A plot point in a movie I saw recently involves someone reciting the Bible from memory (King James Version, if it makes any difference).
Has such an experiment ever taken place? I don’t mean the “from memory” part; obviously that would be impossible. But has anyone ever undertaken to read the Bible out loud, from beginning to end, just to see how long it would take? And if so, how long did it take?
My WAG is that if we assume the reader does it in 8-hour shifts, allowing time for lunch breaks, pee breaks, plenty of time to drink water as needed, etc., it could probably be done in two or three months. But I’m literally pulling that figure out of my ass.
This page claims that an unnamed English translation of the Bible has a little short of 800,000 words. Given that it should be comfortably possible to pronounce an average of two words a second, reading out loud the entire text would take you a little more than 100 hours of net reading time. If you do eight hours a day (an assignment that should be easily feasible even allowing for ample breaks of the kind you describe), it’s going to take you about two weeks.
By the way, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that there are people around who know the entire Bible by heart. Reciting the Quran from memory has a long tradition in Islamic religious education, so it can be done (OK, the Quran is considerably shorter than the Bible, but the idea obtains), and if it can be done there’s most likely a sufficiently pious person somewhere to do it.
This guy memorized 100 000 digits of pi in a year. Given that it is much easier to memorize coherent natural language than a sequence of digits, memorizing the bible would be no problem for someone who really wanted to.
The recording I have is (if I recall correctly) about 73 hours long.
If you did it in 8 hour shifts you wouldn’t even need one month. I know everyone’s different but I could not comfortably sustain reading aloud for 8 hours in one day.
When I read Shakespeare, or the KJV I often read aloud. I find it helps me stay focussed on the meaning rather than merely running my eyeballs over words. Even as little as one hour and I start to feel a tightness in my voice. I imagine people who have some sort of vocal training know how to avoid this.
I have a few different (pretty short) chapters that hold particular importance for me memorized, but cannot wrap my head around having a head clear enough to memorize the whole thing.
My partner and I have read the Bible aloud. Not because we’re religious: we were travelling, living in a van, had no TV, knew before we left that we’d have a lot of time for reading and so took the kind of books we’d never had the time to read. Ulysses, that kind of thing. So anyway, we read the whole Bible aloud: it didn’t take us very long to get through it, and we were only reading in the evenings for maybe between two and four hours. We started on 13th June and finished on 9th July (I just looked it up in our journal. So glad we kept that!).
I actually did read the King James Bible aloud back in the early 1990s. It took a little over 2 weeks of 8 hours a day reading. Parts were really fun (the “begats” and Proverbs) and the New Testament really went by in a hurry.
The entire bible? I know that plenty of people know huuuge amounts of it, but to be able to recite even the completely useless verses from memory? Word for word? Historically not uncommon? Do you have a cite?
I have seen an evangelist who recited the entire book of Revelation from memory, and I have heard tell of other such men who could recite large portions from memory. Depending on how much oomph one would put into the performance, it should take about 70-75 hours. This would call for some intermissions between chapters.
Before mass-produced books were widely available, actual physical (hand printed) Bible were fabulously expensive. So for lots of people, if you wanted to have access to the Bible you had to memorize it. Plenty of people- from backwood priests to the exceptionally devote- would have a good reason to memorize the Bible.
Memorizing a book is not exceptionally hard, although in this age we’ve lost the knack. I was surprised when I gave a test to my Chinese students, and they took their answers word-for-word from the absolutely useless textbook that we didn’t even use in class. The poor kids had memorized the whole damn thing!
William Jennings Bryan, orator, three-time Presidential candidate, U.S. Secretary of State and courtroom foe of Clarence Darrow in the Scopes Monkey Trial, was said to have memorized vast chunks of the Bible (although not the entire thing, IIRC).
" It often amazed me, and I am still unable to understand the fact, that my Father, through his long life–or until nearly the close of it–continued to take an eager pleasure in the text of the Bible. As I think I have already said, before he reached middle life, he had committed practically the whole of it to memory, and if started anywhere, even in a Minor Prophet, he could go on without a break as long as ever he was inclined for that exercise. "
