The Bible: the most boring book I've ever read

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montanaman

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I’m a 38 year old Cradle Catholic. I’m orthodox and faithful to the magisterium. If it wouldn’t freak my wife out, I’d get a tattoo of the Vatican flag over my heart. I hope that if I’m called to martyrdom, I will accept it with grace and humility.

Catholic cred: established.

However, my biggest stumbling block to reading scripture is that it bores me to tears. Maybe it’s because I’ve heard it literally all my life, but I can’t possibly hear about Jesus and the loaves and fishes miracle one more time. I can’t bear to hear about Noah saving two of every animal one more time. I get it. God = good, Devil = bad. Not saved by works, persevere to the end, “this is my body,” blah, blah, blah. I believe all that. Do I really have to read the same things over and over in my “off time?”

On the flipside of that, I DO know there’s a lot more to it than I know. I have no intention of learning Greek, but I do know that there are layers of meaning and interpretation, etc. Perhaps, just perhaps, the reason scripture turns me off is that I can’t possibly find time to become an armchair Bible scholar for at least five more years. We have two boys under five years old and a little girl on the way. I run a ridiculously complicated business (logistically speaking). If I have any time left in the day, I sleep or try to keep up to date on my wife’s life. I could literally fill every hour of the day with essential duties. Becoming a Scott Hahn or Tim Staples isn’t in the cards for me.

Anyway, does anyone else feel like this?
 
montanaman said:
I’m a 38 year old Cradle Catholic. I’m orthodox and faithful to the magisterium. If it wouldn’t freak my wife out, I’d get a tattoo of the Vatican flag over my heart. I hope that if I’m called to martyrdom, I will accept it with grace and humility.

Catholic cred: established.

However, my biggest stumbling block to reading scripture is that it bores me to tears. Maybe it’s because I’ve heard it literally all my life, but I can’t possibly hear about Jesus and the loaves and fishes miracle one more time. I can’t bear to hear about Noah saving two of every animal one more time. I get it. God = good, Devil = bad. Not saved by works, persevere to the end, “this is my body,” blah, blah, blah. I believe all that. Do I really have to read the same things over and over in my “off time?”

On the flipside of that, I DO know there’s a lot more to it than I know. I have no intention of learning Greek, but I do know that there are layers of meaning and interpretation, etc. Perhaps, just perhaps, the reason scripture turns me off is that I can’t possibly find time to become an armchair Bible scholar for at least five more years. We have two boys under five years old and a little girl on the way. I run a ridiculously complicated business (logistically speaking). If I have any time left in the day, I sleep or try to keep up to date on my wife’s life. I could literally fill every hour of the day with essential duties. Becoming a Scott Hahn or Tim Staples isn’t in the cards for me.

Anyway, does anyone else feel like this?
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I think, from what I’m thinking you’re saying, is that it’s like trying to read a textbook from front to cover. It’s just impossible, no matter whether or not you agree with the subject matter or whether or not you love it.

A lot (not all, mind you) is written in a very straight forward, just-the-facts, no-flowery language, and thus makes it much more difficult to read. It’s not written like a fictional book, where you read “and then Jesus looked towards the money changers in God’ Temple. His eyes narrowed, his brow tightened. With great strength, he took the edge of the table and flipped it over. The money fell to the floor, making a soft “clink-clink-clink” that echoed to the Holy of Holies .” No, none of that.

Just my two cents. I agree, partially, though that it is difficult to sit down and read it. I try, but sometimes I catch myself simply skipping some chapters…
 
montanaman said:
Anyway, does anyone else feel like this?
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At times. One thing you might consider is getting some CD sets that you could listen to while driving. I have been doing this for a while now and so has my wife. Both of us have learned a great deal just in the time we spend driving around town everyday. There are some wonderful resources here in case you are interested.

catholicproductions.com/store/audio/pitre/index.html
catholicproductions.com/store/audio/bergsma/index.html

Most of the CD’s are at a very high level in terms of scripture scholarship and I think almost anyone would get something out of them. They have definitely taken my understanding of Sacred Scripture to a much higher level. I think I could listen to them many times and still come away with new stuff.

I hope that this helps.

Peace of Christ,
 
Well I can’t contribute except that you shouldn’t feel TOO bad about saying it’s boring. I’m one of the few on these threads who will proudly decry the Bible as having the lowest entertainment value (unless you have an unusual taste for Ancient Hebrew literature and folklore.)

As someone else stated though, it just proves that the Bible is a book that’s to be take with the same level of seriousness as you would a text book. It’s not for light-reading.

I’ve felt the same way as you and I’m not even a scholar. I just look up the Bible for this or that verse when I need to a bit of homework for this or that teaching etc.

If you ask me, the best thing you can get out of this is you can stop people from putting needless emphasis on the Bible’s entertainment value.
 
How about you start by going through it and looking for the bits that aren’t read out at Mass? There’s probably some interesting stuff there that you haven’t heard before.

Secondly - yes, some of it may seem ‘boring’, some of it you may have heard lots of times. but is stuff that we all need to hear, and repeatedly - if it weren’t we’d all be perfect already.

I sure as heck know that however many times I hear ‘love thy neighbor’, I still fail at it in many ways. So I accept that until I have thoroughly absorbed and incorporated that message into my heart and am really putting it into practice every day of my life, I will need to hear it a couplea hundred more times.
 
montanaman said:
However, my biggest stumbling block to reading scripture is that it bores me to tears. Maybe it’s because I’ve heard it literally all my life, but I can’t possibly hear about Jesus and the loaves and fishes miracle one more time. I can’t bear to hear about Noah saving two of every animal one more time. I get it. God = good, Devil = bad. Not saved by works, persevere to the end, “this is my body,” blah, blah, blah. I believe all that. Do I really have to read the same things over and over in my “off time?”
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Then maybe take some time and instead of reading Scripture try reading spiritual or scholarly books about Scripture (whichever aspect you think might be more interesting). I’m no great Scripture scholar, but people who are tell me there’s an inexhaustible wealth of material for study and reflection in there. Perhaps reading something about it would give you more to chew on than just reading the same thing over again.
 
Hello Montanaman, 🙂

Congratulations with your beautiful family. I think the most important inheritance that we can give our children in our faith.As you know, we transmitted by going to church every Sunday, receiving the sacraments, praying and plainly practicing our faith. The sacraments nourish us.

I have found that reading scripture nourishes also.

If the Bible was just like any other book, I would agree with you. It would be really boring to read the same things over and over and over and over again. But, the Bible is not like any other book. It is Sacred Scripture and God communicates and nourishes us through it.

I will not attempt to share with you here how much I have been blessed by praying first to the saint who wrote the book I would be about to read and just plainly praying for God to allow me to understand His words. I sometimes, pray a little prayer to the Holy Spirit and call the Holy Spirit and ask the Holy Spirit to help me to understand God’s words. Try it.

Another thing that I started doing many moons ago, as I found the Bible a bit overwhelming was to play a little game. I would decide to read a book, let’s say Matthew (I think the best place to start reading the Bible is with Matthew and just continue straight to Revelation and the hit the Old Testament). Well, every time I would finish one page I highlighted the number of the page at the bottom of the page and I would just carry on this way no matter how long it would take me to finish a book, Then, when I finished the book I would see all the page numbers of the book highlighted and it gave me a sense of accomplishment and inspired me to continue. This is how I got through the New Testament. With the OT, I started with the short books - to feel accomplished and just any book that interested me but in sequence and that’s how I read the Bible the first time. You may want to try this.

Nothing substitute Sacred Scripture it is there for you yourself to read it. Try praying scriptures. The psalms are a great start in the OT and Proverbs and Songs of Songs etc… are very nice.

p.s. You are never really reading the same thing. That’s the beautiful thing about the Bible.

Gob bless,

Abba
 
It is a good thing you are a Catholic and not a Baptist! I approach the Bible as literature in much the same way as I approach ‘Moby Dick’. It has some great passages, many memorable phrases, and some wonderful characters. Its plots are archetypical (or have become so because of constant repetition). It is pervaded by a certain fatalism (in regard to this life) and also great hope. But it is not at all easy to sit down and read all at once. I’ve just started reading the Genesis creation account to compare with the beginning of the Gospel of John (because of something I read on CAF). I also often reread the story of David and Goliath, which I reckon is one of the great ‘boy’s stories’ of all time. It is also a wonderful language resource when trying to learn other languages.
 
One of my favorite subforums on this site is the Apologetics → Sacred Scripture section. People ask such interesting questions, and digging through scholarly commentary helps me appreciate all the stuff behind the Bible itself. It gives it more breadth, depth, and interest, and makes me really appreciate how something that can appear relatively simple and straightforward at first can have something amazingly complex and profound at its root. Or how a random, offhand, throwaway quote in one section can have meaningful implications when paired with a reference in another section. Before I found CAF, Bible Scholarship seemed to be a dry, dusty field… but now the Bible seems to be something far richer and more fertile than I’d previously suspected, and can’t even imagine beginning to scratch the surface on my own. 🙂
 
You’ve never read a statistics text, have you? :-p

If you want to enjoy Scripture, read it with someone who is passionate about it - one of the many excellent Catholic commentators, or perhaps a devotional by the likes of Henri Nouwen, Cardinal Newman, D. Bonhoeffer, CS Lewis or even in snippets alongside a more fiery devotional such as “The Binding of the Strong Man” or “The Imitation of Christ”.
 
Not really cause I am not that busy “in my mind”,maybe physically busy but have time to ponder upon a tiny detail of the reading of the day that makes me curious for instance,and curious to find out why it is written or described.Insignificant perhaps,but takes my mind miles away and helps me get a little closer to the picture and the person of Jesus.I actually enjoy it.And in this way,I overcome the feeling that I kind of “already know how each story ends” to say it somehow.
 
I left the Church because in art school, I saw ancient depictions of Madonna & Child types before Jesus and Mary. I thought we were pagans. I studied ancient cultures but never found solid footing, something art school helped with in discerning phonies and derivatives of other things. So I kept studying. And I found out with Bishop Sheen’s writings and D. James Kennedy’s “Gospel in the Stars” that ancients were awaiting a special Child. And there were phony claimants. I got excited finding that Daniel’s calendar predicting Messiah’s coming got it down to the day we celebrate on Palm Sunday–when the numbers crunched were via the Jewish calendar. Jack Van Impe is sympathetic to Catholicism, and his exposition of Daniel, who dealt with “bad guy” countries that included Russia/Tobolsk–modern Russia, were in the OT and correlated with the Fatima warning about Russia. Reading David Fasold’s research on Noah’s Ark–out-of-print book, The Ark of Noah --was wonderful in seeing this genius amateur sleuthing extra-biblical sources grounding the Bible. Savinah Teubal, Jewish scholar, tied up the role of the Woman & Seed from her fine scholarship. Then listening to tapes and reading websites by Catholic apologists refined my appreciation. Further research on antiquity showed the Old Testament was stunningly accurate while other ancient texts paled in comparison. Ancient monotheism has been plastered over and has and is hiding in plain sight, including the likelihood that the Great Pyramid was constructed as a memorial to the Flood and as a reliquary for Adam’s bones. Pray for God’s revelation to pull the wondrous revelation of His ways and His will and His nature out of the Bible and into your heart.

I guess the backstory is enriching, correlating Old Testament foreshadowing to New Testament fulfillment; and awaiting future fulfillment. That’s the lovely symmetry in scripture presented at the Mass. Then I learned my way around the Bible with tv and radio preachers.
 
nordskoven said:
I left the Church because in art school, I saw ancient depictions of Madonna & Child types before Jesus and Mary. I thought we were pagans. I studied ancient cultures but never found solid footing, something art school helped with in discerning phonies and derivatives of other things. So I kept studying. And I found out with Bishop Sheen’s writings and D. James Kennedy’s “Gospel in the Stars” that ancients were awaiting a special Child. And there were phony claimants. I got excited finding that Daniel’s calendar predicting Messiah’s coming got it down to the day we celebrate on Palm Sunday–when the numbers crunched were via the Jewish calendar. Jack Van Impe is sympathetic to Catholicism, and his exposition of Daniel, who dealt with “bad guy” countries that included Russia/Tobolsk–modern Russia, were in the OT and correlated with the Fatima warning about Russia. Reading David Fasold’s research on Noah’s Ark–out-of-print book, The Ark of Noah --was wonderful in seeing this genius amateur sleuthing extra-biblical sources grounding the Bible. Savinah Teubal, Jewish scholar, tied up the role of the Woman & Seed from her fine scholarship. Then listening to tapes and reading websites by Catholic apologists refined my appreciation. Further research on antiquity showed the Old Testament was stunningly accurate while other ancient texts paled in comparison. Ancient monotheism has been plastered over and has and is hiding in plain sight, including the likelihood that the Great Pyramid was constructed as a memorial to the Flood and as a reliquary for Adam’s bones. Pray for God’s revelation to pull the wondrous revelation of His ways and His will and His nature out of the Bible and into your heart.

I guess the backstory is enriching, correlating Old Testament foreshadowing to New Testament fulfillment; and awaiting future fulfillment. That’s the lovely symmetry in scripture presented at the Mass. Then I learned my way around the Bible with tv and radio preachers.
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Great stuff! Thanks for sharing.
 
. Then I learned my way around the Bible with tv and radio preachers.

Since the OP has said he has no time to read much ,yours is an excellent idea.There´s even very short CDs(Lighthouse,for ex),on Scripture you can listen to while driving.And as you said,homilies at Mass of course.
 
You should try listening to it… makes it more fun, absorbable and interactive 😉

Grab the free ipad bible APP. I highly recommend it.
 
Lilsheep88 said:
You should try listening to it… makes it more fun, absorbable and interactive 😉

Grab the free ipad bible APP. I highly recommend it.
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Good recommendation. I listen to the Bible too. I listen to a book I plan on reading as I am doing my housework or driving. It helps a lot for when I actually read the book. Of course, listening to it as I am doing housework, cooking, laundry, or driving is not the same as to be at peace and prayerfully read the Bible. But, the listening serves me as a good preparation.
 
What you say can be true.

It’s a lot like assigned reading in school; sure you can read it, but some of the terms are new so you don’t have a complete grasp of what you read, and a lot of the subject matter is boring.

Spend a few bucks on a volume of The Daily Study Bible by William Barclay. (Click the link, it has the Look Inside thing. Pick “surprise me” and see how you like it) Barclay wasn’t Catholic, but he was pretty close, and since it was originally written many years ago, it’s a lot more orthodox than a lot of the gibberish that Catholics have written since the 1970s. There will be a paragraph or so from the Bible then a couple pages of commentary that explains the context and how it applies to today. They’re very good. Bishop Sheen had it in his library!

I had one I was reading sitting on the coffee table once. My brother the very lapsed Catholic was over visiting. I went to the bathroom or something and came back and caught him reading it. He said, “This is pretty interesting! How come they didn’t teach us this stuff in catechism class?”

So I recommend picking up one volume - Matthew or Mark would be good choices - and leave it in the bathroom. That way you can read a couple pages a day in what would otherwise be down time. You’ll probably find it interesting when taken in small doses and with good explanations.
 
I remember hearing that monks would read a verse outloud, very very slowly, repeating each word multiple times to themselves and pondering every possible meaning to get the most out of the Bible, getting through a chapter an hour, if that. I can imagine the book of John would be a great place to start.
 
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