"Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way"? No! Not so...

Matthew 7:13-14. Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Here, as so often, Matthew's Gospel gets it wrong; and in a harmful way. 
Here - salvation is depicted as if it required strict adherence to a very specific and very difficult way of life - or else... Hell. 
Yet the reality is that Jesus provided the chance and hope of salvation to everyone who wants it; including ordinary everyday "sinners" - seemingly all kinds of very imperfect, and even notorious, people. Jesus did Not demand that his followers adhered to a difficult and specific path through mortal life. 

This underlines for me how - sooner or later - Christianity needs to come to us directly, not via intermediaries. 
Including that Christianity cannot be got from The Bible. It's is false and dangerous nonsense to suppose that we just-plain-get meaning from reading or studying The Bible. 
In reading the Bible we really must be able to evaluate and reject the kind of false and dangerous mistake of the "strait is the gate" kind. 

Everyone who reads the Bible (nowadays, in this era, with modern minds and modes of consciousness) does so on the basis of prior assumptions concerning how the Bible ought to be read and understood: this is a matter of fact, evident to anyone who does not share these assumptions. 
These assumptions frame, control, dictate the meanings we get from The Bible. 

Here are some of the common prior assumptions: all of which I reject: 
1. Regarding the Bible as a single unified book which is all equally true and without 'error' - when error is defined as the falsehood of explicit statements; 
2. Regarding the truth of the Bible as something that resides at a sentence by sentence ('verse') level or even a word-by-word level; 
3. Regarding the truth of all sentences/ verses as requiring knowledge of the whole Bible; 
4. That all the New Testament is equally valid; 
5. That all the Gospels are equally valid and tell a single absolutely coherent story (coherent at either/ both the level of the whole, and part-by-part).
 Instead; we need to approach reading The Bible with an explicit awareness of our own prior assumptions. 
And - once we have identified and acknowledged them - we need to evaluate these assumptions, to check that we really believe them - and that we believe them enough to stake our lives, our souls, upon them. 
And if not; then we need to discover other assumptions: ones that we really are sure about.