Literary criticism of scripture
Critical assessment of the Bible on literary grounds (by David Sutherland - copied from Amazon here
"This book is about a character called God, who creates a race of beings, and proceeds to place a curse on them for rather bewildering reasons. The main character proceeds to hold his grudge for many thousands of years, and eventually ends up destroying his creation, rather akin to 'Frankenstein' in its execution.
Unfortunately, for the first half of the story, the plotline feels very drawn-out and belaboured. Taking place over many generations (similar to Tolkein's 'The Silmarilions', but not quite as action-packed), we are invariably left with little more than a family tree of one-dimensional characters who are never fully fleshed out and serve as little more than stereotypes.
At one point though, the main character does attempt to perform a rather gruesome self-sacrifice by masquerading as one of his own creations, this time called Jesus, the character a blatant rip-off of Neo from 'The Matrix'. Instead, though, we are treated to the main character forcing himself to undergo very sado-masochistic treatment, rather similar to the movie 'Salo', leaving us only to question the author's intentions of including so many unnecessary penny-dreadful horror moments.
Instead of making full use of the 'God' character's decision to interact directly with his creations as a human being, we are treated to a very self-serving bout of morality and ego-stroking. Although the story's subtext indicates that this 'Jesus/God' character's suffering has some purpose in redeeming humanity from God's curse, it ultimately does not answer the lingering question of why a supposedly omnipotent being is unable to lift it's own damnation on humanity. Instead, we are left only with questionable masochistic scenes and highly suspicious 'relationships' with Jesus' male disciples.
Despite the large number of chapters dealing with the 'Jesus' character, the book then continues to show the main character of God going on to destroy all that he has created. As an exploration of the main character's manic-depressive bipolar disorder, it's excessive at times and ultimately fails to impress. There are simply too many inconsistencies between the God character as himself, and the God character as 'Jesus', which make it very difficult to follow the main character's line of thought at times, leaving the reader struggling to follow the book's shifting narrative structure.
The original concept also bears an uncanny resemblance to the sun-god Mithras, a story circulated by Romans to ensure obedience from their slaves, so perhaps the author could have put a little more imagination into his writing. Poor editing in this copy of the book left some of the more interesting characters (such as Lilith) without a full mention. Could also have been improved if it had included vampires at some point, too.
Ultimately, this is a fairly poorly-written story. It gets one star because it does give an interesting (albeit very unbelievable) world-creation story, in the same vein of most fantasy books (this particular one bearing deep similarity to the 'Belgariad' series by David Eddings). Aside from that, the story stretches on far too long, provides far too many one-dimensional background characters, and shifts narrative far too many times to be an enjoyable read."
Has anyone here actually READ the Bible from cover-to-cover? Was it a page-turner and what literary influences did you see in it? Certainly, modern story-telling is far superior and uses more advanced techniques. Perhaps the clumsiness of the book can be explained by its age.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by carl-the-conqueror
