Based on Anne Sullivan's report dated 1890, found at the end of Helen Keller's autobiography in the section titled "A Supplementary Account of Helen Keller's Life and Education," we learn that in 1889, when Helen was 9 years old, a relative who was a devout Christian came to visit the Kellers. It was through this relative that Helen first learned about God; however, at the time, she was too young to understand what she was hearing about. Miss Sullivan reports Helen laughingly talk about the things she had learned such as how "God is everywhere, and that He is love"; Helen's response was that a person can't possibly be "made out of love." Regardless, two years later, in 1890, Helen wrote the following questions on her tablet:
I wish to write about things I do not understand. Who made the earth and the seas, and everything? What makes the sun hot? Where was I before I came to mother? ... May I read the book called the Bible? (Chapter III, "Education")
Regardless of Helen's early curiosity, Miss Sullivan felt that Helen reading the Bible might just confuse Helen's conception of God. Instead, Miss Sullivan created lessons for Helen to teach her about spiritual matters. It was not until Helen was older that she began reading the Bible. We are not told exactly how old she was when she first started reading the Bible. We are only told in Chapter 23 that she "began to read the Bible long before [she] could understand it." Specifically, on one rainy Sunday, when she was bored, she begged her cousin to read a story from the Bible to her. Her cousin hesitated because she didn't think Helen was old enough to understand it but began finger spelling out a story regardless. Her cousin's assumptions about Helen's understanding proved to be correct, as Helen reports soon drifting off to sleep.
Later, when she was a student at Radcliff, she took a class studying the "Bible as English composition," taught by Mr. Charles Townsend Copeland, in which she was assigned to read the entire Bible. The class was one of her favorites, and due to her instructor's teaching style, she reports the following sentiments:
The lectures were always interesting, vivacious, witty; for the instructor, Mr. Charles Townsend Copelad, more than any one else I have had until this year, brings before you literature in all its original freshness and power. For one short hour you are permitted to drink in the eternal beauty of the old masters without needless interpretation or exposition. You revel in their fine thoughts. You enjoy with all your soul the sweet thunder of the Old Testament, forgetting the existence of Jahweh and Elohim; and you go home feeling that you have had "a glimpse of that perfection in which spirit and form dwell in immortal harmony; truth and beauty a new growth on the ancient stem of time." (Ch. 20)
Helen further reports that the Bible became her greatest source of inspiration, saying that she loves it more than any other book. In Chapter 21, she praises the Bible for the beauty of its words, despite it containing some "unpleasant details" she would rather forget. Furthermore, she connects the Bible to her own situation as life in blindness and explains how the Bible gave her hope:
The Bible gives me a deep, comforting sense that "things seen are temporal, and things unseen are eternal." (Ch. 21)
Hence, all in all, Helen first read the Bible for herself as a college-aged adult, probably in Braille. Plus, due to her college class and spiritual advisors, the Bible became her greatest source of inspiration.
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