Nornagest comments on Rational Evangelism - Less Wrong

9 Post author: aarongertler 26 February 2014 06:00AM

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Comment author: Nornagest 27 February 2014 10:15:09PM *  0 points [-]

I'm not sure we can trust general critical consensus in this case, if there is such a thing as objective literary quality that we can attribute to a work. There's a massive halo effect with its finger on the scale here, no pun intended. Not even just for Christians; the Bible and particularly the King James Version is so basal to English-speaking culture that the two are hard to disentangle. Note also that literary quality and significance are often confounded in e.g. reading lists, and the KJV's unquestionably a hugely significant part of the English canon.

That said, there are parts of the King James Bible that I find fascinating and beautiful and generally of high literary quality. I'm just not sure we can say the same for the work as a whole, which I find frequently turgid or repetitive or painfully clunky -- particularly in the Mosaic books past Exodus, and in the Pauline epistles of the New Testament.