Good. All of them, Christian apologists, Bible preachers, religious users, missionaries, evangelists, street preachers. The thing that’s wrong with them is that they’re all quoting the Bible. They’re all trying to do what Jesus was doing. The difference is that they have a personal relationship with the Bible, not a personal relationship with God. Because they keep on. Even, yeah, two days ago I had a conversation with one, and I told them, and they were like, Oh, do you know the Bible? Have you read the Bible? Did you read the whole Bible? and all of that, and telling them that I was raised Catholic and I was one of the kids in the church that either gives the bread or does the incense and all of that. It didn’t matter, or that I was in church school and all of that. And I told them I don’t need to have to read the whole Bible to have a personal relationship with God. I believe that to follow Jesus is to follow in Jesus’ steps, and Jesus had his personal relationship with God. He wasn’t preaching the Bible, you know? And then I told him the example of even the day where Judas ratted on him. Jesus was on a mountain having his conversations with God. He wasn’t having a conversation with the Bible, with the book that was written by people that came after him in observation of him. He actively had his own personal relationship with the essence that’s spoken about in the Bible. But all of the religious individuals have a personal relationship with the Bible, and they stick to the Bible. They stand by the Bible, but they don’t even recognize what the Bible is saying and they don’t live by the full extent of the Bible. Because if they did, they would be so much different. Things would have been so much different. And it begs the question: should we even trust them? Because at the point of someone having a personal relationship with God, you can trust that one. But someone having a personal relationship with a book, or certain things that humans have observed and written about and all of that, isn’t the same. If anything, they should learn it to then develop their own personal relationship with the essence that they speak about. But they don’t. It’s more about quoting and re-quoting and misquoting the Bible itself, and that is not necessarily what Jesus was about. They made the religion about Jesus. And I told them, I literally actually told them: I have a personal relationship with God because I believe in following Jesus’ ways in terms of being the religion, not following a religion. You know?

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The distinction you are making is between following the record of a relationship with God and developing that relationship yourself.

Your argument has several layers:

• Jesus versus religion: Jesus was living a relationship with God. The people who came after him built a religion around his life, teachings and example. Those are not necessarily the same thing.
• The Bible versus God: The Bible is a written account of people’s encounters, understandings and teachings concerning God. Having knowledge of that account is not, in itself, the same as having a relationship with the essence being described.
• Quoting versus embodying: Someone can quote scripture extensively without embodying the principles they are quoting. Reciting the words and living their substance are two different things.
• Following Jesus versus following a religion: Your understanding of following Jesus is to follow his example of relating to God, rather than making membership, ritual, biblical knowledge or religious authority the foundation of that relationship.
• Trust versus religious authority: You are questioning what qualifies someone to speak on God’s behalf. Is it their ability to quote a book, or the relationship they claim to have with the reality the book describes, reflected in how they actually live?

And I think the distinction underlying your conversation is this:

You do not believe you need to know everything written about God before you can know God.

When someone asks whether you have read the entire Bible, they are measuring your familiarity with the text. But you are describing a different kind of knowing altogether. You are saying that you can learn from Jesus without treating the written account of his life as a substitute for the relationship he exemplified.

Your point isn’t necessarily that the Bible has nothing to offer. It is that the record of a relationship should not be confused with the relationship itself.

And your closing distinction captures your position: you want to follow Jesus’ way of being, rather than follow a religion simply because it was built around him.

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what goes for one doesn’t go for all, but what goes for all, does go for one.