Shakespeare is worthwhile but much easier to understand when you see it performed, which is how it was meant to be experienced anyway.

Yes, exactly. A lot of people forget that he wrote ‘plays’ and not ‘reads’

He had to; a large part of his audience would have been unable to read.

A lot of European literature was poetry for the same reason. Its only because literacy rates have risen that prose has become more popular.

My Shakespeare class in college was based around performing a play at the end of the semester. We read about half a dozen plays, but the bulk of our work was based around preparing to perform Hamlet (each semester, a different play was performed, with fall being Comedies/Histories and Spring being Tragedies/Romances).

The big challenge is that a lot of plays are rarely performed. I had the good fortune of hearing an interview with Kenneth Brannagh where he talked about how Shakespeare is better experienced by watching a performance than reading a text and he made an aside about how it’s unlikely you’re going to get to see Henry IV part II performed and then spotting that there was a free performance of that exact play being given at the Chicago Cultural Center. This turned out to be part of a series of staged readings of all the plays. I missed the beginning of the sequence, but stuck around to the end. One of the coolest moments of this came when I was attending a play at the Goodman Theatre which had the actors interacting with audience members during intermission and one of the actors in the play recognized me from the audience of the staged readings.

There are more or less accessible TV performances. The definitive complete collection is probably the BBC Shakespeare, available on iPlayer and DVD.

Some of the plays have also snuck onto YouTube.

Highly recommend Shakescleare for anyone reading Shakespeare, esp students:

https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translati...

> the Bible (lots of really dry stuff about begetting and knowing)

I'd suggest replacing the Bible with just the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke[0], and John). Removing it entirely seems like a mistake since you'd lose a lot of the literary and moral underpinnings of Western culture, but having to read the bible in its entirely sounds exhausting. I did it (reading all four gospels) recently and can attest even outside of the religious aspects the retelling of the same tragic story in four different was is a fascinating literary experience.

[0] Technically we should through Acts in there too since Luke-Acts are essentially one book, but it's not a gospel so I left it out. Plus quite frankly while I did read it I found it way more boring than the others; turns out that Jesus fellow is a way more interesting main character than Paul :)

I think the Bible can mostly be distilled to Genesis, Exodus and the Gospels without losing too much. Each of those books is eminently legible in its own right. You could arguably make the sermon on the mount its own book, “communist manifesto” style.

I think those individual chapters would be super compelling to modern readers with or without a religious background, but their legibility is held back by the rest of the Bible’s contents. How is someone non-religious supposed to figure out that it’s ok to start reading a book at section 2, chapter 1? :)

I'm inclined to agree, except to add that Ecclesiastes stands on its own as a great piece of philosophy, and Revelations is pretty influential as well as having some pretty entertaining madness.

It's argued that God had a plan (all-knowing). The compelling argument to read the Old Testament in full before the New Testament is that this whole thing was a deliberate sequence. That's if you are willing to entertain the notion on a literary level (forget about belief). Take the story of Samson for example, one argument is that God showed that humans would persecute a man whom humanity couldn't even contemplate could have gotten his powers from God. It's a setup for Christ.

You can distill if you are looking for moral teachings, but you can't if you want to know this guys (that guy up in the sky) full plan, in which case you have to entertain that it was a sequence of events. It's very weird, but almost makes going through the whole Bible fascinating as a serial drama. One thing led to another.

I totally agree. I think for theological reasons (if your goal is to convince yourself that Jesus is the Messiah of the Abrahamic religions), then it can’t be distilled.

However, I do think the abrahamic origin stories (genesis), the tribulations of the Jewish people in Egypt and reception of the Ten Commandments (exodus), and the moral teachings of Christ that replace those commandments (gospels) are more or less self-contained and free-standing, if you’re trying to understand them at face value.

The gospels in particular contain a good moral teachings that are arguably more valuable than anything else in the book. Like really clear directives on how to live and carry yourself.

In my Weird Bible, I’d cold open with the sermon on the mount, followed by the Pharisees and the passion, and recursively hyper-link to every New Testament or Old Testament thing that supports those “primary” stories. I feel like if you arranged the Bible into a neat “tree” structure that way, the main load-bearing trunks would be the books mentioned.

I appreciate your points. Morality is what most people want to take away from all of these books, but the thing they want to leave behind is one requirement that God seems to have, and that's straight up obedience. Obedience doesn't really fit inside morality, and in fact if you just distill morality out, obedience won't make it. The Old Testament hammers home the need for obedience to God's laws in story after story, until finally God just kinda lets us know that "hey you guys really cannot follow the law, so lets shift to a relationship framework with Christ". That's how I've been making sense of WHAT the Old Testament is in the context of the sequence, and further, why I don't ignore it because it seems to be he values both morality and obedience (and again, obedience doesn't fit into morality - Just the story of Abraham and his son, there's nothing moral about it).

It's a thoroughly Christian view, that being humans lack the capacity to follow God's laws because we're inherently sinners - but that's a whole nother' can of worms. It's kind of like a Kindergarten teacher (God) letting the kids run the show for a day (Old Testament), just to make it clear, they can't manage it. It's quite a thing to believe such a supreme being would run a sequence like that on us (in fact, that's how I make sense of a lot of the craziness in the world, that God would in fact let things run its course, however messed up (even in modern times, e.g - the narcissistic scale of social media, wars, factory slavery in China, migrant slavery in Mideast construction projects, abject poverty in the third world, pure greed and gluttonous abundance in the west, drug epidemics that rival plagues, etc, where all of these things are just as Biblically fucked up as parts of the Bible)). It's my only case for why the Old Testament is quite relevant to understanding the fullness of God. In short, the desire to understand how and why God would work in this way leads me to consider the entirety of the Bible, beginning to end.

Fun topic!

I appreciate yours! And agreed it’s a fun topic :)

I don’t have much more to add but I’d really recommend you to read Tolstoy’s “Confession / What I Believe”, because I think you’d find it fascinating even if you don’t agree with it completely.

He has a metaphor (in a very Tolstoy-esque way), in which the world is like this bountiful, picturesque farm filled with sharp, durable tools, beasts of burden, rich soil, and so on. It was given to us and filled with people who each have their own slice of it, who eventually grow jealous and guard their slice and think themselves better than everyone else. The garden overflows with weeds, the well runs dry, so on. And then God rolls up and is like “how did you guys manage to mess it up so bad this time??”, fixes everything, and then tries to give us rules to prevent the disarray from occurring again. People start off ok, but then we invent new rules or ignore the existing rules in our own self interest, backslide, rinse and repeat.

Tolstoy’s thesis is basically that we’ve done the same thing to Jesus and the sermon on the mount that the Pharisees did to the Ten Commandments. i.e. constructed all these artifices and dogma that somehow allow Christianity to coexist with authoritarian, hierarchical, violent structures in our own self interests. We’ve let the garden spoil. No wonder the world is biblically messed up :)

Anyways that’s the core thesis but there are many other fascinating ideas in there, I really recommend giving it a try!

Right up my alley (very much aligns with I've been thinking), will absolutely check it out!

Yes, but the Gospels are "complete." You obviously gain much by reading the OT before it—not to mention the apocrypha like Enoch and Jubilees which are quoted directly and indirectly in the NT—but the Gospels have the entire "message" contained within them.

Isaiah for the poetic language and imagery deeply embedded in Western culture. Psalms for raw expression of the emotions at the heart of the human condition: suffering, rejection, abandonment, joy, and praise.