Read the Bible

One good thing that did come out of the service for younger people was seeding my desire to do a major read of the Bible.

I pulled out a NRSV I bought over 20 years ago to read the entire Pauline corpus (that means all the letters attributed to Paul the Apostle).

I'm more than 2/3 through in a few days, so might end up reading the generals as well (Hebrews to Jude).

The aim is to get this reading done by the end of January.

So there we are, at last, a New Year's resolution.

Reading the Bible quickly is great to do. One gets the overall picture and themes very clearly, not something that I find easily emerges from bit-wise reading small groups of verses. So, my suggestion: read it fast and read it slow. I read the Psalms slowly: one a day, so I cover the lot twice a year. A nice start to the day, too.

My serious reading pattern is the NT twice a year, and over a two year period the OT in divisions of History pre-Promised-Land, History Promised-Land, Little Prophets, Wisdom, Big Prophets.

I'm not all that keen on the NRSV, and prefer my favourite, the NASB, but the NRSV does have right at the back some editorial goodies going for it, that I'd not seen until this evening!

A very useful index of subjects of the Old and New Testaments, not too detailed to be quite useful.

The index doesn't give Langton-Estienne references, so I might add these and maybe post them (I'll ask the publisher's permission, of course).

A biblical chronology, with some external events. This pretends that we don't know the dates of creation, Babel and Noah's flood, which of course, on the Bible's own data, we do. I'll add them for my own purposes.

A summary of Paul's life and work, fabulously detailed with full Langton-Estienne references.

A list of prayers recorded in both testaments, in alphabetical order.

Table of Jewish feasts.

The Jewish calendar.

The link on references above is to Bible.Org; they have a sister site, Lumina, for study which looks pretty good.