New Testament has been read! Also, Revelation? That’s “some weird shit”

It is done. I have ploughed through all 27 books of the New Testament (about 15 years ago I did the OT).

Obvs I was familiar-ish with the Gospels, having gone to “elite” primary and secondary schools, and I had read Revelation for the lulz about 35 years ago.

So if you were so inclined to be equally masochistic, I would offer you the following advice.

Do it in King James Version if you can. It’s the one that gets quoted in classic literature (not Shakespeare, obvs, but from mid 17th century on).

The first five books, especially, are long and repeat each other. I did them at ten pages a day, with rest days between each Gospel. You just have to grit your teeth, gird your loins etc etc.

After that, I was tackling books over two days or – especially after 2 Corinthians, one per day and sometimes more (so, 1,2,3 John and Jude all on one day, because, after all, life is short and there is no afterlife, no matter what you’ve been told/chosen to believe.)

By “did” I mean I have an A4 book, and I jotted down the numbers of chapters and within that verses and my responses (usually around “quotable” or “eh?” (as in, “I do not understand what this means”) and WTAF? – self-explanatory.

I then created a spreadsheet where I scraped those verses into a spreadsheet from an online bible resource (Bible Gateway, since you ask) . I suppose I could have cut out the middle man and gone straight online, but I am old school – I like my J pen and papyrus.

The New Testament is Four Gospels and Acts (5), 13 Pauline epistles (Paul probably wrote seven of them), Hebrews and seven much shorter “catholic” (as in general) epistles.

And then, to finish it off, the deeply weird, quotable, weird (no, seriously) Revelation. One is reminded of George W Bush on Trump’s first inauguration.

Anyway, I am done now and can’t see myself returning to this in (checks watch) forever. Or reading any other bearded Sky-god literature in the near future. But I do have to finish off the scraping of verses and have them for deployment in fiction and non-fiction. There was some interesting and useful stuff, and I am glad I did this (once) and wish I had done it 40+ years ago.