The Bible Is a Huge, Tedious Tome to Study
Very, very few people are familiar with everything contained in it, including ministers, pastors and priests. Even if someone has read the entire Old and New Testaments, word for word, from beginning to end, it's really impossible to always keep in mind everything it contains. I've read the entire Bible half a dozen times, and still come across passages I don't remember reading from time to time.
I've read it so many times, because I'm a voracious, fast reader and an atheist who is interested in religious scriptures, the Bible in particular. At one time, while an adolescent Sunday School student, I memorized the entire book of Matthew for a Bible verse memorization contest. I won, but had wasted my time, since the teacher stopped me and gave me the prize before I had even finished reciting Chapter 2. I was disappointed.
I've slogged through even Numbers and Deuteronomy six times. No way do I remember all of that genealogy. It's easy enough to go back and find what I need, if I ever need any of that information. That need seldom arises, indeed.
My point is that a complete knowledge of the Bible is exceedingly rare among individuals, regardless of their profession. Instead, people have their favorite books, chapters and verses that they remember well. One pastor, for example, might focus on Matthew, and pay less attention to the other four Gospels, except when a particular chapter is useful. Another might focus almost solely on one or more epistles from Paul to someone or to some church. Yet another will adore the book of Acts, but never look at the book of James. While they may also have a good acquaintance with other books and portions of the Bible, almost nobody has instant recall of the whole thing.
What that means is that there are always surprises to be discovered. There are contradictions in the Bible, but most of those aren't well known. They're inconvenient, so it's convenient to skip over them. It's interesting to pose a single difficult question to a wide range of pastors and other clergy, just to see what they remember.
My favorite of those questions is, "Which Old Testament Prophet suffered from complete alopecia or baldness?" It's a tiny detail, but is part of a story that should be familiar to anyone who is a serious student. Almost nobody I've asked, including dozens of clergy, was able to answer that it was "Elisha." Now, if you ask about the story of "Elisha and the Two Bears," you'll get recognition from some, but not all clergy members, but the fact that Elisha was bald is almost universally forgotten, even though it's a pivotal part of the story.
Is that important? No, it's not, really. It's just illustrative of the impossibility of remembering everything that is in the Bible. No doubt there are a few people who do have a thorough knowledge of the entire thing, but it's a very, very rare accomplishment.
And yet, many people claim to "follow the Bible." What they mean is that they follow the parts they know and care about, and essentially ignore all the rest of it. If you attend a particular church for a few years, you will hear the same verses read as texts at the same week in the liturgical calendar, every year. You will hear a couple of chapters from Psalms, for example, but will almost never hear the rest of them. That's because they don't illustrate some point that needs to be made in that church.
Christianity is interesting. It's made up of hundreds of major and thousands of minor denominations. All focus on slightly different portions of the bible, depending on the unique doctrine presented by that denomination. If you go then, to a very different denomination's church, you might not ever hear those parts of the Bible you heard at the other church. Christianity is not a unified religion, by any means, and the Bible is understood and studied differently by every sect and denomination.
It's all very interesting, if you're interested in that sort of thing.
= new reply since forum marked as read
