I remember once reading that The Diary of Anne Frank was the second most read nonfiction work ever, second only to the Bible.
Is it right to call the Bible nonfiction? Most characters/stories/etc. can’t be corroborated by anything in history, period. Some people believe it is true, but that does not mean it is true.
For example, I don’t think anyone considers Beowulf nonfiction, though many characters and tribes did really exist. It’s the same concept.
So, should the bible be considered a work of nonfiction?
A work is not deemed “fiction” or “nonfiction” according to the factuality of the content; they are distinct literary genres (or rather a genre and the default dumping ground for everything else) where fiction is a work specifically composed in narrative form with dialogue inserted (epistolary novels and other similar works to the side). In other words, Von Daniken’s prose compositions relative to ancient astronauts, bizarre interpretations of Scripture and other ancient writings, etc., are not deemed to be factual by most sane people – but they’re not written as a novel or similar narrative-for-entertainment-value fictional item, so they’re classified non-fiction.
I think, too, the author has to be intending to write fiction. What purports to be, e.g., a biography of LBJ written by a lunatic who seriously believes that LBJ engineered the Kennedy assassination is definitely non-factual but was not written to be a fictional account.
The problem with calling the Bible a “work of nonfiction” isn’t with the word “nonfiction”; it’s with the word “work.” The Bible isn’t a single work but a collection of works, written by various different people at various times in a variety of genres.
The Bible really belongs in a class other than “fiction” or “non-fiction”. The reason being that it many cases we can’t know what the intent of the author’s were, or what they wrote about actually happened. For example, either an intentional lie was made up about Jesus rising from the dead, or he really did rise from the dead after being crucified. Since we have no way of verifying today what happened back then, we can’t say whether or not Jesus rising was fiction.
Because these books weren’t created to be part of a collection. “Song of Songs” is love poetry. It just is in the Bible today because some editor long ago thought it fit in alongside divine revelation.
As a librarian, I can tell you that the Bible is never shelved in the fiction section, and I’ve never heard that this practice is in any way controversial.
At least some of the books of the Bible–and I’m thinking mainly of the letters from Paul–really can’t be classified as fiction, so that pretty much trumps it.
Saying a book is non-fiction isn’t the same as saying that it accurately describes what happened.
Not everything is classifiable as “fiction” or “nonfiction.” Poetry, for instance, is usually viewed as a separate classification from either “fiction” or “nonfiction”, and the bible is chock-full-o’ poetry.
All the books on Wicca, witchcraft, fortune telling and so forth are also “non-fiction”. So are the new age philosophy guides. Scientology stuff. The Koran. The Kabbala. Myths. All religious stuff other than specific religous fiction- and even that is debateable.
Not to hijack into semantics too much, but do you have cite that demonstrates this distinction when using the word “work”? I’ve failed to find any myself.
In the past, I would have used the word “work” to refer to, for example, a collection of short stories that were not originally created to be collected together. I guess this is incorrect.
I’m more interested in this quote. How do you measure “most read” considering the bible is not a book that most people pick up and read cover-to-cover, as you would the Diary of A.F. Don’t most people keep it more as a reference book, reading selected passages from time to time? And if that is the case, I would think the The Dictionary (i.e., the collective dictionaries of the world) would trump the bible many times over.
I’ve noticed that the bestseller lists in the newspaper have sections for “Fiction,” “Nonfiction,” and “Misc,” and I’ve wondered what the distinction is between “nonfiction” and “miscellaneous.” But I don’t know if that’s relevant to this thread.
It’s still a reasonable question what (if anything) in the Bible is fiction (in the genre sense, as described earlier by Polycarp, not in the sense of inaccurate history)—if the books of the Bible were catalogued individually, which sections of the library would they end up in? Some conservative believers are uncomfortable with the idea that anything in the Bible could be fiction. But if I understand correctly, the majority of scholars understand the book of Jonah (for instance) to be a parable, a work of fiction that was intended as such and would have been understood as such by its original readers/hearers (though there might or might not have been a historical Jonah).
But other parts of the Bible are clearly meant to be understood as a record of things that actually happened, while (as already noted) there’s plenty of it that’s not narrative at all, but poetry or theology or practical wisdom, and so certainly isn’t classified as fiction.
Just for general informational purposes, non-fiction is indeed a more catch-all term than most people usually think. “Fiction,” in a library, encompasses novels and short stories. Non-fiction is really just everything else. The Dewey Decimal system, which is used for non-fiction, includes among many other categories classifications for:
Philosophy
New Age/astrology/ESP/paranormal
Religion–sacred texts, doctrine, history, etc.
Mythology and commentary thereupon
Folk and fairy tales
Literature: poetry, plays, criticism, and also classic literature (most libraries will keep a copy or two of classic novels there as well as in the fiction area)
Humor: Dave Barry lives in the 800’s, Calvin and Hobbes in 791
and so on. A lot of that isn’t strictly factual information, but it’s still non-fiction.
(Note that the Library of Congress classification system gives everything a classification number, unlike Dewey, and has whole sections given over to the literary output of various nations. There is no separate fiction section in an LOC library.)
Some people do just that- read it cover to cover. I did that once. (Was trapped, nothing else to read).
And, “the Bible” (esp say “the King James Bible”) is a single book- 'the dictionary" isn’t- there are thousands of 'dictionaries". And of course, “the Bible” has been around longer.
I think what DrDeth meant is that there is only one book/volume called “the Bible” (albeit available in different translations), but there are many different dictionaries. So if you’re talking about which book has been read most often, it’s not fair to lump all those different dictionaries together as “the dictionary.” Like “the phone book”—there’s not just one that everybody uses in common.
And even the more historical books of the Bible are not accurate - but history from that time was not, by our standards. That doesn’t mean that Greek history is fiction.
Personally, I have it shelved in the fiction part of my sf collection (as opposed to the reference works and history of sf par) under G for God, house pseudonym.