I second the commenters that counter-argue that just because a book is hard, it does not make it a bad book.
While it's hard to understand for the following reasons
- It's not "a book" but a canon of dozens of books bound together, written by different people;
- cultural distance: Middle East versus West;
- temporal distance: authored approx. 2000 years ago;
almost every book written afterwards refers to it explicitly or implicitly or depends on it in some way, and you will never understand the later works fully without having read some of the Bible.
To read the Bible, a layperson needs guidance. Having said this parts of the New Testament are more easy to follow.
For those who prefer to watch, this movie
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058715/ (created by an atheist to better understand it all) uses the original words of the Gospel of St. Matthew, and the result got praise from the Vatican, ironically.
A huge amount of language in the western world is based around biblical stories, and you need to know dozens of them to understand common idioms and metaphors. From the snake in the garden of Eden to being the David to someone's Goliath, to being a good Samaritan, to camels going through the eye of a needle (and here's dozens more https://city.org.nz/blog/eo-bible-20181101).
Beyond that, especially in English, the King James bible's phrasing of dozens if not hundreds of biblical passages are now common turns of phrase - where not knowing their origin reveals you as a uncultured.
Same as Aesop's or La Fontaine's fables, really -- you know it's fiction, you don't have to think it is a good story, you don't even have to agree with the morale -- but since everyone literate in the last two centuries is familiar with it, you will look out of place not knowing it.
I’m not disputing the historical significance of the Bible. I’m disputing the need to learn it to understand modern literature. And again I reference that generations of kids have managed just fine without reading the Bible.
It is entirely possible to explain as phrase without reading its original source material.
To give another example of this: Star Trek does exactly this with Picard and others referencing Moby Dick. I understand exactly what that dialogue is about and yet I’ve never read that specific book.
While it's hard to understand for the following reasons
- It's not "a book" but a canon of dozens of books bound together, written by different people;
- cultural distance: Middle East versus West;
- temporal distance: authored approx. 2000 years ago;
almost every book written afterwards refers to it explicitly or implicitly or depends on it in some way, and you will never understand the later works fully without having read some of the Bible.
To read the Bible, a layperson needs guidance. Having said this parts of the New Testament are more easy to follow. For those who prefer to watch, this movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058715/ (created by an atheist to better understand it all) uses the original words of the Gospel of St. Matthew, and the result got praise from the Vatican, ironically.