Weekly "what are you reading" Thread #89

It's not really ordered in any sensible order, so probably not (although Genesis and the first part of Exodus are pretty interesting since that's a lot of well-known stories). If you just try to plow through Deuteronomy though I guarantee you're gonna get bored and put it down.

The most well-known part for Christians is certainly the Gospels. Mark is the shortest, likely earliest written, and most straight-forward, so start there and see what you think.

Paul's letters (Galatians, 1st Thessalonians, 1st Corinthians, 2nd Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon) are the earliest Christian writings, written before even the gospels. If you just read them without reading the gospels you probably get a better feeling for what the earliest Christianity was like. In a lot of ways Paul's theology came to define Christianity, but he also had a very different relationship with Jesus than we tend to think of today. He never met Jesus, only briefly met people who had known Jesus (and didn't get along with them), and frankly doesn't seem to really know anything about Jesus's life nor care that much about it. The resurrection is important to him, but not really at all what Jesus actually said or did before that. That would be a very foreign perspective to us today!

The important thing to realize is that every book was written by a different person (well, mostly), at a different time, for a different reason, and with a different viewpoint. Too often people like to believe that the bible is somehow one monolithic "Word of God" that's all saying the same thing, but you end up missing so much of it if you don't listen to what each author actually has to say on their own terms.