The Dangers of Reading the Bible by Yourself Essay

The Dangers of Reading the Bible by Yourself Essay

We all know that the priests always want you to read the Bible. Certainly, that is a proper practice. However, there is the right way of reading the Bible and the bad way. First, I want to tell you a little story. When my brother was in middle school he felt like reading the Bible. He wanted to compare notes with his Jehovah witness friend. Anyhow, when he first read the Bible, he skipped over the commentaries.

Eventually, he got to Leviticus. When he read it he was shocked to read so many ridiculous commandments. He figured that since they were in the Bible, he had to follow them. Whenever he found something interesting in the Bible he would share that info with me. He brought to light these new commandments.

In our house we had a stuffed animal. One of the commandments said that you were impure if you touched a dead body. To cleanse ourselves, we had to wash our clothing. After he read this, we threw our clothing under the faucet and poured Clorox over them. By the time mother had arrived, we had ruined two of our best outfits.

Take this lesson into consideration. When the uninstructed read the Bible they come up with very bad conclusions. Another point to consider is the commentaries. Each Bible has its own unique commentaries. Each translator or editor puts their own interpretation into the Bible. Therefore, the writing in the Bible is subjective.

Allow me to explain, I have read over the top a Catholic Bible, a Jehovah Witness Bible and a Protestant Bible. Putting them side by side, I realized that each translation was tilted in the favor of their representative religion. A translation is an art form. It is not too uncommon for writers to stretch the meaning of words. This I learned in my religious classes in Collage. There, they told me of the history of the King James Bible. Needless to say, he commanded that his Bible translation be more protestant sounding.

The final lesson has to do with the context of the Bible itself. You either take it literary or metaphorically. Based on my understanding of the Bible, it is a book about God’s relationship with his creations. The way it is written it appears that God is always interfering with our lives. However, when you put a timeline in the middle, you realize that he only acts out when things are going really bad.

Plus, his miracle working periods only last for a very short time. He also works through others. The problem is figuring out who is for real, or whose is a fraud. Even within the Bible, there are some discrepancies. In the Old Testament, the prophets of God are always rebelling against the temple authority. This is well noted in the book of Jeremiah.  He complains that the priest have made their church a house of Thieves.

As for the New Testament, Jesus also got in trouble with the temple. As a matter of fact, he was ordered to be killed by the temple priests because he undermined their authority. Consider this; Jesus was an unschooled genius that knew the Torah better than those who taught it. Time and time again, he pointed to the faults of their teachings.

They priest thought themselves safe by following the laws of Leviticus. They focused too much on the laws and forgot to take care of the orphan and the widow. They were so caught up in structured religion that they forgot the works of charity. In essence, they were ritually pure, yet they were rotten on the inside.

After the Gospels, there are a few odd books here and there. The first one worth discussing is Paul’s letters. I studied them in my feminist Bible study class. My teacher had made it her life ambition to change the Catholic Church from the inside. Using the power of history, she showed that Jesus had many female followers. Word wise, follower or disciple are other words for Apostle.

Anyhow, she pointed at some discrepancies among the letters. There were those written by Paul, those supposedly written by Paul, and the letters that were edited. Needless to say, all the letters that told women to shut up were not written by Paul. Many of his female followers held mass in their houses. They also gave the Eucharist, which was the earliest Catholic ritual.

You see, in the old days, there was the office of widows and the bishops. Both were competing for authority. We all know how that story ended. When the Romans got involved in the Catholic Church they made certain that the Catholic creed went well with their social values. Needless to say, women had authority, but the misogynist Romans ruined it.

I also want to mention the conflict between the apostles and Paul. Paul was the odd man out. He knew Jesus better than the apostles. Think about it, Jesus might not have recruited Paul had his apostles done a good job. In many of Paul’s letters, there appears some tension between Paul and Jesus’ apostles in Jerusalem.

The heart of the matter was that Jesus’ followers wanted to keep the keep Leviticus. However, Paul knew that Jesus had thrown Leviticus out the window. After all, he summarized it in two commandments. Jesus simply wanted you to love god and to love each other. Jesus demanded love. He did not want to burden his followers with needless rules that distracted them from love’s works. Paul knew this and was hated by Jesus’ followers.

This is well noted in the Acts of the Apostles. The writer of the Acts of the Apostles and of Luke liked Peter a lot. He made efforts to make him look awesome. However, in the other Gospels Peter appeared like an idiot. Anyhow, in those Acts Paul appeared like the dutiful follower of the apostles. The reality was another. When you read the Bible keep these discrepancies in mind.