Catholic, grew up in Cleveland, OH. We might have been taught them, but if so, I doubt that anyone in the class remembered, and the teachers weren’t too distraught about that. Certainly we weren’t offered any incentives to learn them: If we had been, then I would have, but I didn’t. I can tell you the Pentateuch, and (in Catholic bibles, at least) the Old Testament ends with Maccabes, and the New Testament is Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, various epistles, and Revelation. But I think that much I might have picked up on my own.
We also weren’t too big on memorizing individual verses verbatim. The focus was much more on whole stories, and getting the gist of them rather than the exact words.
Same here on all counts. BTW, gytalf, did you have a song mnemonic for the apostles? It started “Jesus called them one by one, Peter, Andrew, James and John…” I think the tune was a popular song, but I can’t recall which one. Bonus points if you can tell me.
One of my favorite scenes in Deliverance is near the end. The valley is being flooded by a new dam, and important structures are being moved. The ambulance taking Burt Reynolds to the hospital is blocked by the old wooden Church of Christ, jacked up and sliding around in the mud.
Catholic schooled (middle and high). Memorizing order was not even in the radar, the classic brands of Christianity are about whether you learn the lesson, not the order of books. Besides we had enough hassle learning a pile of different prayers and invocations and calls and responses and when do you genuflect or stand or kneel or what are the Rosary mysteries and when do you use each set.
After a while you *would figure out the general order of blocs – Pentateuch, Historics, Sapientials, Prophets(); Gospels, Acts, Pauline Letters, General Letters, Apocalypse. Then again if you have a Bible it has a table of contents anyway.
(*I see some who still remember their OT lessons falter when they get to that last set. Who can blame them… I mean, Nahum, who?)
I’m guessing that what you’re referring to as “Sapientials” there is the same as what I learned as the “Wisdom books”: Wisdom, Proverbs, Sirach, and so on. And the list I learned from put Acts in the History category, and Revelation in the Prophecy category, rather than giving them each their own category.
Although, actually, I’m not sure it was actually in Sunday School that I learned those. A lot of our friends went to the Presbyterian church in our neighborhood, and so we ended up involved in a lot of their programs, and they had a poster of all of the books, categorized, in their Sunday school room. And of course, anything written, I’ll read.
Lutheran catechism, AWANAs club (baptist perhaps?) and fire and brimstone ‘testimony’ style evangelical- so most of my childhood homework and memorization work was Bible based.
As of now, I can remember parts of various creeds, some of the books of the Bible, and a whole lot of half-remembered verses that I don’t remember where they’re from.
Memorization is not my strong suite. and even as a child I thought it was a pointless party trick used mostly to show off your ‘holier than thou’ kids.
I don’t recall reciting anything for ‘the congregation’, but we memorized a lot of stuff as a kid.
Lucky me, I’ve always had a crappy short term memory and was always the worst at memorizing verses and things like that. I can look at something on the page and be absolutely certain that I have it memorized, look away and its gone. :smack:
In our teen years, we had “sword drills,” where a Bible verse number was called out, and the competition was to see who could turn to it and read it first. That, obviously, was the purpose of memorizing the books in order.
It is disingenuous to claim. I brought those two issues up together. I am not the one who asked the question I was responding to in your second post. You are.
Catholic; didn’t go to Sunday school but went to CCD classes (aka Catechism classes) for 12 years.
It’s shocking how little the Bible played in my CCD classes. There may have not been a single time we actually opened a Bible and started reading. Remember learning a lot of prayers, how to treat others (usually a wordier version of “be nice”), and learning to be an altar boy. Which, considering the devout Catholics I was raised around, actually makes sense; I rarely saw them read the Bible, praying and genuflecting to statues was what they did.
We were never expected to do anything but be faithful and compassionate. We learned Bible stories in Sunday school and we took home a paper every week for “homework” with a Bible topic and when we were a bit older we were encouraged to do the daily Upper Room study. I don’t recall ever needing to recite all the books of the Bible but I bet by the time I was an adult I could recite them.
Neither in Sunday School nor in any of my Religion classes at regular school. In both of them and at different points we went over which books there were, which types…; I’m getting a flashback to Madre Mora saying “this Library contains about every type of book there is: poetry, history, a census*, a novel**…” We weren’t required to memorize anything beyond how many in the OT, in the NT and in total (well, most of us just learned two numbers and remembered our arithmetic for the third).
Went to CCD for my Catholic upbringing. No books of the Bible memorization required. In college, I belonged to a church where some people would memorize them but it was more of a lame parlor trick than anything doctrine-related.
I wouldn’t say “required”–Sunday school didn’t really have any requirements, as you weren’t being graded or anything–but we were given a little song to sing whose lyrics were the books of the New Testament. I can still sing it to this day, and still do so if, for some reason, I need to recall the order of the books.
I’ve been poking around on YouTube, and although there are several songs out there with either the books of the N.T. or the books of the entire Bible, none of them have the melody that we were taught when I was kid.
Edited to add denomination: I was raised United Church of Christ (which is very distinct from the Church of Christ).
United Methodist including confirmation classes. We were vaguely aware of the Bible and discussed the meaning of a few specific stories from it, but no memorization or anything like that beyond knowing the names of the Gospels. Sometimes in teenage youth group we’d read Revelations in the church basement by candlelight with heavy metal music playing.
We had the sword drills also! And for easier memorization of the order of the books, we learned a song with three verses (two verses for the Old Testament, and one verse for the New) that was nothing like the song “Ten Little Indians” mentioned by JohnGalt. The last verse ended thusly: “Peter, John-Jude, Revelation, ends the word of God!” (I hyphenated John and Jude because they were sung as though it was all one word. And you just had to know that Peter consisted of First and Second Peter, and John was three short books NOT to be confused with the Gospel of John, mentioned earlier in the song.)
I grew up in a “non-denominational” fundamentalist evangelical church known to some as “Plymouth Brethren” (same as Garrison Keillor). During the “sword drill” everyone held his/her Bible in the right hand up above head level, and after the chapter and verse was called out (maybe a word like “go” or “charge” was said next), we frantically thumbed through the Bible and upon finding the verse, stood up to read it aloud.