The Fiction of The Bible and Blair Witch

It is of course rather difficult to write very negatively about a religion that has in fact contributed so much wonderful art and culture to our society but there is still something essentially wrong with people still strongly believing in a compliation story book about a vidictive god character and allusions, stories about higher values that in the end only contradict themselves. We all know the stories set in the bible, more or less, and how they are terribly judgemental in many ways. This would all be very fine if it was read perhaps in the same way as the story of Beowulf or The Sorrows of Young Werther and so on, but it’s clearly not, and yet people would surely think someone mad if they were to claim that they strongly believe and have faith in Superman for instance (with which one can coincidentally draw many parallels from to the character of Jesus, but that’s another story). Why do religious people assume authenticity, truism, factuality about a told story by the only assuring factor of a sheer passage of time? Will there be churches raised in the name of Superman a few hundred years from now? Most certainly not. But why is that? Wherein lies the real difference?

Compare perhaps The Blair Witch Project or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Batman or Midsummer Murders, all of which are fiction with the difference that the former two are ‘pretend-reality-fiction’ (or whatever it might be called, meaning that the makers have made the films in such a way that it should seem as close to reality as possible, most often used in the form of ‘documentary-gone-wrong’ kind of films, of which Blair Witch, of course, is an excellent example. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is made on the basis that it is a remake of an actual happening of which we can see parts of in the beginning and the end of the film), and the two latter are simply fiction-fiction, where there is not real pretend that it is real, everyone is aware of the fact that it is fiction throughout and no-one every tries to claim otherwise neither directly nor indirectly.

Now keep this in mind and go to the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs website where you can read this article: King David and Jerusalem: Myth and Reality, here follows and excerpt:

The Bible is not – and was never intended to be – a historical document. A work of theology, law, ethics and literature, it does contain historical information; but if we want to evaluate this information we should consider when, how and why the Bible was compiled.

Until comparatively recently, the Bible was accepted as the word of God by most Jews and Christians, and therefore scholarly works dealing with it, such as the Talmud, rabbinical commentaries, and the work of Christian scholars, concentrated on its interpretation.

In the 19th century CE, the “Age of Reason,” scholars began subjecting the biblical texts to linguistic, textual, and literary analysis, noting inconsistencies and interrupted rhythms, comparing styles, and placing the text within the archaeological, historical and geographical background. There are still many differing opinions regarding the origin of the Bible, when it was written, and under what conditions; but it is fair to say that, outside fundamentalist circles, modern consensus suggests that the assembling and editing of the documents that were to constitute the Bible began in the seventh century BCE, some three centuries after David’s time. (The earliest actual material in our possession, part of the Dead Sea Scrolls, dates to the second century BCE at the earliest)

It is not a historical document but naturally historical information can certainly be found within it. Is this not the same as with most fiction of today? Stories put in a (then) modern, present society, reflecting historical data, acts, beliefs and values etc. but with an essentially fictionalised story as the plot told against the background of the author or the narrator or the intended reader or the characters in the story? The bible therefore is simply a (then) contemporary moralistic story trying to make people think and reflect but is probably not much truer than Miss Marple. So why cannot fiction be fiction?

Consider then that the bible could be similar to The Blair Witch Project in that it is pretending to be based on reality to such an extent that it even produces ‘documentaries’ about the (fake) ‘documentary’ re-enforcing the idea of it being real all the time, and since communication was rather much more limited back then (the timespan during which the bible was written) for the purpose of discussing the work or researching it or checking the source etc., perhaps some people eventually started to doubt and actually thought it was real … for real, and then this spreads by word of mouth and the belief in that it is actually real gets established so that later when extensive research and so on can actually be done it does not really matter so much any more because no-one will believe the “one” saying that it is not real because it has been very much real for a long, long time, people have even founded their entire lives on the belief that it is real. It’s like building an exact replica of Mount Everest and towards the end you realise that in the bottom layer you have put in the wrong pieces so that if you wanted to correct your mistake you would have to start all over again. Rather troublesome, no?

Tags: age of reason, article, bible, biblical, catholic, Christian, Christianity, church, creation, evangelical, fiction, fictitious, foreign, god, historical documentation, islam, Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jehovah's Witnesses, jerusalem, jesus, jew, jewish, king david, miss marple, mockumentary, myth, new testament, old testament, pope, pretend-fiction, reality, Religion, religious, Science, superman, the Blair witch project, the texas chainsaw massacre, trinity