The Bible - Fiction or Fact?

[Tony Walker]

I'm trying to start a serious discussion here, so please don't splatter me with favorite quotes from your Bibles.

Leaving aside the various claims to authorship, should the Bible be treated as a collection of folk myths, a handy pocket guide to getting along with each other, a genealogical history of the Israelites, or should it be recognized as the actual, written down in his own hand, word of God?

Just to set the record straight, I tend to go with the first explanation, with a few useful tips to be taken from the second.

[Luis Borges]

I would go for the first two. The third might not be completely accurate. And the fourth is for the faithful

[PaulWHankins]

Tony:

As I share with students, one definition of myth is a "collective belief in a story of unknown origin and time." This makes them a little more comfortable (those with cultural myths from Sunday School), when we talk about the different myths of origin, the creation myth, the flood myth, etc. . .

Joseph Campbell has a lot to say about these myths in his work Myths We Live By. Not that I want to be nailed to the wood on this one, but I enjoy seeing the individual stories as a type of Hero's Journey. With this approach, I am able to see the journey of Moses, Noah, David, etc. . .

This probably similar to your approach to the reading of this text. Sometimes I wonder if the Exodus story is really a metaphor for a dual identity confusion on the part of Moses. This kind of story could happen without Egypt, Slaves, etc. . .the real issue is coming home to who Moses is and the internal conflict that sometimes comes of one's own call. . .

Thanks for letting me reply. . .


Best,

H.

[James Waters AKA. NineSpeed]

I believe the Bible is the word of god, And if I die and nothing is there, well I'll be dead and wont know about it anyway so who cares. But If God is there as the Bibles states It is sure going to smell like a Bar B Que joint in heaven.

Someone pass the sauce

[Tony Walker]

James Waters said:

I believe the Bible is the word of god, And if I die and nothing is there, well I'll be dead and wont know about it anyway so who cares. But If God is there as the Bibles states It is sure going to smell like a Bar B Que joint in heaven.


Someone pass the sauce

But ...

What if someone arrived in your heaven who was vegetarian, and couldn't stand the smell of BBQ? Wouldn't that make it a hell for the poor veggie?

[James Waters AKA. NineSpeed]

Good Question, Maybe there is a veggie Heaven, and God Is a giant Cucumber, and all the Angels are Lima Beans...It Could happen I guess...

[Michelle James]

The Bible is fact.

Ask a simple question... get a simple answer.

With regard to the other "sub-questions" you posed, it's not a mythological book, it's historical in its content and was penned by...how would you say it in today's verbage... ghostwriters? As a Spirit Being, God cannot utilize pen and paper, so He uses people to do that under His inspiration and via one-on-one communication.

And herein endeth my discussion. (grin)

Know why? Because we can all post our opinions: our 'yeas' and 'nays, our 'wherefores' and 'therefores', and argue and debate each and every jot and tittle. Will it change anything other than perhaps to get a few people hot and bothered under the collar? I think not.

Anyway, that's all I had to say. Thanks for reading... (smile)

Oh by the way, TW, it's nice to see that the atheistic side of you is actually curious about the Bible. Methinks that conscience of yours is being pricked... but by what, or Whom? Hmmm?

I am winking here, whether you choose to see it or not.(:wink:)

[Michelle James]

Hey James.. I don't think Heaven's equipped for BBQs. It's Hell that has the fiery flames. Heaven only has pure Son-light. (grin)

James Waters said:

I believe the Bible is the word of god, And if I die and nothing is there, well I'll be dead and wont know about it anyway so who cares. But If God is there as the Bibles states It is sure going to smell like a Bar B Que joint in heaven.

Someone pass the sauce

[Rianna]

Tony, I believe everything option you have tossed out there is correct. The Bible is collection of myths, just as all the stories of Greek, Roman, Norse, and other mythologies. However, I also believe that it was written by the inspiration of God (just as I believe is where all other mythologies come from). However, it was still man's hand who wrote the Bible, making it just as fallible as any other story. Non-fiction is only non-fiction in the eyes of those who write it, with all the biases and personal opinions as the author. And such is the Bible. Which is why the genealogy of the Israelites is so prevalent in this collection of old stories - they wrote it. As for the pocket guide of how to get along with each other - that just plays into all myths, whether told by God or not. Stories often have some sort of message attached.

Has anyone ever compared the myths out there: Greek, Egyptian, the Bible, etc? You'll find many stories very similar, just with different names and occasionally a slightly different twist. But the plot is almost always the same. For those who believe in Christianity - could it be Jesus and his 12 disciples were indeed the same as the gods of Mount Olympus? There were many minor gods who could very easily fall into the same descriptions as the disciples. The angels mentioned in the Bible could also be considered minor gods. Just a little something to think about.

[Ashton Gray]

In sober consideration of the Bible being "the actual, written down in his own hand, word of God," I am still scratching me 'ead over this: He created the place in seven days, but it took Him over 1600 years to write the manual. (Any writers out there who think their own book is coming slow, take comfort.)

I don't know what the faithful did to find their way into Heaven before He got the final draft done, nor why he ended up calling in 40 or more ghost writers to put on the job. He must, though, ultimately have been relieved that He had had the foresight to create editors, because before Pope Irenaeus came along in the second century A.D. to smack down the Gnostics, there wasn't a Bible at all, and Lord! they had more "gospels" in circulation than all the begatting that was accomplished in the length and breadth of Genesis. They just had gospels galore. Scads of gospels. There was a surplus of gospels—every one of them, of course, having the distinction of having been written by the Hand of the One True God. (Through one of the ghost writers, I mean.)

Well, with all these ghost writers running around claiming to have gospels that the faithful should cleave to, even poor old Irenaeus—who aspired to be the first editor, and I suppose was the first censor—could not cobble together a Bible before the Author ran out of patience and plucked him up. He did, though, to his credit, thin out the plague of superfluous gospels.

After Irenaeus departed, it all festered around and smoked and waffled just for decades and decades, and the faithful still had to guess what might get them into Heaven or get them into Hell, because there was not a handbook that the whole tissipossity could agree upon as being The One True Word of The One True God, even though every syllable that was still circulating as "gospel" had been written by His own hand. (According to the ghost writers, I mean.)

So however proud He might have been over His clever creation of editors and ghost writers, I believe that God's proudest creation must be the committee, because it took a committee to finally lay down the law and get a Bible slapped together, with an "Amen" and "that's that!"

This holy committee (which, I confess, may be an oxymoron) was seated sometime in the nearabouts of 397 A.D., and was anointed the Council of Carthage. This was no Vegas convention, either. These old boys had their work cut out for them, because even after Irenaeus had sacked and scandalized the Gnostics, even after all his editing and censoring, they still had 45 of these "gospels" rattling around all over creation vying for official God status. But after considerable convening and confabbing, these boys got out their rubber stamps, and they issued a canon, and they said, by God, that there were 27 and only 27 books that actually, truly, inarguably were The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth, so help them— Well, so help them, God. And it was about time somebody did.

I wish that were the end of it, but it isn't. I, though, am so tuckered out just contemplating what it took to get the confounded book this far that I don't think I could work up a decent Bible thump if Beelzebub himself walked in and needed one.

And I still don't know why God snapped the whole shebang together in a week of work, but took over 1600 years to get the book out on the shelves. I do believe, deep in my soul, though, that this explains fully why the publishing industry is the way it is.

Ashton

[June McGee]

Perhaps what we need to do first here is to ask, "What IS truth"? Is truth a standard for all? Does your truth differ from my truth? My personal opinion on this is that the Bible is the Absolute, Unquestionable Truth of God to man, and therefore, since God cannot lie, His word is truth. Our difficulty in this is our failure to recognize truth when it has been pounding us in the face for many, many generations, trying to get us to realize that we, as men, are not seeing the power of the real, pure, and perfect truth. Instead we establish "our own truth" and choose to live by this.

Truth is not just so many written words, even as I consider the Bible itself. If all we get from the Bible is words then we might as well be reading a science book, or a history book, or a book on the genealogy of Israel. etc. There is an identification what has to take place upon seeing the truth. If this doesn't happen then it is only words on paper for us, even if it is the Bible which you are reading.

[Blindogg]

My personal (and agnostic) opinion of the bible is that it is a collection of stories that were written with the intention of directing people in how to live their lives, very similar to the teachings of Buddah.
I don't know if these stories were dictated by an almighty being and dutifully penned by the faithful or if they were the product of several "Aesop" like story tellers cleverly bound in one package in the most brilliant marketing plan ever conceived.
As with all of Tony's posts this question could be debated until the second coming...in the end I believe that the truth is what lies within you.
That is the underlying principle of faith.
If you believe it - it is true.
So in summation - I believe that "The greatest story ever told" is really nothing more than a placebo for those who need a reason to keep on keepin' on.

[Tony Walker]

Michelle, you said: "The Bible is fact."

OK - prove it!

The fact that you believe that every word came directly from God, doesn't prove anything to the skeptics among us. It's just your belief, nothing more. If I say that the planet Mercury is made of plastic, that's just what I believe, but it certainly doesn't make it a fact.

As a writer, you shouldn't confuse beliefs with facts. Facts can be proved; beliefs can't. I respect your beliefs, but please, don't try and convince me that they are facts.