Sometimes, when you talk to some of
the saner Christians and they admit that the Bible can’t be taken seriously or
read literally, they gamely counter with the notion that “but still, you can’t
deny that the Bible is one of the great works of literature!”
Why not? What’s so great about it?
First of all let’s remember that the
Bible doesn’t work as history or science: the creation story, the Garden of
Eden, the flood, Abraham the would-be child killer, the enslavement of the
Israelites and the escape across Sinai where they received God’s commandments,
Joshua’s genocide in the Holy Land, God punishing the Israelites when they
disobeyed the Torah, Jesus rising from the grave and flying off into outer
space….are all lies. Never happened.
The Bible doesn’t work as a moral
guide: God approves genocide, ethnic cleansing, killing your children
and/or selling them into slavery, subjugating women, killing gays, and the absurdly
widespread use of the death penalty. God’s followers commit murder, bigamy,
adultery, incest, rape, theft, fraud. And the Song of Songs is pure porn.
The Bible doesn’t help in the quest
for wisdom: it says specifically that the path to wisdom is…obedience. The
lesson it teaches is that even if you obey God’s absurdly arbitrary and
capricious laws, he is still going to screw you over and kill for fun. The few
worthwhile bits of wisdom in the Sermon on the Mount are the bits that today’s
Christians do their level best to ignore, all that hippie commie stuff about
loving your neighbor, meekness, tolerance, forgiveness, caring for the poor and
the sick. The hell with that!
It doesn’t work as fable: many of
the little lessons it teaches are about God’s whimsical cruelty. Occasionally
they teach a neat lesson about David taking on Goliath or the good Samaritan,
but those are few and very far between.
It doesn’t work as prophecy: the Old
Testament promises over and over that God will watch over the chosen people,
and time and again they are invaded, slaughtered, scattered to the four winds.
A key message in the New Testament was that everybody needed to get ready
because God was going to establish his kingdom on earth within a man’s
lifetime...two thousand years ago. Tick tock, tick tock.
It has few good characters, because
most of them are just people waiting for God to punish them, like hogs in a
slaughter pen. And few of them are sympathetic, because as a group they are not
very nice people: David arranging for a romantic rival to be killed, a number
of “Bible heroes” handing over their female relatives to be raped or killed,
Jacob deceiving his father and brother, the endless whining of Jeremiah. And of
course the most unpleasant character in all fiction, Jehovah.
It’s not even well-written: it’s
repetitive, it has plot holes and logical leaps, and it is often boring.
Jeremiah and Isaiah should not be read while operating machinery. It’s so badly
written that artists as varied as Dante, Milton and Andrew Lloyd Webber have
pulled out their Bibles and tried to rewrite the stories so that they’re
actually, you know, good. And invariably the only way to make the Bible
good is to turn the whole story on its head: in Jesus Christ Superstar the most
interesting character in Judas, and in Milton the most fascinating character is
Satan.
It is badly edited. Even a novice
editor would have sliced about 300 pages out of this monster. All the
repetitive passages about dietary laws and idol-worshipping kings, the book of
Isaiah which could be cut in half without losing anything of value, the porn in
Song of Songs, the lunacy of Revelation, and a lot of sheer silliness like the
miracles.
And very repetitive: Genesis has two
conflicting accounts of the creation, and the Gospels have four conflicting
accounts of Jesus’ life. The Books of Chronicles are a rehash of the stuff in
Genesis and Kings. So at least five books of the Bible are redundant.
A perfect example of the bad editing
occurs in the Book of Numbers. Balaam is a sort of repeat of the tale of Moses’
agonizing and his reluctance to carry out God’s will, so that the Israelites
can attain victory and finally end their wandering in the desert. And right in
the middle of the story, the author inserts…a talking donkey. Script doctor!
Code Blue! It’s as though Orson Welles was working on the script of Citizen
Kane, and Herman Mankiewicz, drunk as usual, shouted out “You know, Act Two
kinda drags, how about we stick in a scene with Mickey Mouse and Pluto?”
If an author were to walk into a
publishing house today (or, worse, Hollywood) and submit the Bible for
publication, they would either reject it outright, or slice it in three and
market it as a young-adult trilogy starring the Witch of Endor as a teen rebel
out to save Israel from a dystopian, totalitarian future. And add vampires. Who
solve crimes. Can we get Emma Stone as the Whore of Babylon?
The Bible does work as a cultural
touchstone: it has been rammed down our throats for so many centuries that
everyone is familiar with its stories and its slogans. Everybody knows the
Pharaoh, Goliath, the Ark, Peter’s denial, the prodigal son, spare the rod and
spoil the child, money is the root of all evil. Generations of bad writers have
tried to tart up their bad writing by opening their works with quotes from the
Bible, just like they do with Shakespeare. It confers a thin layer of borrowed
panache upon the semi-literate. Hurray for the Bible! But alas, to be
well-known is not to be well-written.
The book is so old and so venerated
that no one has the guts to say that it’s not worth keeping in our lives
anymore. It’s a 1370-page effort by ancient priests to sell lies to stupid
people, in order to enslave them. It’s time for modern civilization to move on,
to toss it into the bin with all those books we’re supposed to revere but are
essentially unreadable: James Joyce, the “Silmarillion” sequel to the Lord of
the Rings, Waiting for Godot, Catcher in the Rye, Thomas Hardy, Tom Clancy and
John Grisham after they got rich and lazy.
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