And so, as with all good things, my journey through the bible has come to an end*. I set out on 1st January 2011 to follow a reading plan and work through the whole bible in a year. Okay so there appear to have been a few days when I didn’t manage it but there were good reasons, being unwell, being too busy or away and being not-bothered to name a few. However I have now reached the end. I have also written mini book reviews of each book of the bible along the way. I tried to review them in the light of what they were about and how they read, in other words to be quite subjective. I didn’t write any theology along the way… well I may have lapsed once or thirty odd times. I haven’t checked but I think I managed to write something about every book, so not bad going.

Thoughts

As I read through the whole bible I did have one or two thoughts that I will share. The first is how much emphasis my own religious tradition puts on certain passages above others. I suppose this is only natural but you can see where over the years the church and its various incarnations and denominations have chosen one passage to have significant importance above others. The whole faith verses works issue is one that springs immediately to mind.

In a similar vein is how some people take some passages literally and others not. This is quite difficult and people far more cleverer than I spend time mulling this over. The problem, in my humble opinion, is when people far less cleverer than them decide what verses they will or will not take literally.

Finally, and this did make me think quite a lot about how I live each day. There is far, far more in the bible about how we should live our lives full of justice, mercy and love to one another than getting into heaven. I don’t want to make light of the eternal nature of the bible, but it does put a much bigger emphasis on  how we live now, than how we will live one day.

Ever onwards

I’ll probably return to some of the issues that I have mentioned above, but not for a little while. I thank you for sharing this journey with me. I decided to create these posts to make myself accountable, so dear reader, thank you for keeping me to account.

If you want to see all the posts they are tagged ‘bible in a year‘ so you can browse through them at your leisure.

As a pre-cursor to my footnote below, when I say the whole bible I haven’t actually read the apocrypha in this reading plan… what did I say above about my tradition 😉

*I have read the whole bible before, but it has been a few years since I sat down and did it in such a short period of time. I do recommend it.