KJV (Bible Version)

This really isn't something you can "review" as such, so I'm just gonna scribble down some of my thoughts in no particular order now that I've finally reached the end of this eight month journey.

1. Anyone who tells you to simply "read the Bible", with the expectation that it will change your faith has gotta be more specific. Not saying I didn't learn anything, the read certainly helped me understand a lot more about where we come from as a cultural tradition, but I didn't find anything that challenged me spiritually or belief-wise.
2. Whoever edited this needs to take a literal page from Tolkien and move some of this stuff to the appendices. Too often an engaging narrative will be interrupted by a long-ass genealogy or extremely specific measurements for a tabernacle or a census or some other highly uninteresting minutiae.
3. I was not ready for the use of "circumcised" and "uncircumcised" as shorthand for "holy" and "not holy". Moses telling God that he was not worthy to speak of him, citing his "uncircumcised lips" THREW me.
4. Reading the Bible really brings out the absurdity of the claim that it's in any way the literal word of God, or dictated by God, or perfect and complete. It's very obviously written by human hands, many of them at that, over hundreds of years. As one of my favourite Youtube channels (Esoterica) pointed out, the Bible works best when thought of not as a book but a library.
4. The darkest part: If God tells you to enact a genocide, does that mean it's not only morally right, but morally REQUIRED to do so? What could have been an interesting question about ancient belief systems becomes highly disturbing in light of current events.
5. You know that "Rivers of Babylon" song by Boney M? It's a bop, right? Do NOT look up the second half of the psalm the lyrics are based on.
6. It slays me that one of the big conflicts Jesus had with the establishment was about him not washing his hands before eating. Like I get what you're going for with the analogy, what goes into us is not what defiles up, but what comes out, our words and actions and all that. But dude, you gotta wash your hands.
7. Paul, you had me at "interminable genealogies".
8. At times, I thought that reading this would give me the knowledge I needed to respond to people who state that the Bible supports this or that position. But then I had the depressing realisation that they probably don't care what the Bible "really" says.

Worth it? Yeah. For me at least, I'm a big fan of mythology and ancient stories. What's unusual for this one is that it has had such cultural staying power, and impact on peoples beliefs and actions until this day. A lot of "title drop" moments where I recognised a phrase or saying that's still used in everyday language.

Life changing? Nah. Not more than any other collection of literature.… (more)

After going into the Bible a few years back as a scofflaw atheist and coming out as someone with a healthy respect for the philosophy and stories of the Bible, particularly when rendered in that gorgeous King James prose, I opened the Apocrypha with an open mind. These are the ugly stepchildren of the Biblical corpus; texts that, for one reason or another, are considered non-canonical. Sometimes that is because they were meant to be read in private rather than in public service, sometimes because their authenticity was unclear, and mostly, I suspect, because in the various translations and denominations of Christianity over the millennia, they just got shuffled out of the pack.

After reading the Apocrypha, I do find myself wishing some had been expunged due to being too heretical. Because, even though it is also available in that King James prose, the book could do with some spice to it. From first to last I found the Apocrypha dull and tedious, and while some might have that impression of the canonical Bible, that was certainly not my impression of it when I finally sat down to reading it some years back. The Bible had the masterpiece that is the Book of Job, some neat origin stories in Genesis, the fiery books of Moses, eloquent philosophic rants like Jeremiah, to say nothing of the New Testament's 'Greatest Story Ever Told' and Revelation fever-dream. The Apocrypha had nothing like that, but it also didn't have much else. (And some other non-canonical books which sound interesting, like the Gnostic Gospels – particularly Thomas – and the Gospel of Judas, don't form part of the Apocrypha either.)

The Apocrypha starts off with the two books of Esdras, which are standard Old Testament fare about waging war on powerful enemies and coming through by the power of the Lord. They're interesting enough, but they don't do anything that the Books of the Kings don't do, and the Books of the Kings are far from the best stuff in the Bible. After a banal book called Tobit, there is the Book of Judith, which is the only part of the Apocrypha which threatens to actually be interesting for a moment (Judith seduces a warlord who is an enemy of the Jews, then beheads him in his bed in the night).

After that, there is a long scattergun sequence of books that are nothing very much, but at least are short (though all of the books in the Apocrypha are quite short). This is disappointing, and even a book called the Wisdom of Solomon, which should at least have a few good lines, is mostly just unreflective stuff about praising and trusting in God, lacking the nuance of many similar proverbs in, well, Proverbs.

The book ends with its two longest pieces – the two Books of the Maccabees. Like Esdras, these are banal narratives of fighting other desert tribes and trusting in God to help you smite them. It's sub-standard fare, lacking anything memorable. Ultimately, one can see why the Apocrypha is not part of the canonical Bible; there's just not much there for people to chew on, except for one or two of the more dedicated Biblical scholars. I maintain, not just due to its importance and influence but its objective quality, that the King James Bible should be on the reading list of anyone who is serious about literature. But the Apocrypha can be safely ignored.… (more)

This book is a bit of a mess, frankly. Characters are introduced and then disappear without explanation, sometimes to turn up again chapters later. The narration is a mix of first, second and third person, and the tenses are all over the place, which I suppose is due to the fact that it is the product of innumerable authors and sources, and repeated translation.

The cast of characters is huge but, frankly, none of them are likable. The main character in the first half - the Old Testament - is quite seriously the most unpleasant character I've ever come across. This God character is venal, spiteful, petty, self-aggrandising, controlling, dishonest, murderous and constantly demanding. He sets impossible tasks for people and then punishes them for failure; he encourages (even orders!) the genocide of whole peoples that are doing nothing so much as living peacefully on a patch of land that he had promised generations earlier to a different bunch of people; he personally arranges the destruction of whole cities for violating rules that he has set down, even though they are nothing to do with him, the death of children for calling one of his followers names, the execution of an old man for collecting firewood on the wrong day - the list goes on and on.

The second part starts more promisingly. The main character here is God's son, Jesus (although there does seem to be an issue of parentage; Jesus is described as belonging to the bloodline of King David through his 'foster father' Joseph) who, when we rejoin him as an adult, is preaching some pretty nifty ideas about peace and brotherly love - curiously rather consonant with some Buddhist teachings that probably arrived in the Middle East in the first century BCE, but that's another story. Jesus has obviously inherited a few of his dad's less pleasant aspects; he has a temper on him, and can be seriously controlling - he tells his followers that they have to give up (indeed "hate") their families to follow him, in the manner that has been beloved of modern cult leaders, and he reinforces the earlier injunctions ("commandments"), although i was never clear on which set of sometimes contradictory orders he meant. But maybe that's just me.

Then, after Jesus is killed by the Romans for being a trouble maker, it gets seriously weird again. It's interesting that the four witnesses to the execution that write about it give massively contradictory accounts, both of the execution and Jesus life (kind of a Rashomon difference of perception thing going on there, I guess), then it rapidly gets weird and nasty again. Paul, the guy who takes over Jesus' work, is frankly a nutter. I think he's one of these "operating psychopaths" that you sometimes find in senior management positions, with a healthy dose of misogyny and self loathing thrown in. The drugs he must be taking probably don't help. I mean, you can see how bipolar he is in some of his letters to the Corinthians, but then by Revelations he's completely lost it. The apocalyptic rantings here fail as horror, mostly because they just don't make any sense. A decent horror writer knows that terror works when it connects with the reader, touches something in their psyche, but this just seems like random, drug-fuelled imagery.

Perhaps I'm being a little unfair. This book should probably be approached as a massive collection of (sometimes loosely) connected stories. Some of them are obviously meant to be parables - although sometimes you have to wonder just what lesson the reader is meant to take away - and probably not take it too seriously. And the saving grace, in this edition at least, is that some of the language is simply wonderful, he imagery occasionally breathtaking. It's interesting to compare to [b:The Epic of Gilgamesh|19351|The Epic of Gilgamesh|Anonymous|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167203587s/19351.jpg|3802528] or the [b:Mahabharata|1382693|Mahabharata|R.A. Kosasih|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1183140875s/1382693.jpg|1372685], books from different cultures on similar themes, although I think both of those are told better.… (more)