ideologyhunter

I don't know about bookstores, but bibles should be classified in drugstores as controlled substances and in hardware stores as combustibles. In Oklahoma, they be should be on the shelf next to the sippin' whiskey. YeeeeeeeeeeeHawwwwwwwwwwwww!

Steve Weiss

What is the classification for fairytales, fables, mythology and legends?

sotto voce

Freethought and Rationalism?

stephan huller

of course it's not a f****** novel. what's the point of these threads anyway? why not just setup an effigy of the gospel and then just smash it to bits? it would be a far more useful expenditure of effort on your part

Toto

The OP may have been meant to insult believers in the Bible, but there are serious, pro-religion scholars who classify various books in the Bible as novelistic, with no malicious intent.

Diogenes the Cynic

The Bible is not a book, it's a library of books of all kinds of different genres - myth, poetry, folktales, political propaganda, pedantic legal codes and instructions for ritual sacrifices, apocalypse, prophecy, hagiography, genealogies, etc. If the Bible was to be classified as a single book, I guess it would be as an anthology of religious literature, but there's no genre consistent to every book.

stephan huller

Im not defending the historical accuracy of the Bible. The question was idiotic

sotto voce

Nobody has attacked it with rational argument.

stephan huller

The point is that the author's intention usually defines the genre of a book in the library. It is impossible to believe that the author of any of the material in the Bible and the gospel in particular knowingly set out to write a novel. In my experience there were very few ancient novels to begin with, most were written for popular consumption.

sotto voce

There certainly were ancient works of overt fiction, but they weren't called novels! As pointed out earlier, it is amateurishly anachronistic to speak of novels before novels existed. It's either that, or it's deliberate misrepresentation in order to belittle the Bible. There certainly is deliberate fiction in the Bible- a flood story, a talking snake story, a delightful story in which trees talk to each other, and of course the well known parables. One might even describe the Book of Job as a novel, but the bookseller who included it in his novel list would quickly get emails to inform him of an error. So say, if you want, if you really want to show off a low level of erudition concerning literature, that the Bible contains novels; but don't imagine that you score points against it in so doing. On the contrary, you torpedo fundamentalist opponents to the Bible by so doing.