I think that “fiction” and “non-fiction” as categories are better thought of as having to do with the intent of the author rather than how accurate they wind up being. The works of ancient historians like Polybius or Tacitus may be full of inaccuracies, but they are intended as works of nonfiction, not fiction. A modern dramatic retelling of certain events covered by Tacitus or Polybius using the latest scholarship based on newly discovered primary sources might end up being more factually accurate than the ancient historian’s summary, but that wouldn’t make it a work of nonfiction.
Where does this leave the Bible? The authors of the various works that make it up, and the people who collated it, had very different motivations that cannot accurately be described as fiction or nonfiction. And especially where biblical stories originate as oral traditions, the difference between fiction, nonfiction, and religious belief is not really a distinction that the people generating those traditions would have made
Much of the Bible is clearly “history” in the same sense that Herodotus is; the authors appear to have been trying to accurately describe past historical events. They didn’t do it well, but we don’t have a separate word in English for the genre of “unreliable history”.
Good point. We’d have to put Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in that category also. Heck, most “histories” published before 1900, and many after.
Did Ambrose Bierce in his definition of History: “An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools” get it more right than we realize?
As someone who teaches a World Lit survey that includes portions of the Bible, I agree; “fiction” is not a super-useful label here, and there are usually other, more specific genre terms that fit better. Depending on which part of it I’m teaching, the labels I tend to use are “creation story,” “love poetry,” or “parable,” all of which sidestep the “is it true?” question altogether. (This is not a battle I particularly want to fight in a gen ed class full of nursing majors from Mississippi; I consider it a win if they can put aside their pre-existing beliefs long enough to pay attention to what is and isn’t in the text, e.g., the serpent in Genesis is not actually identified anywhere as Satan or Lucifer.)
I mean, if we want to shelf the Bible under fiction, we have to put the Quran, Bhagavad Gita, all the Sutras, not to mention Plato and most of the ancient Greeks, Norse eddas, and even Isaac Newton (he wrote a bunch of stuff on alchemy, about a third of his works), Shakespeare, any history book before 1900 and many after that- well the list goes on.
Newton wrote science, math, and theology. He didn’t tell stories. I think it needs to be stories to be fiction. (Not all stories are fiction. Some are history, some are memoir, some are parable. But all fiction is stories.)
Newton didn’t write fiction.
Shakespeare did write fiction, broadly defined.
I think it’s clear that the Bible, the Bhagavad Vita, the Koran, and probably the Norse Eddas belong in the same general category. I would like this class to include excerpts of some holy texts that aren’t in the Christian Bible, but i suppose that’s not going to happen.
The Bible is a hodgepodge. It sounds like Texas is including both stories (Jonah) and poetry (Lamentations 3). I’m going to bet they won’t be including the lengthy passages detailing the laws God gave to the Israelites. (Don’t mix linen and wool, don’t yoke and ox to an ass, don’t delay paying a laborer. It’s okay to beat your slave, unless you kill him outright, that’s not okay. But you have to free your slave in the jubilee year, and forgive all debt. Oh, and in every year, you need to leave the corners of your fields unharvested so the homeless people can collect food from your fields.) But that stuff is neither true nor false, it’s just a list of rules.
I just don’t think “fiction” is a useful description of most of the Bible. Maybe not of any of the Bible.
Add my voice to the chorus that the “fiction or non-fiction?” dichotomy is simultaneously too broad and too restrictive to be useful here. Both terms are simply inapplicable to the topic of categorizing ancient writings. And especially inapplicable to ancient writings that are held to be religiously significant to anyone in the audience.
Of course the GD here is about a good faith (heh) intellectually honest academic argument over semantics and vocabulary, while the actual topic in Texas is entirely about bad faith intellectually dishonest political skullduggery.
It’s important not to let this discussion sanewash what’s really going on out there. At the same time there’s other threads for dealing directly with Texas’s plots; this ain’t that place. So here we sorta need to keep their nose out of our tent.
Which IMO renders the whole discussion so ivory-towered as to border on pointless. Especially once we consider the aspect of “lies to children” inherent in teaching anything to people much below grad school level. The “right” way to categorize ancient writings changes depending on whether you’re explaining it to 5yos, 10yos, 15yos, undergrads in-major, undergrads out-of-major, etc.
I wonder if you could slap a sufficiently broad disclaimer in front of some stuff in every such case: something about how some folks in the past thought this was true, and we’re not saying if we think it is (and, tomorrow, in history class: some folks think this is true, and we are saying we think it’s true).
If we’re trying to sanewash affirmatively teaching christian religion in US public schools we can plaster the effort in fig-leaves until the pile is taller than the school’s flagpole. And it’ll still be an abomination before the Constitution.
An argument against it is religion is practiced historically, and thus not fiction. It is interwoven with society, culture, authority, status to a degree that myths and legends never acquire. Religion is lived, myths and legends are told. That makes religion much more integral to humanity and more ‘real’, though yes in that religion does use myths, because it is lived, it’s not really fiction.
Where did I mention any specific religion? My statement is generic to religions and the bar has been set - It is interwoven with society, culture, authority, status to a degree that myths and legends never acquire. Religion is lived, myths and legends are told
Right before you present a Greek myth in the classroom, you accurately state that we’re not saying we think what you’re about to hear is true. And then, right before you present something from the Bible, you say the same thing. And then, right before you do likewise with the story of Beowulf or something, you say the same thing.
That way, you’re not saying the Bible is true or false; you’re simply leaving open the possibility that it’s significantly similar to the other texts that you’re discussing in a like manner, while making no inaccurate statements.