Reading the Bible, Literally

 FEW PEOPLE read the Bible. Of those who do, most skip around, cherry picking scriptural passage which suits their personal needs or reinforce their  beliefs. Nearly one million words is a major undertaking for merely reading a book, any book. Of those who read it cover to cover like the historical novel that it is, know that the Old testament is an "enhanced" history of a single family which grew into an ethnic group,while the New testament is the early history of a new religion which sprang forth from a very old one. Several trends stand out. God in the Bible has multiple personalities, which figures, because the Bible was written by approximately forty different people, over a long period of time.The bible begins with god dominating the narrative, but as the thirty nine books of the Old Testament proceeds, god god slowly but surely disappears, is mentioned less frequency. The book of Esther, late in the Old testament, contains no mention of God. By today's legal, moral, social, and psychological standards, the biblical god is a psychotic, petty tyrant, childish, murderous, prone to tantrums, cruel, and genocidal, an extreme narcissist  with an insecurity complex. He is only somewhat less harsh and more reasonable in the new Testament. the people who most devoutly worship the biblical Christian God tend to be the least informed about the bible's contents, the least concerned about god's cruel nature. They are the page turners, the cherry pickers.Those who study and know the bible the most thoroughly and completely are scholars who overwhelmingly ten to examine the Bible from a factual, critical, historical, an scientific point of view, rather than a blindly devotional viewpoint. They read in in its original Hebrew and Greek and they teach at divinity schools in the world's most prestigious universities, like Harvard and Princeton.Harvard was founded as a theological seminary, and remains to this day among the world's best divinity schools. People who teach there can read the Bible in several languages, and almost by memory.A high percentage of students who enroll in graduate studies at these institutions enter as devout evangelical Christians and graduate as atheists or agnostics. Such is the impact of sustained scholarship undertaken from an historical scientific objective rather than a devotional point of view. One famous example of this is Bart Ehrman, who entered the Princeton religious studies program a devout christian, and graduated with a doctorate, having evolved into an agnostic.  Scholarship, honest scholarship influences people. Ehrman went on to become perhaps the world's leading authority on the early history of Christianity, and president of the UNC Chapel Hill school of religious studies. His personal religious evolution did not and does not deter his research; he has written many excellent books on the subject. Agnosticism can be regarded as an extreme form of open mindedness, always conducive to good scholarship.