When people find out that I was not born and raised as a Christian but converted early in my youth, they often ask me "so what made you convert?" The answer I give is both very prosaic and very surprising at the same time: I read the Bible. It's prosaic because on the face of it there could be no more straightforward conversion experience than reading the central religious text of some faith. And yet, Bible is not really a regular book that you can just pick up and read over the weekend. Technically speaking it is not even a single book, but a collection of books of various lengths written by many authors over the course of thousand years. Hence its name – "ta biblia ta hagia" is a Greek phrase that means "sacred books." This fact explains its length as well. Most Bibles are written on over thousand tightly-printed double-columned pages. The books that comprise it deal with many matters that are very hard for modern Western readers to relate to – ancient customs and warfare, religious rituals and customs that seem rather quaint to say the least, fascination with genealogies and other social structures that are far removed from our contemporary experiences. It is safe to say that most Christians will not read it cover-to-cover in their lifetimes. So what spurred me on to read it, at the age of fifteen, when I was neither a Christian nor new anything about Christianity? Curiosity. Just plain old curiosity. I always liked to read, and at that age I was starting to read many more "serious" books, fiction and nonfiction, current affairs and history. And when you start reading widely sooner or later you start bumping into Biblical references, allusions or downright retelling of Biblical stories in another shape or form. So it seemed to me like a good idea to get to read this great book that so many other books are referring to. Since I grew up under the Communism, in what is probably as close as one can get to a perfect religious vacuum, I did not really have anyone who could tell me which parts of the Bible to read and why, so I decided to read it just like any other book, starting at the beginning and going through all the way to the end. And that experience had completely changed my life.
Since then I had read the entire Bible two more times. The second time I read it when I first arrived in the United States. I thought it would be yet another good way to practice reading material in English. I had also recently been baptized, and started going to church on a regular basis. It didn't hurt either that I was a weird exchange student in a senior year of American high school, when all cliques had already been long formed, and there was no place for me to fit. Not having any social life leaves you with a lot of free time.
My third reading ended just a few hours ago. I really didn't think that I would ever read the Bible in its entirety again, but this past year I decided to use it as a part of my daily devotional. I've been reading parts of the Bible more or less regularly over the years and Gospels in particular, but felt that I knew most of the content fairly well as is. However, in recent years I had picked up the amount of stuff that I read in general, and had established a consistent morning routine for reading mostly spiritual and theological works. It seemed like a good idea to add a few pages of Bible reading a day as well, which I had now brought to a conclusion. It has been a very good experience.
So will I read the entire Bible again? Almost certainly yes. I am planning on getting a Kindle edition of The Ignatius Bible. That way I will have an access to the Bible wherever I go, especially since there is a version of Kindle software for iPhone. The temptation to read it will then be irresistible.