A few years ago I was in a dis­cus­sion with one of the more intel­li­gent peo­ple I have had the plea­sure to meet: a Ph.D. phi­los­o­phy stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Cam­bridge. Sub­stan­tial parts of his the­sis had to con­sist of orig­i­nal philo­soph­i­cal ideas, and this meant a large por­tion of his ‘revi­sion’ con­sisted of bring­ing dis­parate thoughts together into one uni­fied the­ory: essen­tially, sit­ting and thinking.

I asked what he thought the essen­tial, must-read phi­los­o­phy texts were: those texts that any self-respecting philoso­pher must have read? With­out hes­i­ta­tion he gave me the first: “Regard­less of reli­gious affiliation—or absence thereof—the Bible.”

To help me on my jour­ney of enlight­en­ment (philo­soph­i­cal, not reli­gious) Slate’s David Plotz has now fin­ished his lat­est series: the com­plete blog­ging the Bible.

There are experts to tell you why the Bible is lit­er­ally true, oth­ers to advise you how to ana­lyze it as his­tory, and still oth­ers to help you read it as lit­er­a­ture. You can learn how to approach it as a Jew, a Catholic, an evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tant, a fem­i­nist, a lawyer, a teenager.

So, what can I pos­si­bly do? My goal is pretty sim­ple. I want to find out what hap­pens when an igno­rant per­son actu­ally reads [the Bible].