Quote:
Originally Posted by madisonbtb
...i may be the odd one out here, but honestly, i see the bible as a book with stories in it -- nothing more than stories. a work of fiction based maybe loosely on some real life events. i don't take it literally. just stories and guidelines to set people on the right path.
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While I do not deny that there is a great deal of fiction, poetic license, and contemprization in the Bible, it is most certainly more than merely a collection of "stories". For example: the creation myths are just that: myths. Science has proved this. The exodus narrative is probably a myth as well, but there is still not enough evidence to determine how much of it was fabricated versus what was fact. Was there an actual "Moses"/deliverer figure? Were the Hebrews slaves in Egypt? Was the narrative nothing more than a construct invented generations later to explain what was nothing more than a regional class conflict? Was David a fictional ruler? Or was he an idealized tribal chief? Did the Babylonian and Assyrian invasions and exiles occur, or was it a more subtle form of assymilation? Was Jesus a real man, an idealized figure, or a total fabrication?
Phillip Davies is a biblical scholar at Sheffield University, and he has argued fairly persuasively for the whole of the Hebrew Bible as a collection of literature that was written (or adapted or "re-written) as propoganda for an elite class of Babylonian nationals who immigrated into Palestine. I don't agree with him, but he has done a nice job of tracing immigration as a dominant theme through the Hebrew Bible. He would certainly purport that the Bible is mythical literature, but I am not certain that even he would be comfortable with reducing it wholescale to fiction. There are too many real, historically verifiable persons and events accurately described in much of the Bible to dismiss it wholescale as a collection of stories.
A huge amount of the biblical literature was the product of political and religious turmoil just prior to, during, and after the Babylonian sacking of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. Much of what the prophets spoke about corresponds fairly closely to what we know of the demographics of the region from the period, and from what has been unearthed through hundreds of archaeological excavations. Large portions of the New Testament betray an intimate knowledge of social and religious life prior to the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. While I do not read biblical narratives with the same sense as I do the daily newspaper, there is still enough "history" preserved in the texts themselves to believe that they are not all—or even mostly—entirely contrived.
