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8/12/2019 Essay Bible
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Ian Carlos Iracheta
The Bible as a Literary Mirage
One of the most enthralling aspects surrounding the Bible is the
colossal abyss that yaws between
what this most ancient book is thought to be, and what it verily
is. For something that has been
completely immersed in the worlds cultural tableau ever since
the days of yore, and that
continues to occupy a paramount place in todays society, it is
quite bewildering how the Bible has
always been enshrouded by a miasma of misconceptions. The fact
that most people dont learn
about their religion in a direct manner, i.e. by personally
reading scripture, but by a pious proxy,
has only augmented the level of vexatious misconstructions and
general ignorance in reference to
this unarguably invaluable book. In fact, in order to prove this
point, one needs not look further
than to the very first verse of the very first book to find a
thought-provoking disjunctive between
what the Bible actually says, and what the collective
consciousness of humanity has arbitrarily
declared to be axiomatically true. Were one to poll the western
populace as a whole about how
the Bible starts, it wouldnt be striking if most people were to
answer a somewhat paraphrased, or
even severely distorted version of In the beginning was the
Word. However, this ostensibly
plausible answer in the eyes of the human hive mind is off by
approximately forty-three books;
that is, a whole testament away from where the right answer
lies. In fact, this often-quoted verse
appears in the Gospel of John (1:1) in the New Testament, where
the apostle quickly retells the
story of Genesis, but the creation of the world is obviously
first narrated in the eponymous
chapter whose opening verse is the not colossally, yet
sufficiently differentIn the beginning God
created.. Genesis 1:1
Other instances of brobdingnagian solecisms attributed to the
visibly non-reliable concept of
common knowledge are not a literary delicacy, only to be enjoyed
on special occasions, but a
recurring theme whenever the Bible is discussed.The laymans
knowledge about thisliterary work
is teeming with wild guesses and blatantly erroneous ideas.
Apart from the aforementioned
example, two other prominent ones immediately spring to
mind:
According to the Bible, Mary is the mother of Jesus; however,
centuries of nondenominational
cultural attrition have changed in the mind of the average
person that simple statement from its
correct form to the virginMary is the mother of Jesus. It is
only by reading the Bible that we can
receive the discombobulating surprise that the vestal epithet
with which this eminent feminine
biblical character was bestowed by the Christian agenda is
either wrongly interpreted by the pious
demographic, or completely inappropriate. In the Gospel of Mark,
we learn that Jesus is not an
only child and that he actually has several brothers and
sisters. Since no divine intervention is
announced anywhere in the New Testament in regard to their
conception, one can surmise that
unlike Jesus, his brothers, James, Joseph and Judas, and his
unnamed sisters, are the offspring of
Joseph rather than of the manifestation of the Holy Spirit. This
of course means that the words
virgin and Mary dont belong together in their traditional
semantic arrangement.
This conclusion is not one that can be easily refuted by
claiming an error in interpretation. In fact
this truth is unavoidable because of the obvious presence of
both allegorical and literal meaning in
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Ian Carlos Iracheta
the Gospel of Mark. In the third book Jesus is told by a throng
of people that his mother and
brothers are looking for him, and he replies Who are my mother
and brothers? Here are my
mother and brothers! (Mark 3:34) while pointing at the crowd
around him. Evidently, the only
way in which this passage makes sense is if both his literal and
metaphorical family play a role on
the scene.
Another apparent non-sequitur in Biblical logic that has been
wrought by the extraneous minds of
the populace into a more logical, and in a way more coherent
result is the famous book of Job. In
it, after being deprived of his offspring, his cattle, his
slaves, and finally his health in what is
basically a glorified bet between God and Satan, -who isnt the
devil here - Job spends the ensuing
thirty-five books in what can only be described as a raucous
tantrum about his affliction. He
burnishes the plot by telling the four friends that visit him
that he is in the right, and that therefore
God is being unjust. His friends then proceed to sporadically
interrupt him and tell him that he is
mistaken and that God is never unjust, something that God
himself denies at the end of the book,
while talking to the five men from the heart of a column of
wind.
This pseudo-exordium has the purpose of shaking the readers
paradigm and general set of
assumptions vis--vis the Bible. By challenging some of our most
steadfast beliefs with the
vanquishing ram of empirical evidence, we can actually discover
that perhaps our stalwart
postulates de facto constitute the cornerstone of the proverbial
empire built on sand, instead of
the bedrock foundation which we had hitherto considered them to
be. The underlying quality of
the aforementioned passages is that they are thought to be
remarkably different by our collective
cultural conscience. Well, this attribute can be extrapolated
and not just applied singly to specific
literary extracts, but to the Bible as a whole. Maybe just like
in the case of Job, the other books
arent what they are thought to be.It is like this that the most
contentious of issues regarding the
Bible is introduced; the infamous question that has been uttered
several times throughout history:
Is the Bible the word of God, or a literary text?
It is historically visible that the Bible was written in a hefty
percentage by man; therefore, it is
undeniable that it cant be the direct work of God in its
entirety. Theologically speaking, the sheer
volume on contradictions, plot holes and other literary debacles
should be attributed to this
quality; that is to say, what makes the Bible not perfect isnt a
godly mistake, but the centuries of
attrition it suffered by the hand of man. The pragmatic
consequences of this literary erosion can
be evidenced in the fact that anyone who decided to live his
life following the Bibles teachings in
their simultaneous entirety would probably live in a perpetual,
figurative crossroad because the
whole contents of the Bible werentall peacefully amalgamated
into a single canon.
With the infallibility traditionally attributed to God, such a
chaotic result as the one evidently
present in the Good Book would be simply impossible. Individual
contradictions need not be
scrutinizing analyzed, as it only is necessary to briefly
compare the God of the Old Testament to
the one of the New Testament to resolve that they are the result
of completely different
theological Weltanschauungs. From this stems the point that the
Bible is in its majority the work of
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human beings, and therefore, a literary text, since that is the
loftiest result to which men can aim
for.
It is important to remember that this does not invalidate the
religious value that this book has had
heretofore possessed, as it has been said several times that any
form of art is a mirror of reality.However, sitting on the
proverbial fence as a conscientious observer is not a valid option
on this
most controversial issue. It is not heresy to regard the Bible
as being the work of man and not of
God; in fact, regardless of theological issues, anyone who takes
a modern Bible and thinks it to be
the literal, verbatim work of God is guilty of a cantankerous
obstinacy and a narrow-minded denial
of reality. The Bible is a book that, since the dawn of literate
time, has been translated,
rearranged, edited, censored, elongated, etc, myriad times. The
colossal number of human pens
that have entered into it could have, by sheer volume, eclipsed
the divine quill that might have
provided the general outline for the text.
