Bible for Every Body

By Marian Prentice Huntington

Is the Bible only for Christians and Jews? Can this holy book be for people of various faithsand even for nonbelievers? These are among the questions the author asked as she spent a year reading the Torah and Christian Bible, learning from rabbis and priests and recording her observations. Please read along and share her discovery that the Bible is for everybody.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984542397

Marian Prentice Huntington

MARIAN PRENTICE HUNTINGTON se dedica a servir a inmigrantes y a familias pobres en su comunidad y trabaja para mejorar la salud de chicos sin hogares y vulnerables a través de una obra de caridad que ha creado, NOVATOSPIRIT. Anteriormente, era periodista de investigación para el periódico ganador del premio Pulitzer, Point Reyes Light, y profesora de periodismo en la Universidad Sonoma State. Ella también es la autora del libro Ani’s Asylum, el cual trata de ayudar una familia inmigrante conseguir asilo político en los Estados Unidos, y ha sido nominada para varios prestigiosos premios, incluyendo el premio World of Children´s Humanatarian Award y el premio Marin County Women´s Hall of Fame.

Book preview

IS THE BIBLE ONLY FOR CHRISTIANS AND JEWS?

I S THE BIBLE only for Christians and Jews? Can this holy book be for people of various faiths—and even non-believers?

These questions prompted me to enroll in a class offered at a church where the pastor was hosting a Bible-study group that would read the entire book over the course of one year.

What follows is a play-by-play documentary of what happened to me during my Bible-study year. My educational journey is not a legitimate scholarly commentary about the Bible. And it’s not my intention to convince anyone that my discoveries and interpretations are correct. My words are just sincere responses to a magnificent book, which may offer guidance and wisdom to every body.

THE PASTOR’S WEEKLY ASSIGNMENT IS TO READ

T HE PASTOR’S WEEKLY assignment is to read a few chapters from the Old Testament, which shares some of the same books as the Hebrew Bible or Ta nakh .

We’re also supposed to read parts of the New Testament, which begins with the genealogy of Jesus and his life as recounted by the four Evangelists in the Gospels.

And just for fun, a Psalm and a verse or two from Proverbs are thrown into the mix.

Pastor Bill, our study-group leader, is a friendly guy. He’s got a Ph.D. and knows his seminary stuff, but he doesn’t act too brainy. He smiles easily, and talks about his wife and kids with affection. When he’s not preaching or doing pastoral work, he coaches the local swim team.

His presence has a calming effect on our group. We’re nervous, because none of us has ever read the entire Bible before. Most of us don’t know how to approach the book. And a few, like me, don’t know how to approach God.

So you can imagine how uncomfortable I feel with Pastor Bill’s first assignment: As you read, he said, I want you to think about how your idea of God changes.

I’m beginning with no idea about God, so any new idea will count as a change.

As I read, God seems unfamiliar. He doesn’t look like the man in the white toga of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. God’s not like any image I’ve seen or heard about before.

My ignorance about God isn’t necessarily a stumbling block, according to the mythologist Joseph Campbell.

With an entity as important as God, Campbell said, we have to start from scratch and not depend on past definitions spoon-fed to us by other people or religious institutions. We must struggle to have a personal perception of mystery, he said, a nameless experience.

Yes, okay, but many of us need a more clarity. How can we get a crystal-clear sense of God?

In his book Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, Campbell suggested examining our response to a crisis:

Do you have anything that supports you and carries you though? Or does that which you thought was your support now fail you? That is the test of myth, the building myth, of your life.

The goal of envisioning God, he added, is like that of therapy: The goal in psychiatry, it is said, is to bring the mental structure that is governing our lives in accord with the energy that comes from sources we do not fully understand and cannot locate. We thereby become transparent to transcendence. We become like panes of glass, and a radiance shines though us that is otherwise blocked off.

Campbell added, How, in the contemporary period, can we evoke the imagery that communicates the most profound and most richly developed sense of experiencing life? These images must point past themselves to that ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have any one absolutely fixed meaning.

So neither God nor the Bible are fixed in stone. There’s plenty of elbow room for the reader’s imagination and curiosity to explore every page of the holy book and determine how the words connect to life itself.

PARALLELS ABOUND BETWEEN

P ARALLELS ABOUND BETWEEN the Jewish passover seder and the Last Supper Of Jesus
Parallels Abound Between the Jewish Passover Seder and the Last Supper of Jesus. These parallels are no surprise really, because Jesus was a Jew—and a Jewish rabbi.

Pastor Bill told us that these ritual meals both involve the sacrifice of a body (a lamb, Jesus) and the body’s life force (blood). And each involves a sanctifying, symbolic meal (unleavened bread, wine).

Partaking of the Last Supper—now symbolically practiced in churches as the Eucharist Rite or