the same reasons protestants might. I'm not looking for how everything is like Jesus's life and how Jesus's life is like my own. It only makes sense to me that the writers of the Bible would write something that means something in their own culture--their own lives. Not ours. Not mine specifically. We don't read other myths for this. Fortunately.
My religion classes and these kinds of viewpoints led me to adopt a point of view that interferes with that taken in English 240. The way I've always seen the Bible is nonlinear. It wasn't written in the order it is now. The writers didn't even necessarily recognize the existence of other books when they wrote what they wrote. In fact, they weren't even 'books.' Books weren't invented until relatively recently. Reading the Bible from start to finish simply is not the way it was meant to be read, and I am reluctant to take that approach. I strongly doubt that I shall be able to commit fully and accomplish the task of reading the Bible cover-to-cover.
Having said that, I also recognize the fact that there are other viewpoints as legitimate as my own, and I can respect some of them. My approach is to see the Bible as a reflection of the creators' cultures. Another would be to see it as a reflection of our own culture. Admittedly, this makes sense, too, because the Bible is probably the most influential (collection of) work(s) in our culture and literary heritage. I think this is a good approach from a literary perspective because we can see how it has affected our literary heritage. A straight through reading is good here, but I would recommend starting with the Gospels, going through Revelation, and then reading the Hebrew Scriptures as a preëmptive commentary on the first parts you read. I'm not sure why we start in Genesis--unless it's for the same reason that I did. Maybe we just have to start with something interesting. Maybe it's because it's important to recognize that what we think is in the Bible isn't quite what is in the Bible. Even with these thoughts in mind, I think that if we are looking for the basis of our culture's literature, we should probably skip ahead after only a few chapters of Genesis.
One more thing I'd like to add is this. Last class we ended talking about how different cultures have had different creation myths. I think four different major kinds were written on the board. Could we not say that the universe starting as nothing and then suddenly exploding and becoming something which is exploding kind of belonged on the board, too?
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