The Good Book

[loramin]

Originally Posted by DeathsSilkyMist [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Objectively speaking any book/story that has survived 2000+ years is a good book/story, even if it is difficult to understand why that is. Otherwise you wouldn't know the story of Jesus, Gligamesh, etc. People would have stopped caring and forgotten about them hundreds of years ago.

That is simply not true. We read the epic of Gilgamesh because it's the earliest known form of literature. It has nothing to do with the quality of the text, and everything to do with that text being preserved while other texts weren't.

In short, if The Epic of Bob had survived from before Gilgamesh, we'd be discussing it instead in literature classes. And it's the same thing with the bible: it's only survived for so long because it's a religious text of the cultural group that happened to win out ... not because it's good literature.

There are countless other texts that are odes to Osiris, or Dionysus, or whatever other god, all from the same time as the bible ... that no one reads today, even though they're just as good from a literary perspective.