Diogenes the Cynic

True, but not especially relevant since the OP was not specific to any particular version or canon.
It's a distinction with a major difference if you're trying classify something by genre.
So what?
This is not a definition which has any application to the question. Academically speaking, the Bible is definitely not seen as "a book," and cannot even be critically studied without breaking them down into component books.


Asking "what is the genre of the Bible" is like asking for the genre of a mixtape.

Steve Weiss

What happened to the "Good Book?" If it's sold in a bookstore; it's a book. How one divides up its contents is irrelevant. Collections of short stories by O' Henry, for example, are sold as a book. The collected works of Will Shakespeare, some of which he may not have actually written, is sold as a book. If the bible is not a book, what is that I see people carrying around with them on Sundays? A tome? When a book is selected as canon it forms part of a larger whole that we call a .........?

stephan huller

The novel didn't exist in antiquity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel stupid theory

Diogenes the Cynic

This is silly. You are using a vernacular definition rather than an academic one.

Doug Shaver

But it does mean we don't have a good reason to think it was real.

Steve Weiss

What is a novel? One may refer to Wikipedia where a novel is defined as a "long narrative in literary prose." The same article discusses the works of Homer (8th or 9th century BC.) as being a forerunner of the modern novel.

In the case of the NT, one can observe a plot, characterization, setting, the building of suspense, a climax and a denouement. This structure differs from a history in that in a novel the characters are fictional or a mixture of fictional and historical. In other words, in a novel there is a story that has a beginning, a middle and an end. History, by contrast, has events but not plots, and authentic history only deals with real characters not fictional ones. In ancient history the problem is that one often does not know what is historical and factual and what is imaginery. It seems that believers get so caught up in these ancient stories that they forget that they are just stories, not facts. It then become necessary for someone who is objective to point out that the Emperor has no clothes.

Diogenes the Cynic

The same thing is true of Narnia.

Diogenes the Cynic

You seem to have mistaken me for someone who has said the Bible is a novel. My point is that the Bible is not classifiable as any single genre because it's not a single book, that is, it's not a single work by a single author, but a repository of sacred literature compiled over centuries.

aa5874

Are you prepared to argue that the Bible is completely true?

Please state what you know is true about Jesus in the Bible.

I am yet to see what you can establish is true about Jesus in the Bible.

Is it the conception by the Ghost?

Is it the Walikng on sea-water?

Is it the Transfiguration?

Is it the feeding of the 5000 THOUSAND?

Is it the resurrection?

Is it the ascension?

Tell us the truth or else we will think it is all fiction.

Sheshbazzar

What gives you that idea? It is taken to be fiction, and is clearly stated to be fiction nearly every day in these forums.

If you support a book that says a donkey carried on a conversation, and that ancient men levitated up into the sky,
the burden is on you to prove that its claims are history and not fiction.

You want your igsfly: silly fairy-tale to be believed in, it is up to you to prove that it is a historical, and not a fictional account. There is no obligation on us to disprove your fairy-tales.


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