"Have you read the entire Bible?"

This was a question asked by my Mom of me and my sisters on our bike ride the other day. Out of all of us, I was the only one who could say I had, and even that was years ago, back in elementary or middle school. I scarcely remembered so many parts of it, and no one else on that ride had read the entire Bible.

Why is that? As a religion, how can we speak up and defend the Bible, discuss the Bible, without even having read it? I'm not going to defend Harry Potter and have long discussions on it if I've only read a few chapters or bits here and there. Reading a passage about Nearly Headless Nick's party doesn't mean that I can fully discuss the context, or the rest of the Bible.

Yet every single day, we engage in discussions without having fully read the source material. In church almost every day, I hear about how we can't just pluck a verse out of its context and expect it to work for us—but at the same time, we can't just pluck a book of the Bible out of its context, either. Whether that's how the other books explain it - you might want to read 1st Samuel before 2nd Samuel—or even historical context, it's so important to know the backstory of each book of the Bible.

Wait, historical context? Absolutely. I find that a value so underutilized when it comes to teaching and learning about the Bible that it's almost criminal. The few times historical context comes up (aside from the history that is specifically described within the passages of the Bible, such as Herod ordering a census), it's because of parables. "Oh, when Jesus is using his parable about the sheep, [this] is what he means because [this] is what happened back then..."

I heard from one teacher a phrase that remains in my mind to this day: "Jesus was teaching parables to them, not you. That's why he didn't make a parable about Nintendo DS's!" We fully understand that we need historical context for the parables, or they don't make a lick of sense.

Yet, why don't we apply that to the rest of the Bible? Shouldn't we look more into the historical context of why Paul is giving this advice, or why this specific law is being repeated three times? Aside from going over the rituals of the Old Testament temple at least three times in middle school (which I'm still not sure was useful), I didn't hear about biblical historical context until college. That's just not right!

We also never hear about the fact that the Bible we read is translated. It's not the exact Bible. There are so many turns of phrase that were used in the original Greek or Hebrew that we cannot include in the English versions (or whichever version you may read), or words that have multiple meanings that translators have to take their best stabs at translating. There's a reason there's so many different versions of the Bible, and a passage in one can be very different in another. The translators place emphasis on different parts of the sentence, choose different words, translate an idiom differently... it's probably one of the many reasons there's so much disagreement in the church.

We need to read the Bible, and we need to be smart about how we read the Bible. We need to read the whole thing, know the context in regards to the other books of the Bible, know the historical context, and remember that what we're reading has been touched and tampered with by human hands.

It's important.