A New Course of Study

    Immediately after my PE in 2016 I took an interest in religion, that is fairly common after a near death experience I believe. In the ensuing years that interest has waned, but damn it, I bought the bible I'm going to finally read it. I did not grow up in a religious household. My parents never took me to church, we never discussed religion except in an abstract sense, and I don't think we ever owned a bible. During high school I did have the opportunity to take a World Religions course and loved it. The idea of theology is fascinating to me as someone who never had a lot of exposure to that sort of thing. But not having that exposure can also be hamstringing in a largely biblically literate culture. So, I'm going to take the opportunity of quarantine to look at scriptures and form my opinions on them. I don't want my understanding to be tapered through the lens of someone else's interpretation so I'm going in completely cold. 

    I will be using the King James Bible, since I like the flowery language that version uses. It feels more... religious-ie. The details of which are below:

The Holy Bible

King James Version

"An English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, commissioned in 1604 and completed as well as published in 1611 under the sponsorship of James VI and I. In common with most other translations of the period, the New Testament was translated from Greek, the Old Testament from Hebrew and Aramaic, and the Apocrypha from Greek and Latin." (Wikipedia)

Red Letter Edition - "Red letter edition bibles are those in which the Dominical words—those spoken by Jesus Christ, commonly only those spoken during his corporeal life on Earth—are printed rubricated, in red ink. This is a modern practice derived from the art and Roman Catholic practice in mediaeval scriptoria of rubricating headings, leading letters of sectional text, and words of text in manuscripts for emphasis, similar to italicization.

“WITH THE WORDS OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR

SET FORTH IN DIGNIFIED RED ITALICS”' (Wikipedia)

Barbour Bibles Publishing

2012 copyright

My hope that is if I put it out there and make my plan that it will give me something to stick to. So, moving forward I'll give each section/chapter a read through and prepare a small essay on each section.

So next Saturday will be Genesis, (my doesn't that sound ominous). If this goes well, I'll use the same formula for the Tanakh, the Quran and then maybe some of the Vedas.