{"id":11589,"date":"2009-03-05T17:00:55","date_gmt":"2009-03-05T17:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1\/site\/2017\/2\/1985\/david_plotz_what_i_learned_from_reading_the_entire_bible\/"},"modified":"2009-03-05T17:00:55","modified_gmt":"2009-03-05T17:00:55","slug":"david_plotz_what_i_learned_from_reading_the_entire_bible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=11589","title":{"rendered":"David Plotz: What I learned from reading the entire Bible"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Should you read the Bible? You probably haven&#8217;t. A century ago, most well-educated Americans knew the Bible deeply. Today, biblical illiteracy is practically universal among nonreligious people. My mother and my brother, professors of literature and the best-read people I&#8217;ve ever met, have not done much more than skim Genesis and Exodus. Even among the faithful, Bible reading is erratic. The Catholic Church, for example, includes only a teeny fraction of the Old Testament in its official readings. Jews study the first five books of the Bible pretty well but shortchange the rest of it. Orthodox Jews generally spend more time on the Talmud and other commentary than on the Bible itself. Of the major Jewish and Christian groups, only evangelical Protestants read the whole Bible obsessively.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2212616\" title=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2212616\/\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Should you read the Bible? You probably haven&#8217;t. A century ago, most well-educated Americans knew the Bible deeply. Today, biblical illiteracy is practically universal among nonreligious people. My mother and my brother, professors of literature and the best-read people I&#8217;ve<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=11589\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,50,209,108,34,169],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-watch","category-international-news-commentary","category-americau-s-a","category-religion-culture","category-theology","category-theology-scripture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}