The Bible - as an original source of all types of stories and narratives you’ll find in 99% of all fiction books and movies. New Testament — as an original source of most of moral principles and ideas modern european civilization is based upon (also fundamental stories and narratives).
I’ve read the Bible and frankly I wouldn’t recommend. Putting aside that the different translations can sometimes drastically change the meaning of some stories, the English Bible as a whole is harder to grok than Shakespeare. Then there are issues about how it was written by man, in the literal sense. Female testaments were left out. And some of the male testaments were only included hundreds of years after the deat…
While it's hard to understand for the following reasons
- It's not "a book" but a canon of dozens of books bound together, written by different people;
- cultural distance: Middle East versus West;
- temporal distance: authored approx. 2000 years ago;
almost every book written afterwards refers to it explicitly or implicitly or depends on it in some way, and you will never understand the later works fully without having read some of the Bible.
To read the Bible, a layperson needs guidance. Having said this parts of the New Testament are more easy to follow. For those who prefer to watch, this movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058715/ (created by an atheist to better understand it all) uses the original words of the Gospel of St. Matthew, and the result got praise from the Vatican, ironically.