If the Bible appeared for the first time today as a fantasy “Shared World” series(different people writing their own stories , all set in the same fictional universe), would people buy it? How would critics respond?
I don’t think they’d even be able to find a publisher. If they self-published, it would be a flop, and depending on how much money they put into it, a massive flop.
The writing is just too awful, and there are whole sections that read like a boring genealogy tree. If they actually used modern writing conventions with good pacing and characterization to tell the same stories, I could see it having some success.
IT would definitely need a re-write, turning it from chapter-and-verse form to simple narrative, and modernizing the “thees” and “thous”, of course.
The Bible must have been written, or at least inspired, by God. No mortal minds could possibly come up with something so strange.
Also, western civilization has been heavily shaped by the Bible for thousands of years. We have no way of knowing what the world would look like if the Bible didn’t exist.
That never stopped J. R. R. Tolkien from becoming a best-seller.
That being said, how do you think it would fare today as a fantasy “shared world” series?
A rewrite, somewhat condensed and reorganized would find a niche. The ending of the sequel would keep them on the hook.
If you are talking about The Silmarillion (and anything else published since that), yes it did. That only got published after LOTR had become a massive success (which took time), and a serious cult following had been established. LOTR and The Hobbit, by contrast, have a strong, coherent narrative, quite unlike the Bible.
I’m not sure that last book would pass muster, even as fan fiction.
The publisher would be sued by the authors of the Koran.
Just take the premise as written without trying to poke holes in it, please. How do you think it would sell as fatasy fiction today?
Very poorly, because it isn’t a fantasy series. It’s a mixture of history, personal narrative, short story/myth, poetry, song, advice, political diatribe, and other genres. Some parts of it might be excised and made into decent separate works. For instance, the Psalms could make a good songbook.
I was merely making a joke.
The OP is unanswerable, as it’s well beyond the capacity of human imagination to determine what society today would look like minus the influence of Christianity, for good or for ill. Would we be mostly Buddhists, Atheists, or something else entirely? What would they read into it? What language would most of us be speaking? I can point you towards an alternative history novel, The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson. The premise is that the Black Death kills 99% of Europe’s population, leaving it ripe for colonisation from Asia. Not sure how much that help really, it’s just one author’s vision.
Perhaps the nearest you could get to the answering the OP would be to take biblical stories to people of various cultures and see how they react. Would there be any with a universal appeal? (Optimistically, I’m going to suggest the story of the Good Samaritan as a candidate.)
One aspect of the Bible that would be likely to impress would be it’s rich use of language. The KJV was worked on by some of the greatest writers of its day. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins lists 129 English phrases in common usage, which add to its literary richness.
There are vast portions of the Bible which I think are vile bullshit, but I’d not say the writing is crap. For one thing, you have to differentiate among translations. The New International Version does not sound like the King James, et cetera. For another thing there are some good stories in the Bible. I find the David cycle compelling simply as a work of fiction, and the book of Jonah is funny as hell.
While I tend to agree, I can imagine a society in which another religion grew in Christianity’s place. Mithraism, say, or if you want to get a little further from Xtian roots you could imagine a widespread cult of Dionysus.
I like your thread concept, but surely you know that the chapter-and-verse form was devised for convenience, and not part of any original Bible book. Certainly not the verse separations, which are often odd. Of course, the Psalms are separate “chapters” but that is an exception.
True enough. But the original manuscripts don’t have paragraphs either, if I recall aright.
There’s nothing essential about chapters & verses, and in fact I think they contribute to at least two foolish notions about the Bible common among literalists.
Isn’t that kind of what “Star Wars” is?
I doubt it, since the story loses most of its meaning if you’re not familiar with the history between the Jews and the Samaritans. It’s not just “this one guy helped him”, it’s “this one guy who should have been his mortal enemy helped him”.
Rewritten for today’s grammar, it’d do okay. Better if they played up the sex and incest scenes in the early books. Lot’s daughters, Sodom and Gomorrah, Canaan and Noah, etc.
"The Telegraph said ‘This God is reminiscent of the Norse.’
"The Times said ‘Kind of turgid, but I like the bit with horses.’
"The Mail said 'Lots of massacres, a violent tour de force.
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