The Bible as early postmodern fiction

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Many people have thought about the Bible, in fact, perhaps literally billions have, and it is undoubtedly a book that has influenced many people and the very course of civilization. As such, understanding it is important.

What I would like to argue is that the Bible isn't a normal history, or a normal fiction, but rather that it is a postmodern fiction, that carefully explores and questions our perspectives on truth, interpretation, history vs myth, and the nature of reality itself.

As everybody knows, the Bible is a semi-historical fiction, that is, like a Civil War alternative history, it blends both historical and non-historical facts together without distinguishing between what is real and what isn't. This includes even major events within the story, such as mythical men, ginormous floods, a slavery that never happened but is continually referenced, genocides, miracles and all of that, which almost certainly never happened, and all of this blended with events that historians know have happened. This shows the postmodern questioning of history vs myth, as myth becomes established history to be cited and to be part of a cultural narrative, without regard to the actual history. This is brought even more to light with the Gospels, where each Gospel references a history, and each history has both variations beyond matters of interpretation, and similarities, to convey how perspective is continually contingent and incapable of finding Truth.

Even further, the text continually references itself, as interpretation. In the New Testament, we see that the writers reference, and translate selected passages in a manner that seems strange to modernist interpretations, as an expression of deeper truths, that is that despite what was really written, all of the words point to this Jewish man, a man who subverted modernist truth to become Truth as a messiah. The word become flesh but that cannot truly be reached through himself, as Christ, the logos, is a distortion of himself, of reason and standard interpretation.

Like many postmodern texts, the Bible plays with the continuity of character, presenting characters in a certain way and subverting it at the same time. Showing that our Platonistic ways of interpreting reality and people as essences do not work, and that life itself is a rich hermeneutic. At the center of the text we have God, a jealous, petty, vicious being, who is also somehow concerned with justice, love, and human beings. God isn't the kind of character we expect as God, he is continually billed as perfect, all-good, all-knowing, and yet he fails to accomplish this so gravely throughout the text, but refuses to admit error, and his people tolerate his mistakes, even above sense as can be seen in the book of Job. Essentially, the God of the Bible is the deconstruction of the notion of God, as God is stretched to the logical conclusions, and the contradictions that openly exist are brought forward by the narrator and explained by the contradictory aspects of God.

Finally, the Bible, as a fiction, is such a medley of so many other things, that it is quite revolutionary in that regard. It is a fiction that contains a law, that contains wisdom premised on falsehood, pointless fake genealogies, that contains the absurd, and that contains even the fantastic and bizarre in the book of Revelations, the glaring nature of the contradictions in the book itself brings to question the nature of narrative, and gives insight of how far a people will go when truth contradicts Truth, to give ultimate insight as to how each state of affairs is an episteme with its own internal contradictions ready to tear forward by anybody to give the text a look.

For this reason, I believe that the Bible is a groundbreaking fiction, and one that really should get us to raise questions about the nature of reality.

(that being said, I actually would be interested in some postmodern fiction about the loss of faith, or the distortions caused by dogmatic religion)

Do you think the bible emerged as postmodern fiction, or did its later authors think "let's make the bit about Jesus weird for the shake of being weird?"?

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There have been other early postmodern fictions: Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer and the Illiad, Odessey, The Qu'ran etc. A motley list.

As much as I love books, I do not worship them, nor their authors/inspirations. Every book must be read with a critical eye, even fiction. but in doing so religion vanishes. Some people still need to believe in spooks, as this makes them feel better.

Very nicely written.

I think that it is a mistake to uncritically use the label, "postmodern." Postmodernism is meaningless unless it is placed within the context of the modernist movement against which it is a reaction. So in literary terms, postmodernism marks a departure from modernism, but cannot be identified in the absence of that modernism.

Now, the Bible cleary involves the concept of a metanarrative, which is often taken to be a hallmark of postmodernist literature, but that is not the same thing as classifying it as post-modern. I would take the alternative view that the Bible is one of the sources from which postmodernists have cribbed to find the metanarrative as a literary device.

I'm not sure if I've understood what you said about "pointless fake genealogies" correctly though, Awesomelyglorious. Did you mean that they are in fact pointless, or did you mean that they just seem pointless unless look at the bible from this point of view ( that you described so well )?

I see the genealogies as a brilliant way of representing the use, ( and success/dissemination ) of the model of cause and effect; a caused b and b caused c, in the same way as the incredibly long and tedious lists of dimensions and weights and numbers of building materials etc for the ark among other things represent the stage at which we developed the model of measurements of that sort, ... and is a narrative which portrays very well the sort of "god"/"one" reality that people will experience if they believe that god, or the "one" reality, can be "contained within", conveyed by, or controlled by/with such systems/models.

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Well, the genealogies are in fact pointless, but they do play a significant role within the text, just like a hypothetical grocery list might play a significant role within a postmodern novel. I mean, a grocery list does not advance the plot, but it provides a context to push internal coherence by emphasizing details that are themselves absurd, and that themselves violate internal coherence. As it stands though, one could easily skip every genealogy, simply because they are space-fillers, and pointless ones to highlight a bizarre obsession at the heart of the text.

Btw, to all the people who are objecting to the term "postmodern fiction" in application to the Bible, as I stated before, this is a bit of a joke. I am not saying that there cannot be any bit of insight to this, but it was written with a semi-mocking attitude, particularly given that conservative Christians are very ANTI-postmodern, and explicitly so, so to label their text as postmodern is really quite a bit of an insult.

Great post.

I recently enjoyed reading Michael Crichton's "Eaters of the Dead", a brilliant mixture of historical fact and the authors fiction. But by the end of it, my knowledge had been clouded by the fictional account. In fact the author also made the statement that having written his book, he was unable to pick out his own falsehoods from obscure historical data.

Better read than the bible too.