For too many Decembers, I told myself while decorating our tree that I really ought to re-read the gospels – or at least the dramatic nativity scene from Luke depicted in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
Like a lot of my resolutions, that one died on the shelf. It wasn’t because I disdained faith; I was a religion minor in college. But, as a secular person reared among like-minded people, I always felt there were better ways to learn and grow.
Then, about two years ago, I decided to read the entire Bible. I wasn’t driven by a spiritual awakening or hunger but, instead, by feelings of profound ignorance. Many moons ago, when I reviewed books for a living, I quoted the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who wrote that learning should focus on “the best that has been thought and said” in order to understand the human spirit. Yet, I had never seriously engaged the most popular and influential book in the history of Western civilization. The embarrassment I would have felt if I’d never read Shakespeare or “Don Quixote” – and that I still feel in my failure to tackle Joyce – had never previously extended to the Bible.
If I had a deeper yearning, it was not to find meaning through faith. It was to connect with humanity. How could I understand who we are – who I am – if I didn’t know the stories we had long told ourselves to explain … everything? I also recalled the words that had fallen on my deaf ears years before from one of the most erudite people I’d ever known – the gay Christian poet and novelist Reynolds Price – who expressed amazement that so many people blithely dismissed ideas that had been embraced almost unanimously by the most brilliant and learned figures of the last 2,000 years.
I knew I couldn’t do it alone: Understanding the complex text required conversation; the book was so long, it would be easy to stop reading without an obligation to others. A small group of committed Christians – including a doctor, a lawyer, and a college professor – agreed to meet once a month for a year as long as I supplied the pizza. It turned out to be one of the great reading experiences of my life; even Leviticus had its moments.
It’s been said that we don’t read books, but books read us – we reveal the peculiar turns in our own minds by what we find interesting in them. As someone who writes about politics in an era of misinformation, I was especially struck by the deeply subversive nature of a work commonly cast as a constricting force of conformity. In a world so often ruled by power, wealth, and sharp-elbowed self-interest, the Bible trumpets the opposite values: love, compassion, and the equality of all people made in God’s image. What a rebuke to the realpolitik of pharaohs, kings, prime ministers, and presidents!
It is also the most unlikely of stories. That the tribal god of the Jews – a small, relatively weak people whose history is often marked by oppression – would become the foundation of faith for billions of people is astonishing. So, too, is the fact that one of those Jews, a poor man who preached for just three years, who cast himself as the son of God – which, let’s be honest, is textbook crazy – died a criminal’s death, became, well, Jesus Christ!
To top it off, St. Peter, St. Paul, and many other early churchmen who spread the chief thing Jesus left behind, the sometimes cryptic message contained in a few thousand words, were themselves executed, which underscores Christianity’s remarkable rise.
Suffering and death. If one were setting out to craft a narrative to conquer the world, it is hard to believe anyone would concoct this plot. Every element seems built for failure, especially the core commandments of both testaments, which seem so completely at odds with our Darwinian nature: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart” and “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
And yet this story – which exposes the gulf between who we often are and who we yearn to be – became the chief cornerstone not just of Western thought but of our experience. Finishing the Bible, I have never felt so connected to, or been filled with such love for, humanity. That our long-dead ancestors created and bequeathed to us this vision of the better angels of our nature seemed an act of radical generosity. That this was the message we have trumpeted above all others and against all odds through the millennia reveals the kindness and hope at our core.
Only beautiful creatures could have done that. Oh, lucky man!
