read the Bible, the whole thing.

Lovely writing. Very warm and affectionate. 2 years ago

is really different. Instead of telling about what happened, as the gospels seem to, Paul is interpreting what those events meant. This seems like an enormous responsibility. It seems like his work is the first place where I found the idea that Christ died to liberate us from the law, which we couldn’t seem to follow anyway.

I never encountered that idea until I was an adult. As a kid at a VERY conservative Southern Baptist church, I was taught that I was not to sin. It never occurred to me, as I tried and tried and tried, that it was impossible. 2 years ago

I love the way Paul writes so passionately to those he sees as his own for Christ. 2 years ago

Just started….

I notice a very strange thing. Have you ever noticed that MMLJ are stylistically so different from Paul’s letters? Why? Paul writes more like I would than the Gospels do. The Gospels are a little unnerving to me in what they don’t put in…things like a description of Jesus. Paul is much more colloquial.

What’s going on? 2 years ago

awfully earnest about any sexual topic. I think he is clearly talking about his opinion rather than Jesus’ message, but I can see where it could be taken very literally.

It really challenges me to identify my own moral beliefs about sexual behavior (as does my status as mom to 2 teens). What I’ve tried to teach them is probably the truest representation of my own beliefs. I told them that sexual contact touches the deepest part of your soul and has enormous impact on your feelings, creating a vulnerability that almost nothing else creates. That this is powerful and you need to think carefully about who you are allowing yourself to be so emotionally open with. That I thought sex for its own sake is, I think, morally wrong, because it dismisses the person whose body you are touching. And that I hoped they would wait until they are sure about the person’s concern for them.

All the rest is perhaps just overkill. 2 years ago

Corintheans 2 years ago

I think from a fear of finishing it. After all, I’ve been reading the Bible since 2005 and I don’t know what I’ll do with myself after I’m done. Right now I’m on Romans, which strikes me as very intense. 2 years ago

sort of. I read it in pieces, at night, when I’m not particularly clear-headed. I found that I kept losing the theme of where Paul was and who all these characters were.

I finished it in a long spurt of reading in bed this morning, and that was far more satisfying. But I have to admit, I have ambivalent feelings about Paul. I miss the men who actually went through life with Jesus, and it feels strange that they suddenly disappear after his death (at least in the sequence of this narrative). I’m far more interested in the thoughts of James and John after the resurrection than those of Paul (sorry, Paul…). I’ll be glad to get through the text to their letters.

I can see now that I will finish this goal, this long project of several years. The thought made me feel deprived. What will I do then? I think I’d like to read the NT again, using notes to learn the messages more deeply. I’d really like to puzzle over Jesus, why no one describes what he looks like (?), why his messages seem framed in such an unusual way (unlike Luke’s writing, which seems very straightforward).

I’m struggling more than I admit with this material. I sometimes get stuck in the religion sectino of the bookstore, picking up texts on the Bible and Jesus’s life, hoping I can follow it a little better. But often, these are books written from the perspective of Jesus as simply a man dressed in God’s clothing—not as God himself. I make it partway through the books and dump them, because they are not answering my questions. I can’t go with the assumptions underlying these texts, and without those, the books make little sense.

I want the Jewish study model, what I’ve learned of it from Adar. I want someone who will give me 30 minutes a week, or more if allowed, and let me ask questions about a particular test, and talk to me about the setting and the links that fly over my head. I want tutoring.

I’m not afraid of losing my own perspective. I’m a former Unitarian: I believe it’s my own responsibility to make my relationship with God. But there is clearly a lot I don’t know, and somehow Sunday school classes don’t seem to do it for me.

At the same time, I’m having a spiritual dry spell of some kind. It’s not about God; it’s about my church. I’m just not well-motivated to go, and have missed for a number of weeks. And of course, the more you miss, the more you feel like you don’t need to go.

My daughter’s rape is still so large in my life. I think dealing with this has taken a huge amount of emotional energy, leaving me with not very much to use to engage with others.

I’m planning to go tomorrow. I wish, somehow, that I could tell everyone what happened, but of course I can’t, for my daughter’s sake. And a secret that big isolates you. It sits right on top of your heart.

I’ll have to move the stone. 2 years ago

Acts now. I really like it. 3 years ago

John. 3 years ago

and I do love him. As abstract as he is, what he wrote makes the most sense to me of all the gospels. 3 years ago

I’m sometimes nonplussed by the transitions between Jesus’ parables. Sometimes he moves without transition from one topic to the other, a pattern that feels abrupt.

When I notice this, I have to remind myself that these “narratives” were written long after his death, and that, of course, his disciples remembered the most salient stories to include in their works. The lack of transition sentences probably isn’t Jesus’ fault at all. 3 years ago

I don’t have the sense of confusion that I did with Matthew and Mark, that sense of unreality. But I want to read these slowly, and I don’t want to read when I’m distracted.

I’m beginning to think about what I want to do when I’m finished. I think I want to start again with the Gospels, and think through a comparison of the content. 3 years ago

Luke! 3 years ago

and am beginning Luke. I like Luke’s style so far a bit better. I’m finding it hard to read the New Testiment—The writing about Jesus seems unreal somehow—maybe an effect of his being like no other man. 3 years ago

I’m reading the Sermon on the Mount. Slowly. Jesus seems to change subjects abbruptly, but that may be because of the author’s recall. Imagine trying to record something like that years later. What strikes me is the internal integrety of his thinking. There’s not a false word. 3 years ago

slowly, carefully. I go over the maps at the same time, trying to follow Jesus’ path. It’s so amazing to read this with an adult’s perspective. When I last tried to read this, I was a child, and it was so confusing. This is very clear and gives me a much stronger hope of being able to understand this message. What does strike me is how radical Jesus must have been. I’ve never read anything else with a moral message this clear and coherent. 3 years ago

book on historical sites in Isreal last night, so I could track some of Jesus’ changes in local.

I’m really fascinated and want to go to Isreal now. My mom learned Hebrew as an adult (and gentile) and went.

I wonder if I could do the same? Would a rabbi let me learn from him or her? 3 years ago

that I finished the Old Testament! I can’t believe it’s taken me 3 years to read it, but it was worth every moment, and reading the notes in my study Bible helped a great deal.

I’m in awe of the NT, and starting it seems like a scary proposition. I never understood Jesus’ parables very well, and sometimes they seemed harsh to me. This will be my chance to really get to know him, to understand what he was doing, appearing in our lives.

I can’t wait! 3 years ago

and soon the end of the OT. I’m so looking forward to the NT. 3 years ago

Habakkuk really touched my heart. Here’s the gist of the book: The prophet asks how Judah can be permitted by God to ignore his instructions. God explains that he is planning to use the Babylonians to exercise judgment over Judah. The Babylonians were horrid, and the prophet recoils: How can God use something as vile as Babylon? In response, God makes it clear that eventually the destroyer will itself be destroyed…in other words, there is a larger plan.

It’s not an academic exercise. My very young, kind RA was attacked at gunpoint a couple of weeks ago, coming face to face with pure evil. It makes you think, how can he let this exist? How can he let this happen?

It’s a presumptive question, something I’m good at. In reality, I don’t have the big picture. I don’t know what the impact of this attack will be.

But I know that God can use anything, even Babylon, for good. Not that he inflicted it on her, but she can grow from it.

I imagine her 5 years from now, supporting a victim going through exactly this recovery process. She will use her own experience. It will not hurt her anymore; it will be an old scar, one she has stretched to near complete flexibility.

She will move on. And God knows in what direction—now. 3 years ago

5 more books of the Old Testament to go. This is the best adventure I’ve been on in my life. 3 years ago

now. It is even more frightening, in terms of God’s anger at humanity for ignoring him. It still seems to me, neophyte that I am, that he is hurt more than angry, or at least that his anger comes from there, something I can understand as a mother of teenagers. It’s not fun to be ignored. There is a sense of desperation in his anger, as though he’s tried everythign and we are still not getting it.

It seems like the world is still that way…that we are not getting it. It makes me wonder how bad his people during that time must have been for his anger to be so direct.

I also wonder why we don’t have prophets of the same type now. I know…. there is Mother Teresa, our poets and preachers, but few seem to claim direct messages from God. Why then and not now? These kinds of questions worry me for some reason. 3 years ago

last night. Onward to Jonah. I’m looking forward to hearing the REAL story. 3 years ago

Amos. Which is fearsome. 3 years ago

These minor prophets are quick reads! I’ve already finished Joel… 3 years ago

now. My son calls him a minor prophet. Somehow that seems like an oxymoron. 3 years ago

is incredible. His dreams are deeply disturbing, and so dramatic I keep wondering if the writing were meant to be symbolic or a literal reflection of events.

The theme of God as manipulating events to get our attention continues. And I continue to think about the way we interact with our own children, trying first one strategy and then another, hoping to get them to notice us.

When I put my girl to bed tonight, I realized what I really wanted was her attention. She does not need me in as direct and obvious a way (although I know she needs me just as much). Sometimes I yearn for her to need me in an obvious way. I wonder if God experiences that difficulty, as we mindlessly run around living our lives without him…. 3 years ago

now… 3 years ago

and I’m so, so sorry for the tragedy described in this book. The book is also making me rethink my understanding of God to some extent.

Adar and I have corresponded a bit about this. I have struggled with the idea that God purposefully punishes people for sins during their life on earth. It is a short jump from that idea to one I abhore: That bad things happen only to those who ARE bad. In my experience, it’s a surprisingly common, albeit unconscious, belief in American society.

Ezekiel is clearly writing about God punishing multiple people, out of anger. It reminds me of the way parents punish while they are angry, even though they (we) know that our judgment is impaired at that time, and that it’s unlikely to produce positive change in children.

If this is the same God who sent us Jesus, he seems to have changed. And as I read through the OT, it seems to me that God is changing….that is, that he is almost baffled by the idiocy of humans, how we stubbornly go off in the totally wrong direction. He tries a flood, and then promises never to do that again. Later, he tries similarly drastic moves…and they don’t work, in terms of helping us to understand what we must do in order to have a relationship with him. He is portrayed as almost wistful, confounded by our inability to behave like good children. I can completely understand that feeling, since I often feel that way with my children. But all my life I’ve been presented with the idea that God is all-knowing, implying that he knows everything that is going to happen (my Presbyterian background).

The feeling I get, reading the OT, is that it’s not that simple…that God is frustrated with us, and trying repeatedly to get us to understand. Although I’m not at the NT yet, I can imagine that Jesus, as such a radical step for God to take, represents the ultimate effort to understand us and to help us understand him.

In other words, what I’m struggling toward is the idea that perhaps creation got away from God a little bit, and we became maybe more independent than planned. Adam and Eve misbehaved, because, well, we can—and therefore all this misunderstanding and suffering. And perhaps God is trying over and over to get through to us….without much success….until Jesus, who represents the deepest way of trying to understand us, and to give us a way of understanding him.

Now, I know what I don’t know, and I’m no Biblical scholar by any means. But I like to think out loud here… 3 years ago