Why do some religious people not read the religious text/texts in full?

[oatmilkcoffee]

I’m going to preface this by saying I have ASD so my way of viewing things may very well be rigid. I am not religious but am not looking to bash religion nor people for being religious. I want to understand and can’t ask my family as it is a very contentious issue to bring up with them now that I am adult who has left the faith.

I grew up in a very religious family. Very few of my family, including extended family, have read the Bible in full. As for how I know this, because they have said things here and there over the years that they haven’t. They go to church, and they rely on the sermons to teach them the Bible. However church sermons only teach certain passages, and reading the Bible in its entirety is a completely different experience. I have read the Bible as I am a very literal thinker and needed to understand what it was I was being told was the truth. As a teenager I read it cover to cover (in this case, the New International Version). As the Bible was taught to me as the literal Word of God, and therefore infallible, it was very eye-opening.

With Christianity for example, I understand that back in the day, people were largely illiterate and relied upon the church to tell them what the scriptures said. These days that isn’t the case. As for lack of time, I understand that life can be very hectic, but I would think to someone who is religious, that this would be important and therefore a priority to understand the Word of God?

If you are a Christian but haven’t read the Bible in full, why not? I know that the only thing that makes a person a Christian is their belief in Jesus as their Saviour, but isn’t it important to have first-hand knowledge of the Bible as a Christian?

This can also apply to other religions but I’m not familiar with them to speak about, which is why I’m using Christianity for my examples, but the question also applies to other religious faiths as well.

I hope this hasn’t been offensive, and I’m not trying to be at all goady. From my perspective I can’t understand it so other people’s perspectives would be helpful.

I can only answer about Christians as I don't have enough experience of other faiths from the inside.

I have read the Bible in full several times, and I don't come from a tradition of biblical literalism, but if I were to put myself in other people's shoes, I would say:

Belonging to a very solidly working-class parish has shown me that there is a perception that reading the gospels (and maybe some of Paul) is sufficient for average believers, and covers everything you actually need to know. More than that is seen as too difficult to understand, just for professional theologians and people with learning. It's a question of confidence in one's own skills, but also time, and having absorbed a message that the gospels are the most important thing.

As a Catholic, there are some people (mostly elderly, but not all), who think that hearing the extracts read at Mass is a better way to read the Bible than to sit down by oneself. It comes from a place of deference to authority. To be fair to them, you will hear a very large proportion of the Bible over the cycle of readings (nearly the whole of the gospels, about 70% of the NT overall and less of the OT).

“ isn’t it important to have first-hand knowledge of the Bible as a Christian?”

Yes, it absolutely is.
I agree with you, it should be read, multiple times, in its entirety. And as much as possible studied, meditated upon and memorised.

I also listen to it, read by David Suchet, who has a beautiful voice.

Here’s John’s Gospel

You're not religious, you've said so. Why does this bother you? Why are you spending time thinking about it?

It's like me musing why people follow Chelsea, not Arsenal!

I think some people are socially rather than theologically religious.

For example my mother thinks of herself as a Christian but is almost proud to have never read the bible, nor attended church much. She says that if “her god” wanted her to know something then she would just know it.

Conversely I have read the bible many times, and most other major religious texts, but am not religious.

This is a really interesting question OP.

You’re coming at it from an evangelical background. I agree that I would expect evangelical Christians to have read the New Testament, perhaps not all the OT.

However, other traditions don’t put the Bible ‘above’ the Church, its history and teachings in the same way. To give a personal anecdote, my DM (a pretty mainstream Anglican) got a job at an RC school and was very surprised by how little emphasis was put on the Bible (she’s not anti Catholic at all, but probably thought Catholics and Anglicans are not too different).

There are dangers in the ‘sola scriptura’ approach, not least that people read it in ways it was never intended to be read - eg believing it’s all literally true.

However, I do think Christians should read the Bible, although not necessarily the whole thing.

Because religion was a very large part of my upbringing, and this point has always confused me. If I can’t understand things based on my own perspective, then I ask others in order to have a better understanding. I’m not judging other people for it so I don’t know why it would be inappropriate to ask.

And I think it’s perfectly valid for someone to wonder why a person chooses one team over another.

Thank you everyone for your insights, it’s giving me food for thought. I appreciate it.

But then some of the protestant denominations (including Anglicans) don't read the deuterocanonical books, and hardly any western churches read the Book of Enoch which is important to Ethiopian Jews and Coptic Christians.

I was baptised as Anglican, and have over the years gone occasionally to church, either Anglican or Methodist. I know some parts of the Bible fairly well, and others not at all (King James version). So you could say I'm a Christian, but not really practising as a fully-fledged believer in everything . I'm certainly not a creationist.

No, I haven't read the Bible in its entirety. There is too much in it that I find uncomfortable, and as it was written by men and based on stories from the Middle East 2000+ years ago, much of it is irrelevant in the present day, and does not sit well with me at all.

If I feel like having a chat with God, I'll have one. I don't feel the need to have a priest or minister tell me what to think.

I am a Christian and I have read the Bible mutiple times.

I agree that if you are a Christian it is something you should aspire to. I think we should use our brains and think and discuss our faith. In fact it is generlaly accepted to be a sign of a cult that you are not allowed to question/discuss your beliefs.

BUT I also believe that faith is simple enough for a child to understand. We have a lady with learning difficulties in our church, and another with Downs. Neither can really read, and without wanted to be patronising, I am pretty sure that neither of them would understand vast parts of the Bible.

Is their faith genuine? Can they believe and have faith and worship God if they don't understand everything in the Bible? Well yes I believe they can. They understand that God loves them, that Jesus died for them, and they in turn love God.

So it isn't quite as simple as saying that you must read the Bible as a Christian. I would also say that lots of the Bible is hard to understand and needs other people to discuss it with, or some study to understand the context and the background. Some people find that easier to do than others

The advantage of reading the whole Bible, and knowing a bit about it, is that you understand some of the internal debates going on in it. You can be horrified by the xenophobia, racism and disregard for women and children in Ezra and Nehemiah (even while admiring the effective way they went about the job of re-establishing Jerusalem as a Jewish city after the Babylonian exile), but then you can read Ruth, a book written as a reply and a reproach to them. Both books are there, you can partake in the debate. As for the Pauline Epistles - a lot of stuff being worked out on the hoof there - and the Acts of the Apostles gives a great account of the internal struggles in the first years of Christianity.

There's stuff that's repetitive, stuff that's clearly written as myth not as anything we'd know as history, stuff that actually is history, wonderful little novellas, poetry, philosophy.

Well worth reading, preferably in a modern translation with good footnotes.

These answers have been really insightful and brought up things I hadn’t considered at all.

Great question OP. I started out reading the Bible as a young Christian but only read though the first 5 books of the OT and all of the NT apart from Revelations which I found confusing and frightening tbh. Then I lapsed from my faith for around 35 years and have only in the past year fully gotten back to it. I am now reading the whole Bible using a 'read the Bible in a year' plan, and am mainly in the OT.

I find the OT extremely interesting and yes, shocking and difficult to read in a few places but it's very important we understand it to grasp God's character and to see how the coming of Christ was prophesied and why he was so needed for our salvation. I have a Chronological bible as well as a regular one so if I want I can see how events unfolded in time in a more joined-up manner.

I agree with PP who said we need to study the Bible with other Christians, too, because a lot of it isn't easy to grasp and other people can offer insights we may have missed. I also agree that not everyone will be able to read all of it due to various limitations but that's OK, your salvation isn't depending on having read the whole thing!

@invisiblecat Just to gently point out that ministers/priests don't 'tell you what to think' (unless they are very bad at their job!) they will be directing you to scriptures that are relevant to whatever is being discussed and analysing them. This should give you food for thought to come to your own understanding and decisions, aided by your indwelling Holy Spirit if you are a Christian who has accepted Christ as your saviour and repented. Reading the Bible is the best way to draw closer to God, really you should aim to do that every day. I can only speak from my own experience that doing so has increased my understanding of God's word and drawn me far closer to God than any occasional 'chat' with God has done in the past 35 years.

@CrunchyCarrot Unfortunately, in my experience, I have listened to sermon after sermon in which the minister has used a piece of biblical text and interpreted it in a way with which I did not necessarily agree. We were expected to take on board the point they were making, using parts of the Bible to back up their opinions. If that isn't telling you what to think, I don't know what is.

A visiting Methodist minister was particularly misogynistic in his pontifications one Sunday, and I wasn't at all happy with that. I was on the verge of walking out at one point.

Then the question is, do you want to actually understand the Bible or do you just want a faith that's shaped around what you believe? It's no good just choosing which bits you want to believe in and rejecting the rest. Some of it is going to be challenging and does involve soul-searching.

I'm RC and have only read bits of the Old Testament. We studied one of the Gospels in depth at school for GCSE and I've heard most of the Nee Testament at Mass.
At school more emphasis was put on understanding the Sacraments

“It's no good just choosing which bits you want to believe in and rejecting the rest”

This reminded me of the prophetic statement (below) which Paul made to Timothy in his second letter. It certainly has come to be true in our own time, when I see some of the doctrines that are being promulgated these days.

“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.”
2 Tim 4:3-4

(I’m not suggesting @invisiblecat is one of those people, by the way).

It's no good just choosing which bits you want to believe in and rejecting the rest. Some of it is going to be challenging and does involve soul-searching.

But also it is no good just accepting something written thousands of years ago, translated many, many times both through time and through other languages, without putting what is written in to context of it being written, when it was written.

Context and the culture at the time of writing is always very, very important, yes.

Ah, but should one be taking a particular minister's interpretation of a Bible passage as Gospel? I don't necessarily want a faith shaped round their individual belief either.

With all due respect, I will never believe in the Creation as told in the Bible. The Bible was not written by God, it was written by people two thousand years ago, before they had any clue how it really happened, but felt the need to explain it somehow. I believe in scientific fact as told by scientists. I'm also a Darwinist, and look at the struggles he had with his faith when he realised what was really going on didn't tally with his religious beliefs.

Which version and interpretation of the Bible would you like me to believe? Catholic? Anglican? Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Greek Orthodox, Plymouth Brethren? Or how about Mormon, Jehovah's Witnesses or Seventh Day Adventists, or any number of others?

The ministers of all of those denominations all use different versions of the Bible, and their teachings reflect that.

Which one would you like me to choose - just one, or all of them? And what about the Old Testament which tells of a time long before Jesus, who was a Jew himself and was also one of the Islamic Prophets?

Do you seriously think that Jesus would mind if I don't always agree with how other people interpret a book written not by God, but by people?

The world is full of conflict and war, driven in no small part by people disagreeing on which religion is the 'right' one. So I am not going to argue with you about what I should or should not choose to believe. Let's just agree to differ, shall we?

Do you want me to answer your questions or just leave it? 🤔

I’ve thought about this quite a lot recently following conversations with a Christian friend of mine who’s very selective about which parts of the Bible he’s interested in reading. He has views that are pretty extreme by most people’s standard and I think this is partly related sadly.

I was brought up in a Christian family and was familiar with a large part of the Bible by the time I’d left home. However it’s only over the last two years (in my 40s) that I’ve read the whole thing. It’s made a huge difference to my faith and ability to talk to other people about it now that I understand the whole context. Also I read it in chronological order, which is quite a bit different to the usual order.

I think tbh the most likely reason many Christians don’t read the whole thing is that some of it doesn’t seem very relevant. However, now I’ve read it all I absolutely believe all of it’s in there for a reason 🙂

'Chronological order' is going to involve a lot of assumptions and theories. Chronological by author or by content or by setting? And according to which authority? And how to deal with all the deliberate repetition?

If the generally agreed view of modern scholars is correct and Genesis to Kings is a single narrative written during the Babylonian captivity in response to exposure to books by Greek authors such as Hesiod and Homer, do you then read Isaiah and Jeremiah first, even though they were familiar with some of the myths that got wrapped into the Genesis - Kings text. Or some of the Psalms first? And what about the bits of Genesis-Kings, like the flood story, that came from a Babylonian source? In the New Testament do you read John first, or the discourses in John first, and do you read Luke and Acts as a continuous account (which makes much more sense than sticking John in between the two halves imo).

Getting too hung up on chronology might make it harder to discern intention and meaning some of the time.

Just as reading something written to be a founding myth as though it was either history or an account of something scientifically factual is very foolish and insulting to its author(s).

I love the Bible, but it isn't an easy collection of books.

I am Christian ( not brought up that way but converted in my teens) and have read the Bible many times.

As I get older, though, it is getting more difficult and I have more questions.

I don't get how evangelical Christians say that the Bible has the last word, rather than the church. Yet, who decided on which texts are accepted as Scripture? The church, of course!

It seems a bit mad.