I’m actually pretty ok with this, at least in theory. The execution is going to be tricky and I don’t think this approach should be limited to the Bible but I do think that the Bible is significant enough as literature that it would be fair to simply teach some of what it says without commenting on issues of historicity or factual accuracy.
My one big problem with this particular textbook is that it uses the King James Version of the Bible as its source. The KJV is a terrible translation and the text of the OT, in particular, is tweaked in many ways to render more specifically Christian interpretations of certain passages. If the Bible version was changed to something more accurate and less overtly Christian, I think I could tentatively approve of this. I know it’s dangerous territory, though. The curriculum would have to be scripted pretty tightly and the teachers watched like hawks.
When I was in high school we had a unit in English about the Bible - fully non-sectarian. It was the revised standard edition, I believe. I am actually quite grateful for this. I worked in the English bookroom my senior year, and there was a stack of them. There was commentary in the beginning, which was my first exposure to the concept that the Bible came from a variety of authors. It started me on the road to atheism.
A whole class might be a bit excessive, but a well done unit seems appropriate.
In theory, I think it would be great. The Bible has had such an enormous influence on Western culture and literature that I think it’s near-criminal the way a lot of kids wind up as English majors without the least clue about the Bible. I’d also like to see similar classes with other religious texts.
In practice, much more difficult, epecially in the US. Tons of pitfalls.
We’ve been paying some attention to this textbook and it looks pretty neat, to the point where we might invest in a copy some day.
I would approve of using the KJV, however. The language of the KJV, along with Shakespeare, has been considered the pinnacle of English prose for centuries. Its language has profoundly influenced the way English speakers write, speak, and think. If you’re looking to learn about the cultural influence of the Bible, the KJV is the way to go. If you want to know how Biblical teachings have influenced political thought and so on for the past few centuries, again, the KJV is the book to use, since it’s the one the people in question were using.
If you’re looking for accuracy of translation, that’s a different animal, and so then I would use another text or two alongside the KJV (personally I favor the Phillips NT, for one).
I also had a bible unit in high school. We studied the bible as a piece of literature. I sem to remember talking about the significance of Job’s story as an early example of an innocent man being made a victim due to no character fault of his own, which is a particular theme in later literature…
Boy, my lit teacher would die to know how much I’ve forgotten.
It doesn’t bother me a bit.
And it doesn’t bother me if they use the KJV because if that’s a popular version that many worshippers rely upon, it makes sense to study it. So what if it is extra tweaked and Christianized? Isn’t that worthy of study: the way long-standing stories/legends/dogmas are changed, rewritten, made more or less meaningful? Sounds like excellent fodder for literary analysis to me. I don’t expect them to teach the bible in a fresh, new, academically-reengineered version translated straight from Aramaic, because they’d be teaching a work of literature that the masses never interacted with. It’s kinda like saying you want to take all the bad grammar out of Zora Neale Thurston or the southernisms out of Faulkner.
I approve the theory of teaching the bible. I expect it to be taught in the same way the Bulfinch’s Mythology is taught.
I am afraid that some teachers will use it to teach Christianity instead.
I’m OK with it. Sure, there will be some teachers that try to cheat, but so what? Nothing is ever perfect, and those teachers would just as easily “cheat” when teaching Moby Dick.
It might be better to include this as part of a class on other key influences (like Greek philosophy, Roman Law, etc). No need to water it down too much, and I assume this would be High School level.
I’m a non-believer, but I think it should be taught as well. I think “Don’t Know Much About The Bible” would also be good text. I’d like it if people learned a few key things about the Bible:
It was not written in English
It was wriiten by several authors
There is dispute as to what books comprise it
The way that the 10 commandments are enumerated differs religion to religion
Learning all the ways it has affected our language is important as well. The patience of Job, prodigal son, etc.
When I went to high school and middle school, the Bible was taught in many different classes. For AP Junior and Senior English, we were required to read certain stories during the summer and we were tested on those stories the first day of class. When we read “Inherit the Wind”, we prefaced it by reading Genesis 1 and 2. In middle school, my English teacher had us read the story of Joseph in Genesis and taught it as literature. In 7th grade, our history textbooks included summaries of the lives of Jesus, Muhammad, and Siddhartha Gautama. None of my classes went beyond a strictly secular approach to these religious stories, and the only complaints came from conservative Christian kids who disliked how our teacher referred to the Creation stories as “mythology”.
I think teaching the Bible in school is important, simply because so much of Western culture is built on it. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I support teaching the Bible as history or science. Public schools have to make sure that their teachers don’t inject their own religious beliefs into this, of course, and based on my own experience, it is certainly not as difficult to do as some posters may think.
Well, it’s not going to be a historical critique of the Bible or used to justify Christian prophecies or something (supposedly). From a literature standpoint (rather than a theologically accurate one), the King James is the standard against which all other English Bibles are measured so it makes sense to use it. I believe, it’s also the version of the Bible that was used by the bulk of English speaking peoples for a couple hundred years, so again, it’s not out of line to use it when discussing history. You can only get a good reading on how the Bible may have influenced history by using the Bible they actually used at the time, not the one we use now. Who knows, maybe they will go into why the KJV isn’t used as widely anymore due to more knowledge about its inaccuracies, etc.
Isaiah 7:14 would be the classic example (where the Hebrew word almah (“young woman”) is mistranslated as “virgin”). Psalm 22:16 would be another one. There are other examples. It’s especially the OT material which Christian traditionalists read as being prophetic of Jesus which gets rendered in the most Christian friendly way.
I understand what people are saying about the KJV kind of being “The” Bible for much of Christian history and for that particular version being used for that reason. However, it is not the version of the OT used in Judaism and since the OT is a Jewish religious text, I think it needs to be taught from that perspective (or at least inclusive of that perspective). I would withdraw my objection to the KJV if the mistakes in translation and the contrasting Jewish interpretations of the OT material were pointed out in the class.
No argument on the language.
That’s debatable but the Oxford Annotated is usually the version used in academic studies.
While I don’t object to this outright, it seems rather incomplete.
Christian thought/popular cosmology/the cultural influence fo Christianity owes as much to Milton and Dante as to the Bible itself. As for the arts- well, Greek and Roman works have a far bigger influence and that is something that children are not as likely to pick up outside of school. Let’s face it- most everyone knows the basics of the bible. Even as a born and bred atheist I knew the most popular and fundamental stories. Most high school courses arn’t going to get much beyond that point, so there really is no point to teaching it.
Technically, this is not an example of the translators of the KJV tweaking the OT to push Christianity.
In this instance, the author of Matthew’s Gospel quoted the Septuagint (hardly a “Christian” document) which had already rendered the Jewish almah into Greek as parthénos, virgin. With an 1800 year tradition of “virgin” appearing in the Septuagint, the Gospels, the Vulgate, etc., it is not quite fair to lay this particular issue on King James’s scholars.
(This is not to say there was no tweaking or that we have not done a better job since then, of course.)
But how many kids have read those sections as opposed to being exposed to the picture book versions? How many actually have read all of the first few books of Genesis? You might also choose to cover the poetry of Song of Songs .
I would bet most kids also don’t know all the naughty bits in there.
I don’t think that’s true. Not everyone does know the basics of the Bible. In our society, it is now quite possible to grow up without ever hearing more than a tiny amount of what is in the Bible, unless you go to church. (Heck, in some churches you can still manage to avoid learning any Bible stories.)
I went to college with a whole lot of people who didn’t know the most basic Bible stories, which is why this is kind of a hobby-horse for me. I sometimes found myself in the position of having to explain the story of Moses or Adam and Eve to people who had never really learned them. It was a terrible handicap for them (since these were lit classes), but they didn’t even know they were missing key knowledge.
It’s true that Isaiah 7:14 is an example of the KJV preserving a preexisting LXX error rather than “tweaking” the translation of its own accord. However better versions exist which do not preserve that error. I chose the example for its familarity but I suppose I could have done better.
I think it’s a great idea to teach the Bible as liturature. I’d like to see them cover several of the world’s most prominant religions, a summary oof their beliefs and their historical significance.
