r/askphilosophy • u/myriadisanadjective • 22h ago
How to read the Bible?
I'm in a little bit of a weird position where I am extremely culturally Catholic and have had profound spiritual experiences through Catholic rites and rituals, and have been called back to the Church repeatedly (despite being rabidly queer and generally not the type of person you'd think would find comfort or meaning there).
But I've never seriously read the Bible. I don't want to approach it as "Bible study" the way churches do it, but it is an important philosophical and theological text and I'd like to read and understand it the best I can.
How would a philosopher approach reading the Bible? I obviously can't come to it from a place of total faith and belief, but I would at least like to come to it in a spirit of intellectual and personal curiosity.
Thank you!
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u/Xeilias Christian Philosophy 20h ago
Boy, what a question. I think the first thing you would need to remember is that the Bible isn't really "a book," as much as it is a set of books. So reading each one will use different rules, and require different contexts. There are general overarch rules, but there are also more specific rules for each book. To take an example. If you were to read the book of Hebrews, and compare it to the book of Romans, two books that most scholars think were written with a relatively similar theological bent to them (they used to think that they were written by the same person, the apostle Paul, but more recently, they don't. Regardless, most scholars still think Hebrews would have been written by someone directly within Paul's circle of influence). But, many people have read the two, found the same word used in both, and assumed they meant the same thing. The problem is that Paul wrote in koine Greek, with a pharisaic background, while Hebrews was written in koine Greek with a significant number of classical Greek loanwords, and had an Alexandrian Jewish background. So it can't be taken for granted that the two letters, which are theological treatises in two different genres, mean the same thing when they use the same words. Then when you bring in Revelation, which is entirely different in almost every conceivable way, it gets more complicated.
With that said, you should be able to fair well with a good book on biblical hermeneutics. There are non-religious as well as religious ones. And when reading a specific book in the Bible, it would be good to get a good commentary on it.
Secondarily, as I'm sure you are already aware, the Bible is not a book on philosophy. There are more or less philosophical books within it, but it would be a mistake to fail to read it without an interpreter's lens.
And finally, there are different layers of messaging that the Bible is saying. Think about it like this. Q1: what did Jesus say? Simple enough. Q2: Who was His intended audience, and what was His purpose? Also simple enough. Q3: what was Mark's intended audience and purpose for recording what Jesus said? That's more complicated, and people don't usually ask that question. Q4: what was the gospel compiler's intended audience, and his purpose? Even less often asked. Q5: what was the new testament compiler's intended audience and purpose? What you have with Jesus' words are three layers of meaning and audience, and the meanings may expand or contract with each layer. And it's also not really obvious which layer is the proper one for knowing the intended meaning. It gets wild when asking these questions about the Old testament. And this is when you get into the hyperlinked nature of the Bible. So if we were to begin asking those questions about Moses, it might get really messy, which is partially why people can dedicate their lives to its study.
Anyways, it's a worthwhile venture. It's worth finding those books on hermeneutics, and good commentaries if you do want to understand it. Just reading it is probably not going to make it make the most sense.
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u/myriadisanadjective 6h ago
This is so WILDLY helpful and exactly the kind of guidance I was looking for - I hope it helps others googling around for the same answers I was, because this is a much better explanation than what I was finding. Thank you so much!
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u/CalvinSays phil. of religion 22h ago
A work that may interest you is Dru Johnson's Biblical Philosophy where he seeks to expound the philosophy of the Bible much as one would the philosophy of the Vedas or the Homeric epics. While the Bible certainly presents itself as teaching us about God, in doing so it explicitly and implicit teaches a philosophy of how to know, what the good life is, etc. So this might be what you're after.
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