The Bible as early postmodern fiction

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Try the Gospel of he Flying Spaghetti Monster. There's another spoof.

Did you not read my entire comment? Why did you reply to that one sentence? It wasn't even the point of my comment.

I did.

Because it expressed an attitude all too common in our society, especially among atheists, and bible-bashers ( :lol in both senses of the word; those who hold it in contempt and those who hawk it around as absolute literal/objective truth ), that myth/fable/fiction is trivial/insignificant, of little or no importance. ( You did say that "it is true that the bible could be nothing more than a fictional fable" ), and I wanted to point out how mistaken such an attitude is, in my opinion.

I wasn't too sure what the point of your post was, so preferred to reply to the one thing which seemed clear to me.

But I'll risk a reply to the rest of your post; was your point that if so many people spent so much time and effort recording/describing these things ( thoughts, experiences, etc ) they must mean something/be important?

I agree that the material must have meant a lot to the people that wrote it down, and that the fact that certain organisations have worked very hard to reproduce/copy and preserve these writings over time suggests that other people have taken the material very seriously too. The very existence of the bible today does suggest that it is about something which was until recently very important to quite a lot of people ... and there is almost nothing else quite like it, ( apart from writings from further east ), even the pyramids only exist today because nobody wanted the land where they stand, not because anyone protected/preserved them.

But unfortunately your theory only suggests that it probably was important to people, in other epochs ... something which could be said about a lot of other things which are no longer useful to us.

But I may have misunderstood your point; as I say, I wasn't quite sure what it was.

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I don't think that the highly intelligent people responsible for the bible would have spent the time and ink it took to write out massively long fake genealogical records simply to pour scorn on, or to point out the absurdity of, valuing ( and keeping meticulous records of ) certain blood lines/ties, unless, as I believe, it served as a perfect example/specimen of something far more pervasive, something with much more impact on spiritual "health". You say that it mocks/highlights an obsession with "essences"; I agree, but I don't think that the essences stop with/are limited to blood lines.

We in the developed west are so used to using the model of cause and effect that it ( that view/framework ) has become almost invisible to us, but in fact the model is based on a faith in essences, and on the belief that certain essences, ( which we then call "causes" ) are more important than others in different contexts. We trace imaginary lines from one event to another, when in fact each and every event is "caused by" everything, and it is merely our needs and/or priorities at any given time which determine which "essences" we will notice/highlight/pick on.

eg. The word starvation is generally understood to mean dying from lack of food. Is that really what the people in eastern Africa are dying of? Lack of food? We know that this can not be true, because there is in fact enough food to feed everyone on the planet. They are actually dying from other *causes"; political activists would point to the absence of interest on the part of other countries in paying for the transport necessary, etc; but in fact they are dying because of "everything". But we designate their deaths as starvation.

eg. More and more people in the west have serious degenerative diseases. So long as the food and agriculture industries possess powerful lobbies in govt the causes are officially too much fat and/or not enough exercise, or genes. Even if the balance of power, and of "need", changes ( as it is doing, and science is uncovering the relevant evidence/connections ) and the govt starts telling us that such disease is the result of too much carbohydrate, ( esp cereals, and fructose and sucrose ), it will still only be part of the story; degenerative disease is a result of "everything" in the universe being the way it is at each moment.

Humans find causes for things, trace lines of causation, according to "need", according to what "works" for the society and the individual at any given moment. Science will even, when necessary, find whole new systems/networks in order to find a connection. It could, if society needed it to, ( and was prepared to spend the money and time on detecting and uncovering the relevant systems/networks ), find connections between almost anything. Cause and effect is a model, a bias/choice of which connections to see. It prioritises certain "bloodlines", events or factors/elements or processes over others.

And yes, that is why it is so significant that the "bloodline" of Jesus ( subjective truth ) is not "normal" at all. It recognises the role in causation of the whole of the "one" reality/god, and depends on one person, Mary, saying "yes" to that way of looking at things, rather than insisting on the usual "causes", sperm for instance.

Yes, I think that you are absolutely right about the genealogies being about the ( modern/post-neolithic ) human obsession with essences, our belief in the non-contingency/objective reality of "causes". "Cause and effect" is just a highly complex form of superstition, lines drawn between our favourite/profitable essences of the moment backed up by the immensely elaborate tools/so-called objective processes ( eg. science of the twentieth century ) of whichever is the largest and most complex social organism in existence at that point.

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Ah, but the issue is that the genealogies were undoubtedly fake.

Even further, sure, we can talk about authorial intent, but really, why should the author's interpretation constrain our interpretations? It is not as if the author is a better interpreter of a text than others are.


That is actually true, but the begetting while having causality, does not highlight causality more than anything else.

The real issue questioning causality is divine action, not breeding. Divine action is a cause invented to just be a cause, due to a need for a cause, but as a cause it does not really have a sensible pattern, other than some prophet needs to explain sin.


Right, well, I think that causality isn't so heavily highlighted in the bloodline issue. It really is more likely that essences are.

Well, induction of any form is the real superstition, and the problem is pointed out by Hume. The real solution is Popperian theorizing and falsification, and even then we must avoid being overly simplistic Popperians given how complex the whole of reality is and how many unknowns there are.

I don't think that it matters; as the postmodernist perspective of the Gospels shows us, we can, and do, make our own subjective truth out of any text, any body of data, a "truth" whose form will be determined by our bodies including our brains, ( genes, all the environmental causes/"bloodlines" that we can think of, parents, school, society, etc ), and the "rest" of the "one" reality, that which we have not labelled "cause", that which is insubstantial/invisible to us, like a "spirit".

Your subjective truth is that the genealogies simply refer to genealogies. Mine is that they are a synecdochal metaphor for the model of cause and effect.


You're quite right; I accept/recognise that my references to their intelligence and intent was a craven attempt to strengthen my argument with the kind of reasoning which postmodernism debunked. :lol


"Begetting" would have been one of the most "sensitive" and thus most policed, of all "causal" kinds of relationship in the first few millenia after the neolithic revolution, as society sedentarised, and families became far more permanent arrangements and land something to be passed on to children. "Begetting" would, together with the sowing of seed and growing of crops, have been one of the first processes to have had the model of cause and effect applied to it, ( because the newly sedentary society "needed" to regulate/manipulate/keep track/a count of it ).


I don't think I understand what point you are making here.

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God is the explanation of evil in the OT. The issue is that God is not an observable cause. So, I think that the speakers were inventing causality for their own rationalizations.

Looking on today's roster of threads - one page worth - and despairing, O Ozymandias, I said to myself, said I, let's just take a looksee.

I rolled back to the thread page from a year ago.

Big surprise - there was a bit lesws junk, a bit more reasonable stuff.

Take this thread. Now I am very down on PostModernism and associated critical traditions. And some of the contributions here are ill-informed junk. But there is meat here.

To be sure, treating the Bible as a postmodernist work largely ignores its history and nature. But PostMod crit notoriously ignores authorial intent and the various layers of intended and contemporary and later audiences.

Seen from this angle as in AG''s opening post, the Bible becomres as it were an Objet trouve, seen as an ART-fact in its own contemporary light.

More of this. Less of "Third Generation Polish-American liberals Eat More Spaghetti than Mafiosi".

I'd say the Bible and all other holy books take oral history and aggrandize it for the sake of promoting the sect/faith/institution's interests.

It would qualify as fiction after a its been aggrandized and edited for some time. But i'd hardly call it post-modern... more like a collection of oral history with fairy tale elements (which likely WERE adapted into the book from oral tradition folk tales).

The bible is pre-modern fiction;

ruveyn

You would then compare thre Bible to an anthology of readings [on history, Lit Crit, Econ, Linguistics] selected to push a partiular viewpoint - Marxist Criticism, Transformational Grammar, etc?

First of all, the Bible is truth because it is literally God's word, but this truth cannot necessarily be read as a literal, fact-by-fact accounting of history; it must be understood through a tradition, His Church and His Apostles, etc. The Bible is not a postmodern work, and postmodernism as a theory can only fail to interpret the Bible correctly because postmodernism is false. Postmodernism promotes the heresies of relativism and nihilism; it is the teachings of godless professors. Semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, and related schools of literature, art, and philosophy offer nothing to the godly disciple.

That would sound about right.. most religious books encompass all subjects from social behavior to their version/interpretation of past events as passed down to the writer through oral history to propaganda pushing their agenda.



The same can be said of all other religious books and oral history from any culture.

Last I checked the bible we know today (meaning adding the 'sequel' of the new testament to the jewish original) was put together by Irenaeus 200 years after Jesus died and it was a carefully selected collection of gospels (out of dozens circulating), heavily edited (to make it more acceptable to Rome..aka less seditious) and pushed onto the various sects of the day so as to consolidate the believers into one easier to manage group and reduce the bad image the christians had in the eyes of Roman leadership. It worked.

Its... like an archaic religious version of wikipedia.

I don't usually ask this, but are you being semi-sarcastic or entirely sarcastic?

Entirely of course.

Great... I fell for it line hook and sinker.