Well, I certainly can't speak for Christians, or the Christian Bible. But in Jewish tradition, we have always held that scripture is infinitely complex, having limitless layers of potential meaning within it. In part, we have taught that this is because the Torah is a gift of God to the Jewish people, and like its maker, it cannot be limited by what one might presume are its visible parameters. In part, we believe that this is because Torah (in its widest sense of both the Written Torah-- that which Christians believe is the entirety of the "Old Testament"-- and the Oral Torah-- the continuing superstructure of interpretation and exegesis that was also "given" with the Written Torah, creating an interpretive tradition that continues to grow and evolve to this day) is designed to be eternal, always yielding new meanings and levels of insight. And in order to do that, it must be tremendously complex and nuanced.
The Biblical authors used every literary tool available to them, not just history, theology, and narrative. They used poetry, imagery, allegory, metaphor, puns, wordplays, idioms, allusions both internal and external, and many other devices also, to create something that is not simple. It is a fusion, containing many things.
The Hebrew Bible is a collection of many texts written by many authors over the course of around a thousand years. It is a history of the Jewish People couched in mythic structuring designed to impart philosophical lessons. It is an account of the relationship between the Jews and God, depcited large on mythopoeic character narratives and larger than life story arcs. It represents a record of the evolution of Israelite Jewish religious thought, theology, ritual practice, law, and social doctrine for a millennium or more. And it includes wisdom literature, homiletical material, and poetry of virtually every genre known in the Ancient Near East. And it was written to survive the ages, offering new and continuing wisdom over time, by a people who are known for complex thought and detailed art, in a language that is one of the most nuanced and complexly elegant languages in the Western World.
If people are telling you it ought to be easy, or it ought to be all one way or another, or it ought to be clear and plain and simple to understand (whether they mean to take it all literally or reckon it all fiction)...then they're leading you down the garden path.
It's hard. It's supposed to be hard. And it's complex because it's supposed to be. It's about people wrestling with God and God's desires from us, and how to try and live a better life in a very difficult world. Nothing in there should be simple, because neither God nor the world are easy and simple. And if you crack open a book expecting pat answers, you learn nothing about the world, yourself, or God. You start learning when you crack open a book expecting to find questions to struggle with.
and the likes of purgatory ect ect ect
