Reviews

Holy Bible: New International Version, by

marioosa517's review

adventurous challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective slow-paced

hellenalawliet's review

dark informative slow-paced

1.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Abortion, Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Antisemitism, Biphobia, Blood, Body horror, Bullying, Cannibalism, Child abuse, Child death, Chronic illness, Colonisation, Death, Death of parent, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Fire/Fire injury, Gaslighting, Genocide, Gore, Hate crime, Homophobia, Incest, Infertility, Infidelity, Islamophobia, Kidnapping, Lesbophobia, Miscarriage, Misogyny, Murder, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Pregnancy, Racism, Rape, Religious bigotry, Self harm, Sexism, Sexual content, Sexual assault, Sexual harassment, Sexual violence, Slavery, Torture, Toxic friendship, Trafficking, Transphobia, Toxic relationship, Violence, Xenophobia, and Abandonment

fyodoralekseyev's review

challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective tense slow-paced

4.5

Big fan, haha. I read the New Testament remarkably fast - all 4 Gospels in 4 days, which means that I probably missed a lot. 

breza's review

5.0

Three years ago, I bought an audio Bible from Audible. I've listened to it in bits and pieces and finally finished! I've been a Christian my whole life but I was still surprised by some things. Above all else, I learned how important it is to understand the context of a passage before using it to support a belief. There are so many different contexts that prooftexting does the scripture a grave disservice.

In case you're curious, I listened to the David Suchet reading of the NIV. If you want an audio Bible, I highly recommend this version.

cgreig88's review

5.0

This is one of the fundamental books that people should be familiar with, as many of the stories in the Bible, whether you perceive them as being true or not, are the basis for classic and modern literature. There is also good general advice that should be followed by all, no matter what you may or may not believe.

moemai's review

1.0

Virtually no substance, dry and repetitive. Vaguely poetic in some places. Too much discussion around male genitalia, would not recommend for children. Not very convincing, no proof to back up claims, uncompelling.

eralon's review

I started at the beginning of the year and it took about an hour a day for 8 months. Sometimes I'd skip a few days, but then sometimes I would do 2 hours to make up for falling behind. The Old Testament is much longer obviously and I think I made it feel even longer by reading The New Testament's Gospels, The Old Testament, and then the rest of the New Testament. I spent 6 of the 8 months on the Old Testament and only 2 months on the New Testament.

A few thoughts on the Old Testament, it's very long, and I think there's a lot of merit in the Jewish tradition of focusing on the first five books (the Torah). Genesis and Exodus are particularly interesting. [Repeat from my Tanakh review:] Much of the rest of the Old Testament is wars and God getting angry for his worshippers breaking rules, especially marrying those of other religions. A few notable exceptions: Song of Songs is very romantic, Jonah is the stuff of great adventure books, and the locusts are as scary as a Steven King novel.

As for the New Testament, the Gospels are really interesting, in particular, the Gospel of Matthew. Not to be outdone by the locusts in the Old Testament, Revelation is some scary stuff.

Since I finished the Bible in less than a year, I'm going to try to read nonfiction books about the Bible for the rest of the year.

ambassadorfae's review

2.0

Plot seemed kind of scattered. Find some other verbs than "begat." Main character can be a bit of a goody-goody, and the whole thing sometimes gets very preachy/sermonizing. Sorry for the spoiler, but killing off the protagonist 2/3 of the way through? In such a depressing and barbaric manner? Why?? Still, it had some good information on slavery and the social status of women. Some of the miracles were a bit gimmicky, yet they worked in the context of the story. Disciples were rather humorless, which never makes for good storytelling. The good news is that I doubt these amateurish techniques will be repeated in the sequel.

caitlin_bookchats's review

5.0

I am so proud of having completed this. (more later, perhaps)

deedeegerdes's review

I guess I should say I've read this one...