It is common for new Christians, or newly serious Christians, who want to deepen their relationship with scripture to set out to “read the whole Bible cover-to-cover.” This practice, while well-intentioned, can lead to one of two problems.
First, many Christians make it through the exciting, narrative story of Genesis and Exodus before losing interest somewhere in the legal sections of the Pentateuch.
This is unsurprising. As a lawyer familiar with legal treatises and codes, Ian can tell you that even the best jurist usually does not intend his treatise to be a pleasant cover-to-cover reading experience even for other lawyers, let alone the lay reader. A legal treatise is designed to be consulted, not read like a novel.
Because all legal treatises are boring to read, Christians at first riveted by the generational drama of Jacob, Joseph, and Moses usually founder in discouragement when they collide with Mosaic dietary and agricultural laws. Sadly, this prevents many Christians from ever truly discovering biblical narratives that are as compelling and rich as Genesis-Exodus—including Judges and the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles.
Secondly, some Christians who do succeed in making it through the Bible cover-to-cover do not seem to profit much by the experience. I’m reminded here of the Christian musician Shannon Low, who—as I recall the story, at least—publicly repudiated his faith after a skeptic directed him to read the story of Elisha killing 42 young boys in 2 Kings 2. Low recalled that he was shocked to read the story despite having previously “read the whole Bible.” “How did I miss this?,” he asked himself. I’d wager that Low was a “cover-to-cover” Bible reader.
The fundamental problem is that some Christians—informed by a naïve oversimplification of sola scriptura—implicitly assume that the various books of the Bible were directly ordered by God into a coherent structure, that all components of the Bible are intended to be understood by the ordinary person with no external assistance, and that the Bible as a whole is meant to be read in a sequential narrative form.
These assumptions have no basis in the Bible itself and little basis in church history. They instead seem to reflect the creeping, unconscious influence of Islam’s theology of the Quran. Unlike Christians, Muslims have historically held that their central text was dictated verbatim by an angel and existed as a coherent, single text from eternity past.
In contrast, Christians since before the time of Jerome have understood the Bible as a library of individual books, in different genres, created in a variety of ways and in different historical circumstances. The precise scope of the canon has always been considered an appropriate subject for inspired councilor deliberation and/or scholarly debate.
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