The bible is not a single book; it's a collection of dozens of books written at very different times. Just reading it front-to-back is not a very productive way to read it. Genesis and Exodus are okay, but Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy are just dreadful.

The best place to start is the gospels, at the start of the NT. That gets you right to the heart of what Christianity is about, they're good stories, and there's quite a bit of wisdom in there. Absolutely worth reading.

If you want a philosophical treatise about the meaning of life, read Eclessiastes. The stories of David in the books of Samuel are exciting adventures as well as the most central part of the history of ancient Israel. It's also worth reading a couple of psalms (23 probably being the most famous) but if you read them all in one go, they might get a bit repetitive. And of course there's the erotic Song of Songs. For more adventure stories, Judges also has a couple of good ones.

How could you even begin to understand the text without knowing what they meant? Surely not by free association! Recall those ancient epics you've likely read in school. What were they? Translations. Someone rendered the original text into your language for you. To do that, they had to first understand the original text. To do that requires understanding the language(s) of the original text. To understand the language(s) of the original text, you need an adequate familiarity of the culture at the time. This is extraordinarily difficult to accomplish competently because of the breadth and depth of background knowledge required. It is incidentally why there are multiple competing translations of ancient texts (it is said that translations aren't truly possible).

Now consider again the knowledge you need to interpret text in its historical context. If you've just unearthed some text from an ancient civilization no one knows much of anything about, this is going to be damn near impossible and full of speculation even when you manage to produce a plausible translation. There's also the question of the status of the text: what is it supposed to be? In the case of the Bible, you need the continuous Tradition through which to interpret it. You need to interpret it synoptically or run the risk of making ad hoc judgements unhedged by other parts. (This is why Sola Scriptura fails; not only is it self-refuting, as in, nowhere in the Bible is this principle declared, not that this would lend any credence to the claim, but you lack the interpretive apparatus to interpret the text in the first place, leading to all sorts of weird claims and inferences. Not only that, but the Bible itself was compiled in the fourth century in light of this Tradition. How else would you establish the canon if not by drawing on the Tradition?)

> They're fallible like everyone else, and therefore might be wrong.

Yeah? Check out the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. The Catholic Church states that Holy Scripture is free from error[0]. So your view is not universally shared.

> In terms of impacting people's lives for good, I definitely feel like religions are at their best when they are inspiratory

What is your view of religion, of Christianity? Its purpose? What is this "inspiration" and what is it for? What does it inspire? If your answer is "to become a better person" or something of that sort, then we must ask: how so? Either some truth is being communicated which makes you better by virtue of knowing it as well as the change it effects in you, or whatever is being said is fraudulent and useless and ought to be discarded (put aside partial truths for the moment). And because Christianity concerns the ultimate things, it means that all of your life is oriented by it, and it means that it must help you with respect to your ultimate end, something you can fail at attaining.

As I have written elsewhere, everyone has a religion, so the question is "is it any good?", which is to say "is it true?", and not "do you live by one?". Man cannot do without religion because he cannot live without an orientation or a direction in life, he cannot live without an Ultimate, so much so that he will fill that void with all sorts of garbage. He needs to know at least the necessary part of the big picture and a way of living in accordance with it. You may find bits of pieces of truth scattered among the religions, valuable insofar as they contain the truth especially about ultimate things, but Man does not subsist on religious dabbling. And here the Catholic Church asserts clearly its claim to the fullness of truth.

> and at their worst when they try to impose authority.

This seems to misunderstand the purpose of authority. The purpose of authority is to safeguard teachings from corruption and manipulation and make them available over the centuries so you don't end up with a proliferation of confusion and error. Don't let the centuries of caricatures of the Big Ol' Mean Church fool you!

[0] https://www.catholicherald.com/faith/what_is_biblical_inerra...

The parts you describe are a history book. They are not meant to be normative to someone living in a modern Western Democratic context. They are background to explain a people, a time, and a discontinued form of government. Other more pertinent parts of the Bible (see the prophets or the epistles referring to The Law) make sense with that background available.

I also suspect there's some deeper truth buried in those laws about what happens if a community stays distinct, and how that can be enacted (clothing, food, calendar, etc.). And there's certainly a lot of history of the Hebrew people to describe what happens when distinction and noteriety happens, even through long periods of diaspora.

Finally, it's worth having some historical context. Considering the Israelites of the time to be unconscionable doesn't take into account what the typical society looked like in that time and place.

The Bible is not a philosophical text in any way remotely like Nicomachean Ethics. The Bible is a series of stories, genealogy and poetry, not an argument, or a dialogue that attempts to illuminate the truth, or at least points of disagreement over the truth. The Bible is not about how Jesus or God did anything in the way that the Ethics is about how you think about what is good. The Bible is why. If you believe that the reason to live a righteous life is that there is a righteous God and his son was born, died and rose again the Bible is that story. It does not tell you how, except in the very barest details. That's what the Church is for, the community of believers.

Just to add to the excellent comment above. More days than not I am amazed at the relevance of the ancient scriptures. My daughter was caught out last week telling a fib. It made me smile that the next day my bible reading was a 3000 year old proverb about the importance of not telling lies.

Others days, yes, I find it hard reading from a very different age. I sometimes have to delve into my study bible's commentary to get some historical context.

I used to, but it becomes more practical and timeless the more I read my Bible. I read a version with cross-references in the center-line so reading slower and checking these makes it make a lot more sense. The way I'd recommend reading is Mark, Luke, John, Matthew, Acts and Romans (all in the New Testament) while periodically reading the cross-references as you go. This covers basic beliefs and how Jesus taught following the spirit of the Law, why Gentile Christians don't follow the full Jewish Law (Acts 15) and how those before Jesus aren't condemned (Romans). Then I'd recommend Genesis and Exodus to understand the Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob family line, and the establishment of the Law. Follow with 1st/2nd Samuel and 1st/2nd Kings for most of the rest of the historical side of context. Psalms and Proverbs can be read a little at a time, at any time.

> read a section of the Bible's Old Testament, Psalm, Proverbs and New Testament.

This is also the way I read, and it's super helpful. Old/New Testament for spiritual growth, Psalms for worship, and Proverbs for ordinary day-to-day advice (there's also 31 Proverbs so its easy to pickup whatever day it is).

> I went to Sunday school for 9 years and I remember struggling as a child to conciliate what I was being taught at school and at chruch, and specially ignoring the hipocrisy of the people lecturing

A lot of Sunday school is way too boiled down. There's hypocrisy everywhere and the church is no exception. People try to justify their own sin and resultant problems by ranking it against others--part of the reasons Christians are told not to judge others (especially outside the church), but instead help others in the church with their problems and be open to correction. It's supposed to be handled internally, but occasionally isn't, and I've moved to a different church when I've found it's entrenched and not fixable.

No, the canon wasn't even set thousands of years ago (so there wasn't a single accepted Bible to take literally or metaphorically), and Biblical literalism as a doctrine is a minority doctrine in Christianity that is only a few hundred years old, originating within Protestantism, and mostly became a big deal with the explosion of fundamentalism in the US even more recently than that.

The Catholic Church didn't even think laypeople should read the Bible until fairly recently, one of the main concerns being the danger of naive interpretation, which simple literalism would surely qualify as.

That's probably a pretty good analogy - it's useful maybe for historical value, but it has to be understood that some of what's listed is no longer best practice and you can't, for instance, go around stoning adulterers and amputating thieves' hands.

A very important point. I find that many, including Christians, approach reading the Bible as a textbook, or a moral code of sorts to guide behaviour.

Treat it like ancient literature developed over thousands of years, different people making various modifications to it not unlike an open source project, and it can become super insightful. Of course ancient people were wired differently from us, but the lindy stuff in humanity remains

There's lots of stuff in the Bible. Much of it falls under the category you describe, but not all.

> The Good News comes from people today choosing to be better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil acts against others but to do good things to other people, to say kind words from a good heart because they believe in a better world coming tomorrow.

Different people have different interpretations. What you describe sounds nice, but I don't think it's exactly the orthodoxy for many Christians.

It's common to quote short passages (1-3 verses) in society, either to prove a point (often missing context) or in a "thought for the day" manner. Many homes have wall hangings with scripture that the owner has never read in the bible.

Your taxonomy is too simple. :-)

There certainly are Christians who seem to focus only on verses in isolation, without considering even the context of the surrounding verses, much less the cultural and historical context into which they were written. But there are others who think that taking the Bible seriously requires taking the historical and cultural context into account; that God did speak, but he spoke to a specific set of people in a specific circumstance; so if you want to hear him speak clearly, you have to go back and put yourself in the shoes of the original hearers. People who take this kind of approach are are both "better educated, more literate and more capable of critical thinking in a constructive way", and believe the Bible to be "literally true" -- at least at literally as the author intended it to be taken literally. :-)

Um, have you actually read them? They are miles apart. Can you find me the reams of legal codes or origin stories in the New Testament, for example?

It is lamentable if true. They don't know what they miss.

That being said, there are lots of Bible references in the canon of English language literature. So if ones goal is to understand that, then a synopsis of the Bible stories and commonly quoted phrases might just be sufficient. The book is dry, repetitive and a bit inconsistent. It's value is that it is really old and is associated with a big religion. If a modern writer created the same thing it would have a really low rating on Goodreads.

The difficulties translators have with any text should be a reminder of how painfully inadequate any language is as a mediator between two different brains. So much depends in context.

> Perhaps the first person to openly suggest otherwise was Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Jewish philosopher, who daringly wrote that the books of the Bible ought to be studied in just the same way we would study Greek and Italian poetry.

This, 100 times. I am not a religious person at all. However, it makes me extremely sad if self-proclaimed "atheists" make fun of the the Bible / Torah / Koran by pointing out how unrealistic almost all of the texts are. Of course they are unrealistic - but so are the works of Shakespeare, or Dante, or Goethe, or any great poet in the last 3000 years. Yet nobody would ridicule Dante for assuming that hell lies in some cave in Tuscany. If you just dismiss these religious texts as opium for the dull medieval masses, you might miss some deep poetical truths about mankind that just cannot be stated explicitly because of the shortcomings of any human language described above.

I think when perhaps in isolation, some of the individual books may be coherent, but as a whole, there is no logical consistency, but instead there are a myriad of contradictions, such as those between the synoptic gospels and John. For example, on what day was Jesus crucified? John does not agree with the synoptic gospels regarding this. Or in the Old Testament, in Exodus, we have two entirely different sets of Ten Commandments, the first we find familiar, but were destroyed, and the second set that few would recognize that Exodus specifically refers to as the Ten Commandments, including a prohibition on boiling a young goat in it's mother's milk. Is God El, or Yahweh? Is God a perfect being, or subject to all too human emotions like jealousy?

I am nearly certain the Bible was never intended to be coherent. It's authors span nearly a millennia, and it is doubtful they expected or intended their writings to be translated and compiled together by St. Jerome or the First Council of Nicaea. Joseph Campbell, a Jungian, stated "a mythic dream is a personal experience of that deep dark ground which is the support of our conscious lives, and the myth is the society's dream," that a dream is a private mythology, and mythology is the public dream, and as easy it is to understand what he means, not even that is coherent.

I think this is exactly what makes the Bible such a powerful and popular book!

Intelligent, charismatic people can easily use the Bible (which has implicit authority as the "Word of God" in many people's minds) to convince people to move in a particular direction. This makes it a very powerful tool.

It's like reading a Shakespearean play for me. The stories might be interesting, but a lot of the time it's hard to understand what is actually going on, and what's going through the actors' heads.