The most beautiful story in the world - 1 May 2009 |
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There’s always a fly in the ointment. At at the risk of overstating the case (and mixing metaphors), chapter 2 of Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative (’Sacred History and the Beginnings of Prose Fiction’) is a real bluebottle in the honey.
It would be unfair to suggest that Alter denies the historicity of the Bible. His discussion is more nuanced than that. There is, however, an underlying methodological issue that I want to take issue with.
Alter seems to assume that there is a trade-off between a narrative’s literary artistry and its historical accuracy. The more a writer seems to embellishes details, portrays the psychological features of the protagonists, draws attention to word-play and repetition, alludes to other narratives and so on, the more (it seems) we are forced to concede that he has fiddled the facts. We can admire his elegance and subtlety, we can be drawn my them more deeply into the story, but we cannot finally believe that it all actually happened this way. Literary beauty and historical veracity is a zero-sum game.
This assumption evaporates completely once we step back for a moment and ask ourselves who the real storyteller is. God can not only write a story with the literary beauty that Alter describes; he can make it all come alive. Men and women write books; God creates worlds. Why should the literary beauty of the Bible not be a precise reflection of God’s sovereign power?
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Posted by Steve Jeffery · Topics: Books, Minister's Blog, The Art of Biblical Narrative