Free book of John

[Jack]

Some of the Bible is indeed fiction, but I (personally) don't think all of it is. Getting people to agree which parts should and should not be taken literally is always the hard part.

Also, some stories leave out what seem to be very important parts in today's world but at the time they were written it was more common to leave different parts out for different reasons (for example, Jesus' childhood to "about thirty", in the time period it wasn't considered odd at all that these years aren't really mentioned...the important thing was the relatively short time period leading up to his death).

I'm taking a religion class at school, and learning about Mithraism...it's fascinating indeed.

[Whitmores75087]

To me the Book of John is great literature. I've read parts of the Book of Mormon and the Koran. Comparing the Book of John with those two is like comparing Bach's Mass in G Minor with Pop Goes The Weasel. I'm comparing literature with literature here. I'll leave the issue of spiritual depth for another thread.

[Jack]

To me the Book of John is great literature. I've read parts of the Book of Mormon and the Koran. Comparing the Book of John with those two is like comparing Bach's Mass in G Minor with Pop Goes The Weasel. I'm comparing literature with literature here. I'll leave the issue of spiritual depth for another thread.

POP! Goes the weasel!

[rodfish]

Some of the Bible is indeed fiction, but I (personally) don't think all of it is.

I'm curious, which parts exactly are indeed fiction?

Rod

[Jack]

Some of the Bible is indeed fiction, but I (personally) don't think all of it is.

I'm curious, which parts exactly are indeed fiction?

Rod

Wait, is poetry not considered fiction?

[emmline]

POP! Goes the weasel!

In fact, a very snappy tune to play on a high whistle.

[Walden]

To me the Book of John is great literature. I've read parts of the Book of Mormon and the Koran. Comparing the Book of John with those two is like comparing Bach's Mass in G Minor with Pop Goes The Weasel. I'm comparing literature with literature here. I'll leave the issue of spiritual depth for another thread.

I wonder how much of this is in the translation. If I were to compare the Authorized Version with the Good News for Modern Man I might make the same analogy between the two, though the little cartoon pictures in the Good News Bible are kind of nice.

Just a clarification: unless something has changed drastically in the last 10 years or so, the Mormons use the King James bible.
They do have additional books including "The Pearl of Great Price" and "The Book of Mormon."

As my Mormon-convert rommate told me, Joseph Smith was told by the angel (Gabriel, I believe)
which parts of the Bible had been corrupted by bad translations/politics, so Smith included an
appendix with his Bibles containing the corrections to those verses. So, the text of the Mormon
Bible is the same as a regular KJV, but with footnotes directing you to Smith's fixes.
Of course, my friend may have been oversimplifying a bit for me...

The Community of Christ, which is the branch of Mormonism that was led by Joseph Smith's descendants, rather than Brigham Young, have used the Joseph Smith version, while the Brigham Young followers have maintained the Authorized Version as their official translation.

[rodfish]

Some of the Bible is indeed fiction, but I (personally) don't think all of it is.

I'm curious, which parts exactly are indeed fiction?

Rod

Wait, is poetry not considered fiction?

Interesting point of view. Do you consider all poetry to be fiction? Or just Biblical poetry?

Rod

[jsluder]

To me the Book of John is great literature.

I'm glad you like my book; I consider it my greatest achievement.

Cheers,
John

PS:

[rodfish]

I'm curious, which parts exactly are indeed fiction?

Rod

Wait, is poetry not considered fiction?

Interesting point of view. Do you consider all poetry to be fiction? Or just Biblical poetry?

Rod

Actually, I didn't really mean that quite the way it sounded; sorry. I've always been under the impression that poetry was simply another way of communicating through the written word, truth or fiction by arranging one's thoughts or ideas according to a rhythm or metre. Simply because a thought is communicated through poetry doesn't by definition make it fiction. For instance, if I may borrow from a source close to home:
Wave
My Child -
Born to me by water
And by water
Carried away. (D. Wisely)

I don't think all poetry is fiction.

Rod

[izzarina]

To me the Book of John is great literature.

I'm glad you like my book; I consider it my greatest achievement.

Cheers,
John

PS:

Wow, John...you're quite the talent....very inspirational!

[Dale]

Hey, y'all.

Poetry is really not fiction or non-fiction, even though a particular poem can present a narrative that is a piece of fiction. It's not really non-fiction either.

I'm not really that comfortable thinking of ANY of the Bible as "fiction," although I would be quick to add I do not believe everything in the Bible describes events that actually occurred as presented. I'm just not sure it would be true to say that much, if any, of the Bible fits the modern idea of the fiction genre. It is certainly true that the Bible contains a range of genres. Poetry, stories that were orally transmitted before being put to writing, laudatory biographies, lists of laws and geneologies, myths (in the best sense of the word), and on and on.

My belief is that we run into all kinds of problems because we want to appraise the Bible based on modern and Western ideas related to history and journalism. These would have been entirely unknown in Biblical times. Stories were told then to teach morals, to transmit cultural values and, yes, sometimes to relate what were believed to be true accounts of real events concerning real people.

In our times, we are accustomed to thinking something must be truth or fiction. We say something is true if it really happened exactly as told. We tend to dismiss everything else. Regarding the Bible, I've learned that (with all due respect) Biblical fundamentalists and agnostic/atheists have something in common: They tend to be Biblical literalists. On Christmas Day, I heard a fundamentalist Bible-school guy on Larrry King say that there is a war going on between those who accept the Bible as true and those that don't. But then he went on to make it clear that the only way to understand the Bible as true is to accept every work of it as historically and scientifically accurate. This position is startling to me. When you listen to the arguments of some atheists and agnostics, they often have a similar idea. If we're supposed to believe in the Bible, we're supposed to believe it's historically and scientifically accurate. Then they point out some of the more obvious ways that it's not. And then they go to, "See, the Bible isn't true."

[glauber]

I'm not really that comfortable thinking of ANY of the Bible as "fiction,"

How about the parables that Jesus told?

You nailed it though. Our ideas of fact and fiction are messed up.

[Dale]

I'm not really that comfortable thinking of ANY of the Bible as "fiction,"

How about the parables that Jesus told?

You nailed it though. Our ideas of fact and fiction are messed up.

Great example. Those are stories told to teach a moral lesson. They are "fiction" in the sense that they have characters, narrative, plots. I know I'm putting an awfully fine point on this. I'm not objecting to the application of the term "fiction" because I think the parables are stories about actual people and actual events. I'm objecting because I think parables are a different genre from fiction. But, like I say, it's a pretty fine point. I think part of what I'm thinking is that, in this context, "fiction" could be a bit dismissive.

[izzarina]

I'm not really that comfortable thinking of ANY of the Bible as "fiction,"

How about the parables that Jesus told?

You nailed it though. Our ideas of fact and fiction are messed up.

Great example. Those are stories told to teach a moral lesson. They are "fiction" in the sense that they have characters, narrative, plots. I know I'm putting an awfully fine point on this. I'm not objecting to the application of the term "fiction" because I think the parables are stories about actual people and actual events. I'm objecting because I think parables are a different genre from fiction. But, like I say, it's a pretty fine point. I think part of what I'm thinking is that, in this context, "fiction" could be a bit dismissive.

I think it's important to note that in His parables, Jesus drew from his experiences to tell the story. So in that way, even though the people and places may not always be actual, the circumstances surrounding the people and places were.