THE BIBLE
John Gardner
NYT Book Review Jan '83
One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible from one end to the other. Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70% discipline, like learning Latin. But the good parts are, of course, simply excellent. God is an extremely uneven writer, but when he's good, nobody can touch him.
Stephen King
It
According to the Bible, God Himself was at least one-third Ghost, and that was just the beginning. You could tell the Bible believed in demons, because Jesus threw a bunch of them out of this guy. Real chuckalicious ones, too. When Jesus asked the guy who had them what his name was, He told Him to join the Foreign Legion. Or something like that. The Bible believed in witches, or else why would it say "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"? Some of the stuff in the Bible was even better than the stuff in the horror comics. People getting boiled in oil or hanging themselves like Judas Iscariot; the story about how wicked king Ahaz fell off the tower and all the dogs came and licked up his blood; the mass baby-murders that had accompanied the births of both Moses and Jesus Christ; guys who came out of their graves or flew into the air; soldiers who witched down walls; prophets who saw the future and fought monsters. All of this was in the Bible and it was true, every word. [Richie "Trashmouth" Tozier p.333]
an Opus review
In this work, the main author (God) gives a construction of the universe, and establishes some of its metaphysical properties. He refutes certain propositions claimed by Beelzebub (proc. Hades Philosophical Soc., 4004 BC) while at the same time placing the work of his colleague - Christ - in proper context. In the final section certain conjectures are made as to the nature of future research. I recommend publication, subject to certain revisions in the early part, where some unnecessary duplication seems to have occured (cf. Kings and Chronicles).
The Nigel theory for the resurrection of Christ
Amanda Evans
Jesus had a twin brother who fled to the hills because he couldn't handle all the hype surrounding Jesus, and when Jesus died the disciples went and got Nigel and pretended that he was Jesus resurrected.
Anthony Burgess
A Clockwork Orange
It had been arranged as part of my further education to read in the book and even have music on the chapel stereo while I was reading, O my brothers. And that was real horrorshow. They would lock me in and let me slooshy holy music by J.S. Bach and G.F.Handel, and I would read of these starry yahoodies tolchocking each other and then peeting their Hebrew vino and getting onto the bed with their wives' like hand-maidens, real horrorshow. That kept me going, brothers. I didn't so much kapeet the later part of the book, which is more like all preachy gavereeting than fighting and the old in-out-in-out. But one day the Charles said to me, squeezing me tight with his bolshy beefy rooker: 'Ah, 6655321, think on the divine suffering. Meditate on that, my boy.' And all the time he had this rich manny wiff of scotch on him, and then he went off to his little cantora to peet some more. So I read all about the scourging and crowning with thorns and then the cross veshch and all that cal, and I viddied better that there was something in it. While the stereo played bits of lovely Bach I closed my glazies and viddied myself helping in and even taking charge of the tolchocking and the railing in, being dressed in like a toga that was the heighth of Roman fashion. So being in Staja 84F was not all that wasted, and the Governor himself was very pleased to hear that I had taken to like Religion, and that was where I had my hopes.
...on this Sunday morning the Charlie read out from the book about Chellovecks who slooshied the slove and didn't take a blind bit being like a domy built on sand, and then the rain came splash and the old boomaboom cracked the sky and that was the end of that domy. But I thought that only a very dim veck would build his domy upon sand, and a right lot of real sneering droogs and nasty neighbours a veck like that would have, them not telling him how dim he was doing that sort of building.
[Alex (6655321), p.64]
Spike Milligan on the Old Testament
The most boring bloody book in the world, absolute crap from beginning to end... full of people living to 900 and that Sarah having children at 90.
E.L.Doctorow
The Book of Danie 1971
Dreams, visions, and apparitions in the night seem to be an occupational hazard of the ancient rulers. ... [Daniel's job] is not a job for a man sensitive to loud noises or bright light. ... You've got to be desperate to read the Bible.
[p.77]
BE HERE NOW
a book by the Lama Foundation
"LEST YE SEE MIRACLES YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE"
SAID OUR BUDDY
EVERYTHING HE SAID WAS STRAIGHT YOU UNDERSTAND? ALL THAT STUFF IN THE BIBLE IS REALLY STRAIGHT. LOOK WHAT HAPPENED TO SAUL OF TARSUS (FOR GOD'S SAKE) THERE HE WAS RIDING ALONG ON THE DESERT ON HIS HORSE OR CAMEL OR SOMETHING AND A VOICE SAID TO HIM WHY ARE YOU PERSECUTING ME? (HE WAS OUT IN THE HOT SUN AND YOU KNOW) HE FLIPPED OUT. HE WENT FLYING OF HIS HORSE AND FELL TO THE GROUND. WHAT DO YOU WANT OF ME?
START MY CHURCH!
"GO INTO THE NEXT TOWN AND YOU'LL BE INSTRUCTED" THAT'S WHAT HE HEARD AND HE WENT THE WHOLE TRIP AND THAT'S AN ASTRAL TRIP. A VERY GROOVY ASTRAL TRIP. [P.73]
& THAT'S WHAT THE WHOLE BIBLE IS:
AN ASTRAL STORY
A VERY GROOVY ASTRAL STORY
... AT ONE LEVEL
[P.74 The text is letraset over psychadelic swirls]
Kevin Vanhoozer
The Semantics of Biblical Literature 1986
James Barr argues that evangelicals are so preoccupied with truth that they do not allow scripture to be what in fact it is.
[Hermenutics, Authority and Canon, p.56]
liberalism emptied the Bible of power, neoorthodocy emptied it of meaning.
[p.93]
God's locutions are always meaningful; the performance of the discourse act is always appropriate; the author is always sincere; the propositional content is true (fitting) for it's illocutionary mode.
[p.95 cf. Isaiah 55:11]
C.S.Lewis
Surprised by Joy 1955
I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion - those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them - was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognisable, through all that depth of time, as Plato's Socrates or Boswell's Johnson (ten times more so that Eckermann's Goeth or Lockhart's Scott), yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god - we are no longer polytheists - then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not 'a religion', nor 'a philosophy'. It is the summing up and actuality of all of them. [p.188-189]
Lewis again:
To fully grasp the message of the Bible, an intuitive approach to its literary images in necessary. To try to abstract truth rationally from Scripture or to reduce embodied reality to absolute propositions is like trying to bottle a sunbeam. The Bible is simply not meant to be read that way.
Roger Giner-Sorolla
Notes Toward A Logocentric Mode Of Discourse Addressed To A Patriarchal Deity
Our Reification of Patriarchal Authority,
who can be said to inhabit the positively valorised polarity of the metaphysical shere,
priveliged by thy signifier.
Thy societal structure achieve hegemony,
the enactment of the desire be manifested,
throughout the axis represented by the physical-metaphysical dicholomy.
Empower us this day with the means of material production,
and refuse to enforce sanctions against our transgressive subversions of moral perspective,
as we refuse to delegitimize the moral perspective of the Other.
Refer us not to the thetical term of the dialectics of desire,
but liberate us from the intrinsically limiting concept of "evil".
For thine is the hegemony, and the dominance, and the culturally determined mystification thereof, within the entire continuum of the Western concept of linear time.
Amyn.
George Orwell:
a modern translation of Ecclesiastes 9:11
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
Andrew Francis
[a guy I used to be]
a parody on Jesus' teaching
And Simon Peter stopped him, saying, "Lord, where are you going?"
"Just over here," said the Lord, "under this tree. Do you not see that the kingdom of heaven is like this tree, which sheds its leaves and drops its seeds at the right times."
"Lord," the disciples answered him, "we do not understand this parable."
"O ye of little faith," he said, "when will this generation understand that where the fruit of the Son of Man is most plentiful, there the wedding banquet will be held?"
And the ninth beatitude:
Blessed are those who evangelise, for they shall be called 'evangelistic'.
Or you can read my collection of quotes about God
