That's interesting. I was raised Catholic and am still now a sort of very detached Catholic and I read the New Testament earlier this year and it had kind of the opposite effect on me --- not so much in any fundamental way regarding what I believe spiritually, but in my attitude towards the church itself. I spent 12 years having priests and nuns drill the basic story in all its details into my head, and what's in the actual book is very different.

Tom Bissell --- who is sort of a lighter, breezier version of the kind of essayist David Foster Wallace was, and who has done a lot of serious writing about and in video games, which is not my thing at all but maybe HN's --- has a sort of travel/essay book about the apostles, where he visits each of their purported burial sites and uses that as a starting point for an essay about some aspect of the region, the particular apostle, or some broader aspect of christian faith, which you might find interesting.