The Bible In Literature Class

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MrsSpringsteen

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So what do you think, is is possible to study The Bible strictly as literature without involving religion?

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- Georgia is poised to introduce two literature classes on the Bible in public schools next year, a move analysts say would make the state the first to take an explicit stance endorsing -- and funding -- biblical teachings.

The Bible already is incorporated into some classes in Georgia and other states, but some critics say the board's move, which makes the Bible the classes' main text, treads into dangerous turf.

On a list of classes approved Thursday by the Georgia Board of Education are Literature and History of the Old Testament Era, and Literature and History of the New Testament Era. The classes, approved last year by the Legislature, will not be required, and the state's 180 school systems can decide for themselves whether to offer them.

The school board's unanimous vote set up a 30-day public comment period, after which it is expected to give final approval.

Senate Majority Leader Tommie Williams, the Republican who sponsored the plan, said the Bible plays a major role in history and is important in understanding many classic literary works.

"It's not just 'The Good Book,"' Williams said. "It's a good book."

Charles Haynes of the First Amendment Center, a nonpartisan civil liberties group, has said the Georgia policy is the nation's first to endorse and fund Bible classes on a statewide level.

The bill approved overwhelmingly in the Legislature was tailored to make it clear the courses would not stray into religious teaching, Williams said.

The measure calls for the courses to be taught "in an objective and nondevotional manner with no attempt made to indoctrinate students."

But critics say that while the language may pass constitutional muster, that could change in the classroom if instructors stray.

Maggie Garrett, legislative counsel for the Georgia branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the curriculum approved Tuesday -- like the Legislation itself -- is vague.

"They didn't put in any outlines describing what they can and can't do constitutionally," she said. "The same traps are there for teachers who decide to teach the class."

Some teachers might seek to include their own beliefs or be pushed by students into conversations that include religious proselytizing, Garrett said.

During last year's campaign-period legislative session, Democrats surprised majority Republicans by introducing a plan to teach the Bible in public schools. Republicans, who control both chambers, quickly responded with their own version, which passed and was signed into law by Gov. Sonny Perdue.
 
It's a bad idea, because, in practice, it's only going to be a vehicle for fundamentalist Christian teachings. If these courses taught what credible Biblical scholars actually believe, then they'd probably cry that there was some sinister "atheist" agenda out there.
 
Reeks of agenda. Why teach literature from a book which subject matter will overshadow the lesson?

Will the fundies just back off?!
 
But it wasn't the idea of fundies, Democrats were the first to suggest it. Unless even the Democrats in Georgia are fundies..

What if the Koran and other religious texts were also studied as literature?
 
MrsSpringsteen said:

What if the Koran and other religious texts were also studied as literature?

And the Bhagavad Gita and the Talmud, etc. But the thing is, they're not part of the proposal. Just like every time you hear creationist talking about how we ned to see all points of view, they are never talking about the Hindu cycles of samsara. It's just a guise to get the Christian story of creation into biology class.
 
Well if the come at the book like its a complete work of fiction (well at least genesis and all that easter cross stuff) then i have no problem with it :wink:

But i do agree its a very fine line - start theologising and it negates the process but go the other way and its an atheism agenda. :shrug:
 
i'd love to study the bible as literature.

i'd love to study the Historical Jesus.

it'd be interesting to remove all that INFALLLIBLE! INERRANT! SON OF GOD! ONE TRUE RELIGION! RULES AND RULES AND RULES! crap, and just focus on the book and the man, and just learn about what people said that other people said happened.
 
dazzlingamy said:
Well if the come at the book like its a complete work of fiction (well at least genesis and all that easter cross stuff) then i have no problem with it :wink:


The lit classes I took also studied mythic narratives, poetry, oral traditions, and letters, not just fiction novels. The Bible contains all of them. Whether you believe it's contents or not, it's obviously not one continuous fiction novel.


I don't feel it's necessary to study in a lit class unless other religious works are being studied as well. If there was a unit devoted to them, then it could be interesting. If people are really interested in studying religious literature, they can take classes called "religious literature". IMO, too many people aren't getting enough exposure to non-religious literature as it is.
 
anitram said:


And the Bhagavad Gita and the Talmud, etc. But the thing is, they're not part of the proposal.

Isn't the Talmud the Old Testament - or part of it anyway?

I think it's a great idea, really - if it could actually be done. I took classes in high school and college where the Bible was taught from an Historical and Literary angle and it was fascinating. Some of these classes were taught by Catholic priests and nuns, and I don't remember ever feeling like I was being preached too. If you get the right teachers in there, you got yourself an interesting class.
 
It is a great work of literature--with its symbolism, foreshadowing, poetry, myth and philosophy. Drama, interesting characters, sexual innuendo. Connections to to other great works like Dostoyevsky's works, Steinbeck's East of Eden, Dante, ad infinitum. I know I could appreciate those works better with the background I had on the Bible. Then again, I've missed the influence of other religions' texts on literature.

College, OK. Public school, I'm uncomfortable. Love to see the syllabus on that one. This is loaded. I'm not totally against it.
But I'm not sure how you can avoid the appearance of text endorsement and I do not know if you can control the discussion within the boundaries of literature. I suspect this is part of the Democrats' new tactic of appealing to the Christian vote. "Hey, we believe in God too." I find the timing interesting in light of Edwards' recent speech. Political move.

On the other hand, how do you ignore it as literature? How ever much I like Mark Twain (and I do, hugely), it beats the hell out of
"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" for complexity, although Twain is much funnier.
 
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in some ways, i wish i knew the Bible better, especially Bible-as-literature better. i remember being in college and some of the older professors would say how there's less of a common basis of knoweldge shared by students these days. this isn't a good thing or a bad thing -- students are as talented and hard working as ever -- but it does make studying some of the more central texts of Western Literature harder because most of these texts use ample biblical allusions.

in the 1950s and 1960s, you could expect that if you went to a prestigious northeastern university, most of your classmates would be WASPy men and they all would have had formal religious instruction that probably involved memorization of biblical passages and a grounded familiarity with the stories of the Bible. this facilitated the teaching of everything from Shakespeare to Hawthorne because all the allusions would have been instantly understood and the professor could work from this base assumption.

so there's great historical worth to learning the story of the Bible. as i've mentioned before, i'm quite envious of the felicity with which posters like Melon/Ormus, NBC, BVS, coemgen, Yolland, and others, can reference and demonstrate a deep level of (obviously contested) understanding.

i just wish we could be sure that such classes wouldn't be tools of evangelization.
 
BonosSaint said:
I find the timing interesting in light of Edwards' recent speech. Political move.

During last year's campaign-period legislative session, Democrats surprised majority Republicans by introducing a plan to teach the Bible in public schools. Republicans, who control both chambers, quickly responded with their own version, which passed and was signed into law by Gov. Sonny Perdue.

Looks more like a coincidence.
 
You're right regarding the Edwards' speech. My bad. I'm not sure I'm wrong about the political aspects, though, watching the Democratic Party's plan to take some of the religious vote.
 
Yeah, all in all you might very well be right.

It's politics, you look how you can catch most of the folks, and then say what they want to hear.
 
I find it interesting that people assume that "Bible as literature" classes would be taught from one side only. I had a New Testament class my freshman year of college that was taught by an atheist, whose primary aim was to contest the traditional understanding of the Bible. (At times using scholarship that even the Jesus Seminar people would find suspect.) I participated in a Great Books program in high school where the Bible was taught as literature by people keen to debunk it as both history and as literature. I'm not against such agenda-driven indoctrination -- it just goes to show that the knife does cut both ways and that "fundies" are not the only ones who approach the Bible with an agenda.
 
nathan1977 said:
I find it interesting that people assume that "Bible as literature" classes would be taught from one side only. I had a New Testament class my freshman year of college that was taught by an atheist, whose primary aim was to contest the traditional understanding of the Bible. (At times using scholarship that even the Jesus Seminar people would find suspect.) I participated in a Great Books program in high school where the Bible was taught as literature by people keen to debunk it as both history and as literature. I'm not against such agenda-driven indoctrination -- it just goes to show that the knife does cut both ways and that "fundies" are not the only ones who approach the Bible with an agenda.


i envy you these classes. i would have loved to have taken them, and one of my biggest collegiate regrets was not being able to take The Historical Jesus my Junior Year.

i think the assumption that it will be taken over by "fundies" -- at least for me -- stems from the politics surrounding this particular initiative.

i'm curious about the notions of atheist "debunking" of the Bible. if someone doesn't hold the view that it is the inerrent word of God, and doesn't present the materials as such, is that, by definition, a "debunking"?
 
nathan1977 said:
I find it interesting that people assume that "Bible as literature" classes would be taught from one side only. I had a New Testament class my freshman year of college that was taught by an atheist, whose primary aim was to contest the traditional understanding of the Bible. (At times using scholarship that even the Jesus Seminar people would find suspect.) I participated in a Great Books program in high school where the Bible was taught as literature by people keen to debunk it as both history and as literature. I'm not against such agenda-driven indoctrination -- it just goes to show that the knife does cut both ways and that "fundies" are not the only ones who approach the Bible with an agenda.

That's very interesting. I went to a Catholic college (Augustinian) and the religion courses I took weren't like that at all (indoctrinating, one religion, our religion is infallible, etc). People do have preconceived notions about it, taking a college class can shatter some of those notions.
 
UberBeaver said:
Isn't the Talmud the Old Testament - or part of it anyway?
I don't want to derail the thread with unrelated digressions, but since you asked...briefly and roughly:

No, although there is significant overlap between the core layer of the Talmud--the Mishnah--and some of the legal sections of the OT. (I think you might be confusing it with 'Torah', aka Pentateuch.) Like other Ancient Near Eastern cultures the ancient Hebrews had both a written legal code (torah sh'bikhtav) and an oral one (torah sh'bal'peh) transmitted through legal authorities, regents and/or priests (and, later, rabbis) expanding on and detailing what was left terse, vague, or just in general unexplained in the more abbreviated written law. Although committing the oral law to print was frowned upon as direct teacher-student interaction was the preferred method, the Zealot Revolt (66-70 AD) whose putdown ended the Second Temple period, the Bar-Kokhba rebellion (132-135 AD), and the subsequent fragmenting of the Jewish community into numerous diaspora groups scattered at increasingly far-flung intervals meant the destruction of all the major rabbinic academies, the deaths of many scholars, and just in general endangered the continuity of the traditional method of teaching torah sh'bal'peh. Therefore, beginning in the second century it was written down as the Mishnah ("recitations"), 63 tractates systematically codifying Jewish law according to subject matter and adding in bits and pieces of commentary, debates, dissenting opinions etc. from famous earlier rabbinic authorities. (It should be noted that of course the manner it which it was organized, as well as what precisely was included, reflects the specific customs of the rabbis who compiled it; it's impossible to say exactly what the oral law might have consisted of in earlier centuries, as well as what precisely the nature of the debates known to have existed among the various Jewish factions in the Second Temple period over whose interpretive methods were correct was. Unfortunately, the Talmud is the only extensive source of information on those debates available today, so there are invariably self-referentiality and bias problems involved.) Over the next several centuries, subsequent rabbis continued to compile and add in the most significant of their own discussions and rulings on specific cases, sometimes including broader exegetical commentary on the Tanakh (OT) at large. This process continued off and on until the early medieval period, although not all contemporary editions include exactly the same commentaries.

A typical Talmud edition, depending on language of translation and precise range of commentaries included, runs about 10,000 pages and makes for an extremely difficult read--I most definitely wouldn't recommend it for high school literature class! Although it includes snippets of everything from folklore to homiletics to hermeneutics to exegesis to historical accounts and even the occasional dirty joke, for the most part it's bone-dry, often cryptically written, dialectical-method analysis of what for most modern readers would seem like suffocatingly tedious and arcane legal questions. Here's a nice color-coded sample Talmud page (scroll down) showing the various textual layers a typical Talmud has.


************************************


As far as the thread topic, I think it really depends on who's teaching it and how. It's not uncommon for small portions of the Bible to be read in public high-school literature classes, I've known several people who did that, but I've never heard of devoting two entire courses to it before. From a literary perspective the main reason for including it would, or at least should, be a canonical one: as a text it's obviously integral to the "Western tradition," although clearly written by people living outside it, and you would miss a great deal of the context for many, many other "Great Books"--Milton, Dante, Dostoevesky etc. etc. etc.--if you know nothing of it (or, just as importantly, how it's been interpreted and expanded upon within Western Christianity). On the other hand, realistically most people today will never read most of those works anyhow, and a good literature teacher or professor will be able to provide much of that context through their lecture (just as, for example, they might provide an overview of Elizabethan history, culture and thought when teaching Shakespeare). So, I am skeptical as to what the "true" intent of these courses is. IMO, for the purposes of a high school literature course, the focus ought to be on the Bible as a source of important concepts, characters and imagery within the Western tradition, not a theological approach focusing on the world of those who wrote it as they weren't themselves part of that. If you're going to do the latter, then it's de facto religion class and while that too can certainly be done in a 'non-indoctrinating' manner, at that point it becomes necessary to justify why not provide the same coverage for all major religions.
 
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MrsSpringsteen said:

People do have preconceived notions about it, taking a college class can shatter some of those notions.

True, that. I went to a Christian Reformed (Calvinist) college, but all of my religion and Bible classes were taught by profs of other denominations, each ordained in their own respective denomination. In my history class, we read many religious documents containing their own creation stories and mythic narratives (the Enuma Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the bhagavad gita, and others from eastern religions).

We also studied these same things (not as deeply) in my high school religion and theology classes. Funny how the public schools have to be so careful about being all or nothing (usually nothing) that many of the private schools expose students to more varying schools of thought and interpretations of religious literature.
 
yolland said:


No, although there is significant overlap between the core layer of the Talmud--the Mishnah--and some of the legal sections of the OT. (I think you might be confusing it with 'Torah', aka Pentateuch.) ....Unfortunately, the Talmud is the only extensive source of information on those debates available today, so there are invariably self-referentiality and bias problems involved.) ..... Although it includes snippets of everything from folklore to homiletics to hermeneutics to exegesis to historical accounts and even the occasional dirty joke, for the most part it's bone-dry, often cryptically written, dialectical-method analysis of what for most modern readers would seem like suffocatingly tedious and arcane legal questions.

Ahh, got it. I was confusing it w/ the Torah. Thanks, Yolland.
 
Irvine511 said:

i'm curious about the notions of atheist "debunking" of the Bible. if someone doesn't hold the view that it is the inerrent word of God, and doesn't present the materials as such, is that, by definition, a "debunking"?

Hardly. One doesn't have to "believe" the Bible to respect it. There are a number of scholarly approaches to the good book, however, both liberal and conservative -- and when you casually disregard conservative scholarship (dating methods, historicity, archaeology) on the grounds that it conflicts with your liberal scholarship, you have the makings of a problem. I'm all for studying the Bible critically -- I think there are too few conservative Christians who really evaluate Jesus' take on women, other cultures, etc. Heck, I'm all for studying the Bible subjectively. But let's not confuse the one for the other. If we're going to study the Bible critically, let's do so -- but give everyone a voice at the table.

At the same time, however, I have to admit that the class forced me to read the Bible at a much greater depth than I ever would have without it. For me, the class forced me to think bigger about certain issues, and actually reinforced my faith. (Though I know it had the opposite effect on some other students.)
 
nathan1977 said:

There are a number of scholarly approaches to the good book, however, both liberal and conservative -- and when you casually disregard conservative scholarship (dating methods, historicity, archaeology) on the grounds that it conflicts with your liberal scholarship, you have the makings of a problem.

Agreed.

My favorite series of books is one of the most anti-Christian pieces of literature I've ever encountered. Most of my other favorite books have nothing to do with religion. I've also enjoyed reading many other works upon which religions different than my own were founded. My religion has never gotten in the way of what I read and how I read it, one way or the other. It seems odd that non-Christians would refuse to consider the Bible as a literary source, just because it's a religious work. You can choose to believe it or not, but just because you don't believe something doesn't mean it has no literary value.
 
MrsSpringsteen said:
But it wasn't the idea of fundies, Democrats were the first to suggest it. Unless even the Democrats in Georgia are fundies..

What if the Koran and other religious texts were also studied as literature?

Trust me, plenty of Democrats in Georgia are fundies.
 
I wish the Bible were taught as literature more often--objectively, without the fist-pounding-on-pulpit requirement that it must all be unquestionably true. It's too good of a book to be kept out of classrooms.

I was raised somewhat Catholic and my parents sent me to Catholic school. I read pretty much the entire Bible at some point in high school, and I even had to memorize passages. I was also reading everything else I could get my hands on, but I found that I really enjoyed reading the Bible. Even later, when I gave up on Catholicism, I held on to my well-read and highlighted copy of the Bible.

It doesn't matter to me at all now whether or not the Bible is true. What does still matter to me, as a writer and soon-to-be English professor, is the Bible's use of rhetorical devices, imagery, and symbolism. I've always had a strong understanding of metaphor, and it took me awhile to figure out how that happened. Then I realized a lot of it stemmed from how closely I studied the Bible. I mean, Jesus turns bread and wine into his body and blood. Literally, if you think about it, that's kind of creepy, but it's an amazing metaphor.

Think about what any really good writer can do--get you to suspend your disbelief and draw you into the story so much that you can't help thinking it's true. What if that's what the writers of the Bible did? What does it really matter if it's all a true story? What if all religion really is is a bunch of people who like the same stories?

I used to get yelled at a lot when I asked questions like this in high school :reject:
 
BonosSaint said:

On the other hand, how do you ignore it as literature? How ever much I like Mark Twain (and I do, hugely), it beats the hell out of
"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" for complexity, although Twain is much funnier.

actually, Mark Twain wrote a very hilarious take on the Adam and Eve story. it was in my "The Bible As/In Literaute" book for my AP English class :wink:

I think a basic familiarity with the Bible is a good thing, as it's pretty much ingrained in our culture, and has influenced so many classic literary works, as others have already stated here. but having an entire class dedicated to it seems a bit much... it'd be an elective I assume, but still, something about it seems not quite right. I think if they were going to do a class like that, they should include other religious writings.
 
not all that surprising.
fuck, at my high school the Fair Tax book is in the cirriculum for Economics (a required class).
objective analysis my ass, they're not reading the Communist Manifesto anytime soon.

by the way, I live outside of Atlanta.
 
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