Please note that due to the software used, not everything in this transcript will be accurate.

Literary Bible

John Dickson (Studio)

When Adam Lewis Greene launched a crowdfunding campaign for a new kind of Bible, he hoped to raise US$37,000. He ended up with over US$1.4 million. His idea was simple: make a Bible that’s a pleasure to read. No footnotes. No verse numbers. No crinkly paper. Instead, generous margins, a fresh typeface, and a layout that reads like literature, not an encyclopedia. People loved it. It landed in Kickstarter’s top ten that year, with 15,000 sets sold. Our producer Kaley, was one of them. But why bother? Doesn’t reading the Bible like a novel diminish it to just another book And what about the Bible’s diversity—its many genres, its different books, its status (as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it) as a “library,” not a single work? Does making it a single work of literature thin out the Bible? Our guests today say: yes—and no. There are many ways to read the Bible. But reading it as literature may help us see something easily missed: the Bible isn’t just a collection of texts any more than a symphony is just a collection of notes. Many voices—one song. Read that way, it begins to look less like a reference work and more like a sweeping story: beginning, middle, and end—a masterpiece. I’m John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson (Studio)

I’ve landed in California, and I’m enjoying the sunny weather in San Diego. I often get to walk to my interviews, and this trip takes me through a very Hollywood landscape. Imagine the set of The Truman Show – a community of large, pristine homes … linked together by beautiful gardens. And the footpath leads me up to the home of noted author and scholar, Bill Creasy.

Media – John meeting Bill Creasy

John Dickson (Studio)

Now, I have nothing but respect for my new home in Chicago and the good people who live there, buuuuuut… I won’t lie, San Diego’s climate is a little more suited to my taste. Dr William Creasy – Bill – taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, for nearly 30 years as a professor of English Literature. For many years he oversaw a hugely popular undergraduate course, The Bible as English Literature and he also founded the Logos Bible Study to teach scripture to a general audience. By the year 2000 he was teaching over six-thousand people a week outside of his university, as well as his normal class load. Nothing but respect for that achievement! Bill is retired now but he continues to tour and speak internationally and in 2022 ‘Who’s Who’ placed him among America’s top two per cent of educators. But it was his recently published book, How To Read The Bible that caught my attention — not just because my darling daughter Sophie is making her way through it at the moment during her morning cup of tea — but because I’m fascinating by the Bible as a literary work.

John Dickson:
Bill, what is a literary reading of the Bible, uh, versus some other way of reading it, you know, historically or critically or whatever.

Bill Creasy:
Well, I think the, my teaching is based on four foundational principles. Number one, the Bible is rooted in geography. The land is important. The land of Israel is a land bridge linking Europe, Asia, and Africa. And anyone who wanted to control the power and wealth of the ancient world had to control that land bridge. Even to this very day. And, uh, so that’s number one. Number two, the Bible emerges from history. These are real people in real places who do real things. Uh, the Bible in its final finished form is a unified literary work. The curtain goes up in Genesis, it comes down in Revelation. In between, there’s a linear narrative with recapitulation. So I read the Bible much like a novel and get the whole story. It’s not an anthology of ancient literature, it’s a unified literary work. And that’s what makes my classes unique, I think in churches, whether Protestant or Catholic. Um, it, it’s theology, it’s what does this mean to you? Well, frankly, I don’t really care what it means to me. It means what it means in the larger context of the narrative, and that was my approach to it.

John Dickson (Studio)

To be clear, there are many valid ways to read the Bible. You can take a historical-critical approach (my intellectual happy place), read alongside the ancient Fathers of the church (like Augustine) to see what they saw that we don’t, or you can read through the lens of systematic theology (our doctrine of God, creation, anthropology, and so on). All legitimate. But the literary approach asks a simpler question: what kind of writing is this—and how does its story work on us? That’s the path Bill has spent decades walking, inspired by the great literary scholar Northrop Frye.

John Dickson:
Who proposed this crazy idea of a, a Bible as literature class? Northop Frye is a big name in that.

Bill Creasy:
That’s, that’s what triggered me as, as a literary student, a PhD literary student, I, I specialized in medieval and renaissance literature. And, uh, and Northrop Fry came, uh, his book came out, his early book, uh, in the 1940s I think it was, uh, anatomy of Criticism, and it was a really important book for literature. And I cut my teeth on that, you know, going through graduate school. And then he, he brought out, uh, the, his book on the Bible and I read that. And I thought this changes everything. His approach viewed the Bible as a unified literary work. That’s where I got it. So he was a major influence on me, uh, along with Robert Alter.

 John Dickson:
He’s a sort of Hebrew scholar. So, um, what place then, for historical criticism and a historical analysis of the Bible, if you are focusing on the literary, what about the historical critical approach to the Bible?

Bill Creasy:
Well, I’m focusing on the literary, but the literary takes place in a historical time place. So you, you. It would be a mistake to read the Bible through 21st century eyes. Hmm. We have to read it through the eyes of the original audience. Yeah. So we really need to understand the history, the culture, uh, all the background of it, and that brings it alive. And I, I teach the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Enead, the Divine Comedy in the same way. You know, you, you engage the text, you. Step into the world of the narrative and experience it from within. You don’t bring your views and your perspectives on an ancient text. You have to go back to that time and read it through their eyes.

John Dickson:
Tell me the story of the whole Bible as a piece of literature, the way a literary critic might do with some great work.

Bill Creasy:
Every good story has a conflict. And the conflict in the Bible is sin. You know, in, in the beginning, God created heavens and the earth, you know, and everything was good, perfect, and complete. And then sin entered the world. And I define sin not as an act that one commits, but a condition that one is in the condition of alienation and separation from God that manifests itself in the outward, sinful actions. In other words, if. If I were in a right relationship with God, I wouldn’t have held up the seven 11. You know, uh, the action is manifestation of the condition. Mm-hmm. And that, that occurs in Genesis. And then in Genesis chapter 12, God introduces the plan of redemption with Abraham. And with that, the story then takes off and comes to a conclusion in revelation of the new heaven and the new earth. So there’s that linear narrative, but again, we have to look at each book of the Bible in its own particular genre. Uh, chapters one through 12 of, uh, one through 11. Uh, of Genesis is mythic literature, not mythology. Mythic literature addresses the fundamental issues of human condition in story form. So to read Genesis one through 11 as journalism or history is simply a mistaken reading. Uh, we can read First and Second Kings pretty much as historical material. Uh, we read a song of songs. As an erotic love poem, which it is. Uh, so looking at the proper genre of each book as we move through, that’s part of the literary approach to, to reading book.

John Dickson (Studio)

Bill’s class—and his book—treat the Bible as a single work. Not 39 Old Testament books (or 46 for my Catholic friends) plus 27 in the New—but one 1,500-page story. That puts it in the league of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, or – to go ancient – even the Iliad by Homer. We don’t have 80 hours to walk through it all (Producer Kaley insists), so I asked Bill to highlight five key contributors to the Bible’s plot.

Reading

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. – Genesis, Chapter 1.

 John Dickson:
And the first is Genesis. Okay. So let’s start there. How to read it, and how does it contribute to the, to the rest of the story?

Bill Creasy:
Well, again, we have to read it in the proper genre, and the book of Genesis is not simply one genre. It’s multiple genres, mythic literature, chapters one through 11. Um, and then we introduce Abraham. And Abraham as he’s presented in the Bible. Is he a real character? Or a literary character or a combination of both. What do we know about Abraham? Only what we have in the Bible.

John Dickson (Studio)

Just to fill in the blanks, Abraham – or Abram at that time – was the man God chose to become the father of his chosen people. But this was a promise that took a long time to be fulfilled, and it certainly wasn’t plain sailing.

Reading

Some time later, God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied. Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”- Genesis, chapter 22.

Bill Creasy:
He’s a literary figure, uh, who may or may not have lived. But is his story literal in Genesis? Did he really say these things? Uh, did he really? Take Isaac to Mount Mariah to sacrifice him? Or is it a literary construct to teach a number of lessons?

 John Dickson:
Could be both.

Bill Creasy:
Could be both. And, and I think, I think it is both. Um, in, uh, the story of Abraham, it’s so detailed. You know what he’s thinking, the interior life of Abraham. Uh, the interior life of Isaac, my gosh. Um, after they get back from Mount Mariah, Sarah dies in the very next chapter and Isaac goes south and he never sees his father again. Uh, there there’s never any conversation between them after they get back from Mount Mariah. Sarah is silent. And then dies in the next chapter. Um, she had Isaac when she was 90 and she died at 127, I think. And, uh, but there’s no conversation. So as Abraham, perhaps a real character, but the literary construct of Abraham is what’s important. It’s not telling the history of Abraham. It’s telling the importance of Abraham and the author tells us what’s going on inside his head, you know, in that whole, that whole night before the sacrifice of Isaac, what was he doing? It’s a gigantic gap in that story. And as readers, we have to fill in that gap and uh, and test it. Uh, and what was Sarah thinking? Was she told anything? Or they simply go. So those kinds of ambiguities are really important in biblical narrative. Biblical narrative is full of gaps and as educated readers of scripture, we have to fill in the gaps.  That’s true all throughout scripture, all throughout, especially in the Old Testament stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph. Um, and that’s what makes great literature.

John Dickson:
So that’s the first book of the so-called Old Testament. Let’s go to the first book of the New Testament.

Reading

This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph, her husband, was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly. But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” – The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 1.

John Dickson:
Tell me how Matthew moves forward with this story of the model.

Bill Creasy:
I think we have to consider Matthew in the context of all four gospels. You have four different points of view on the same set of events. And, uh, Matthew being one of the apostles, um, presumably has inside knowledge because he spent three years with Jesus. And imagine walking on the roads with Jesus every day. And, uh, and he, he was one of the intimate characters in the story of Jesus. So he gives us a, uh. A presentation of Jesus that only an insider in that group could have.

Reading

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. – The Gospel of John, chapter 1.

 John Dickson:
I wanna talk about John’s gospel because you’ve said, um, quote that it stands shoulder to shoulder with the greatest works of ancient literature.

Bill Creasy:
I think it does.

John Dickson:
Tell me how,

Bill Creasy:
Well, we have, we have Matthew, mark, and Luke, so three perspectives from three very different people on the same set of events. Matthew was there, mark. Travel with Paul, heard all the stories, may have been a, a young boy at the time, and, uh, Luke, uh, never met Jesus. He met Paul. So Luke tells us he carefully researched everything and laid it out in an orderly fashion. So with those three gospels, you get a really good idea of, of the narrative, but what did it all mean? And John, John. Was Jesus’ cousin, uh, he was younger. I picture Jesus being 30 and John maybe 15 or 16 at the last supper. John’s sitting next to him. He has his head on his shoulder. Two 30-year-old guys don’t do that. Yeah, it’s, he’s much like a little brother to Jesus. And John, if we look at the traditional time scheme, John writes his gospel much later, and, uh, and he was intimately familiar with Jesus. And he had decades to think about it. What did it all mean? What was the, the, the, the deeper meaning of it all? And when he begins. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. You don’t get that from Matthew, mark, and Luke. Mm-hmm. At all. But I think it’s something John pondered deeply for a long time reading John’s gospel. It, it’s much like Proust uh, thinking back to the Madeline, the taste of the cookie.

John Dickson (Studio)

Marcel Proust is best known for his seven-volume masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. In one famous scene, the narrator tastes a madeleine (a french sponge cake) dipped in tea and is suddenly flooded with childhood memories—a “Proustian moment,” when a small taste or smell unlocks the past. Proust’s point is simple: memory isn’t lost, it’s just waiting to be awakened. In his case, a small cake opens up a 3,000-page, multi-volume novel. In the apostle John’s case, personal moments open into profound reflection on the life of Jesus.

Bill Creasy:
It, it’s much like Proust uh, thinking back to the Madeline, the taste of the cookie. Yeah. He, it, it’s a precious thing to him. And it keeps appearing over and over again. And you can see in John the, the really intimate relation that John had with him and not, he’s not just telling events, he’s telling what the events meant. And I think that’s what makes John such a great, uh, marvelous literary work.

John Dickson:
Romans, what’s its significance as a text and how does it move the story on.

Bill Creasy:
Paul, uh,  a lot of people don’t like Paul. He can be a curmudgeon for sure. Uh, but an enormously bright man, you know, he, he, he was educated in the highest level of, of rhetorical studies. Uh. Romans is a, a colossal epistle. Well, Saint John Chrysostom said, uh, that, uh, it, it’s the greatest epistle ever written. If we didn’t have Romans, we wouldn’t have Christianity as we know it today. Um, John tells us what Jesus meant to him and should mean to us. Romans Paul lays out the plan of salvation as a formal scholastic diatribe. A formal argument, a scholastic diatribe is scholastic ’cause it’s kind of academic. The diatribe has, um, an imagined adversary. Right. And who interjects and, and then they argue, and we have that all across Romans. Mm-hmm. Um, but Romans really lays out the plan of redemption.

Reading

Where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord … What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? …What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means! Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? – Romans, chapters 5-6.

 Bill Creasy:
We know who Christ is and what he did, but how do we reach out and, and take hold of that? How do we appropriate that? And Romans tells us how we do it by grace through faith. We’re saved by grace through faith in Romans, but we live out that life by a life of active love. And when I’m teaching Romans, I always compare it to, um, falling in love. You know, I, I, I have many classes, you know, all these people in class, and there’s a woman sitting over there, guy sitting over there, you know, maybe in their twenties, thirties, they don’t know each other, but, you know, at the break they, you know, they have coffee and things. Pretty soon they’re sitting together, you know, there’s a spark of interest and, uh. And then they go to dinner together and then at one point they’re getting to know each other and at one point sitting at dinner in a very nice restaurant with flowers and candle, um, he says to her, I love you. Would you spend your life with me? Now you have a choice. You could say. I’ve been there, done that. No thanks. Or you can say, I love you too. Yes, I would. That’s what Romans lays on. How do we appropriate, we get to know Christ, we get to become intimate with him, and at some point he says to us, would you spend eternity with me? Now you have a choice. If you say yes, then you move positionally from the world. Into the family of God. And once in the family of God, you live a life that honors Christ. Not that embarrasses him a life of active love or a life of good works. There’s no conflict between faith and works, none. You know, and in, in laying out this schematic for Romans in teaching it, that’s how I introduce it.

Reading

The seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and out of the temple came a loud voice from the throne, saying, “It is done!” Then there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder and a severe earthquake. No earthquake like it has ever occurred since mankind has been on earth, so tremendous was the quake. The great city split into three parts, and the cities of the nations collapsed. God remembered Babylon the Great and gave her the cup filled with the wine of the fury of his wrath. Every island fled away and the mountains could not be found. From the sky huge hailstones, each weighing about a hundred pounds, fell on people. And they cursed God on account of the plague of hail, because the plague was so terrible. – Revelation, chapter 16.

 John Dickson:
You’ve mentioned a couple of times, revelation. So, uh, this is the last book of the Bible. Tell us how the whole story lands. What, what do you, what do you teach about Revelation?

Bill Creasy:
It’s the concluding chapter of the story. When does it happen? And I contend in, in the book and in my teaching that. Romans revelation, uh, occurred at the end of the second, uh, first century. Um, it’s not projecting out in some distant future, you know, you know, you know, he’ll come sometime, you know, uh, but think of all the things that we read about in Romans, stuck on Romans, on, on Revelation, everything we read about, and look at the second half of the first century. You know, um, the Great Jewish War begins in 66 and kind of ends in 72 with the fall of Masada. Um, and that, that was the dumbest decision in the whole world. But hey, let’s declare war on the Roman Empire here. Mm-hmm. Um, so Jerusalem’s totally destroyed in AD 70 and then it kind of trickles out until 72. Um, that happens. Ad 76 Mount Vesuvius erupts. Have you been there? To Pompeii.

John Dickson:
Uh, I, sorry. I have been to Pompeii. It’s haunting

Bill Creasy:
In the book of Revelation, there are eruptions and you know, the sky is dark. And in, in doing research on the eruption among Vesuvius, when it erupted, it blew molten rock 50,000 feet into the atmosphere until it couldn’t support itself and it all came back down again. And there were, there were six Pi Pyroclastic surges that totally destroyed Poe and, but.  All the Mediterranean was blanketed in Ash all the way to constant and or Istanbul. It was all blanketed in Ash. And when you read about these things happening in Revelation, it’s mirroring what was happening in the second half of the first century. And if Revelation is written sometime toward the end of the first century, that was like reading the newspaper. These things happened. So it’s not projecting way out into the future. It happens  then,

John Dickson:
Apart from presumably the final two chapters, new creation, et cetera,

Reading

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” – Revelation, chapter 21.

John Dickson (Studio)

As Bill insists, the Bible can be read as a great work of literature. But here’s another — related — question: What about the Bible’s influence on other great works of literature? My next guest tells us how the Bible’s story has shaped so many other stories in the Western literary pantheon. All that, up next!

Break

Reading

Lord… what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field,  the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. – Psalm 8

Reading

What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem to say so. – Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2.

John Dickson (Studio)

Just a little demonstration by our voice actors, Dakotah Love and Yannick Lawry, of the Bible’s influence on great literature. We could have collected hundreds of examples, from Dante Alighieri and Geoffrey Chaucer, to Leo Tolstoy and TS Elliot. But the Bard seemed a good place to start. And to help us explore the Bible’s influence on such things, I spoke with Dr Jessica Hooten Wilson. Jessica’s PdD is on Religion and Literature. She holds the Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University. She is also the author of eight books on a range of literary greats, and the host of the podcast, The Scandal of Reading.

John Dickson:
Um, look, it, it’s, for some, it’s a cliche, uh, to say that the Bible shaped English literature, uh, what does that statement even mean, and how true is it in your view?

Jessica Hooten Wilson:
Whoa, that’s massive. Um, yes it did. I actually wish I could grab a bunch of books outta my office ’cause I have massive toes of books that kind of show the connection between the Bible and Western literature and we essentially just wouldn’t have the tradition that we have without it. It’s not enough to even say specific works, respond directly to the images, to the stories, to the archetypes that are created by the myths and the characters of scripture, but also that just the images from the scripture are kind of haunting everything from the government to the culture around. Um, the western world primarily, uh, especially between, you know, a thousand to 2000. And because of that, it’s impossible to extrapolate the influence entirely. Like even works that are trying to be, um, as non-Christian as possible, really can’t get away from the Christ haunting that happens in those, in the fiction

John Dickson:
Have you got a good example for us? I mean, you know, I have skeptical listeners who might, who might just. Yeah, but skeptical listeners might be listening, going, oh yeah. It’s just like a couple of Christians to talk about how influential Christianity is on everything. You know, they influence Thai food next, you know? Yeah.

Jessica Hooten Wilson:
Yeah, it’s just, it’s such a big question. So, um, you know, Tom Holland’s done massive work on this, and he was, he is an atheist who wrote Dominion just talking about the impossibility of. Judging how much scripture has influenced, um, the western world and the making of the world. So, so you go back to what the ancient stories and the way that ancients did storytelling, and you can see that the, the change.  So I can, I can talk about that for a brief second. And then also then there’s this huge, uh, cataclysmic change that happens with Christianity. So lemme start with the first one. So, when I teach, for example, the Odyssey or the Iliad, or the, even the Aeneid, which is, you know, closer to Christ and less to the Hebrew world in comparison to, to myths like the David story. About the first kingdom of Israel arising with, with Saul and David becoming kings. The stories are dramatically different because, um, Odysseus is a king just to draw one of the kings from the Greek world, or, you know, Achilles. These kings were, were made kings by worldly ways. You know, how much of the world’s power they could possess. Odysseus is basically a pirate going from shore to shore and trying to steal as much as he can from. Other civilizations, and he’s conquering and he’s murdering as many as possible to show how powerful he is. Um, and that’s how he gets to be king. And then you have a Hebrew story that just doesn’t make any sense in that same ancient context in which, um, a prophet who should have never been born and, and his backstory goes back forever, comes to the forefront. And anoints the youngest son of this family who’s a shepherd, who plays the harp. And he’s going to be king and he has nothing to bring to the table, but God has chosen him and he’s gonna have a heart after God. Right. It’s just a, it’s just a powerfully different narrative, the way that they viewed the world, the way that they viewed, um, their gods. And these stories really start to captivate the Christian imagination, right? Especially after Jesus becomes the David that’s gonna reign forever. So that when you have, um, new epics being written, you know, something like the divine comedy. You have the weakest and least of these, you know. And every single story in the divine comedy goes through discovering their weakest self in, in the journey to inferno being purged of all the things that held them back in the worldly ways, uh, through purgatory, and then rising up to sanctification and Paradiso. Um, or you have paradise loss. Right. Adam and Eve and their vain contest and the power struggle leads to nothing good. And God has to intervene and God has to reveal to make something better happen, um, than the, you know, the ways of man. So it’s just these different counter narratives that are available to us in the post-Christian world that is not just Greek and Roman, um, but actually becomes very Judeo-Christian.

John Dickson (Studio)

According to Jessica, even the structure of story was reshaped by the Christian narrative. That makes sense. Again and again in Western literature, greatness runs through humility. As Jesus says in Gospel of Mark 9: “Whoever wants to be first must be the servant of all.” You go down to go up. Jesus had a particular vision of leadership in God’s kingdom, but the wider West absorbed the pattern: true leadership is humble—and our stories reflect it. And it’s not the only biblical storyline to leave its mark on Western literature.

John Dickson:
I’m reading East of Eden at the moment. Right. You know, now that I live in America, I need to read the American Classics. So I’m reading East of Eden, and of course it’s amazing, even though this book, the, um, Steinbeck was clearly very skeptical about Christianity. The, um, the story of Cain and Abel really is the pulse of the book.

Jessica Hooten Wilson:
Yeah. And, and that, that becomes the pulse of Hamlet, you know, brother killing brother. And, um, or even like today, Mufasa, the, the New Lion King story in which, you know, is a brother against brother. I mean, this is, um, these become the motifs that we start living by. And, and they populate our imagination even when we don’t realize that they do. And they’re, they’re motifs that, yes, there’s lots of motifs that we retell stories from, from Greek and Romans, but the Judeo-Christian ones are, are just so lingering and so powerful. Um, in addition to genres, I would say genres. Syntax and ways of speaking are also really influenced in Western culture from scripture. So you look at something like the Psalms. And the way that the Psalms are so different than a lot of the ancient poetry that you see and you, and now that we have writings from like 2300 BCE from in Rwanda, um, the, um, the writer from Mesopotamia, and we get to see  the way she talks to her Gods versus the way David is allowed to talk to his God.

John Dickson (Studio)

Enheduanna was an Akkadian princess and high priestess who lived around 2300 BC. A corpus of Sumerian works is attributed to her—many in the first person—making her the world’s earliest known named author. In her work, The Exaltation of Inanna, an exiled Enheduanna appeals to her goddess, who seems as terrifying as she is powerful: “Be it known that you crush heads! … that you devour corpses like a dog! … that your gaze is terrible … that you have flashing eyes … that you are unshakeable and unyielding!” Enheduanna desperately tries to persuade her deity to help her. It’s kind of different from the portrayal of the God of the Shepherd-king David.

Jessica Hooten Wilson:
He just has this expectation of a personal relationship. He has an expectation that God is listening, that he can cry out to God, that he can be angry with God, that he can also, so he doesn’t just have to praise and lower himself before that God, though he does, um, but he also has just a personable relationship with him. And you see that in poetry from those moments on, we expect poetry to have a personal calling out. Um, even, even once who don’t recognize anything, but just a, a nameless higher power. Expect that like, can I talk to someone? Can I call out through poetry? Can I lament? Um, and these things are. Or part and parcel of the, of the tradition from Judeo-Christian poetry, um, right.

John Dickson (Studio)

The God presented by the Hebrew scriptures is strange compared to other ancient deities. On the one hand, the ancient Israelites had a view of God that was radically higher than the gods of the Near East. The gods of Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome were kind of like Marvel superheroes. They’re part of creation, just more powerful than we are. The Bible, though, presents God as transcending creation, he’s not even part of it. But at the same time this God is also more personal. His followers can complain to God about their pains, in a manner you wouldn’t even do with a king, let alone the transcendent Creator. And the expectation is that he’s listening and has compassion on them. More about that theme in our episode on lament and moral injury in the Bible. Anyway, back to Jessica …

John Dickson:
What about redemption, Jessica? Um, I, I, I, you know, no one could say. Christianity invented the whole idea of redemption. But you know that that’s sort of the prodigal son story and and indeed the whole biblical story. Does that redemptive theme sneak into English literature?

Jessica Hooten Wilson:
Yeah. I also think in some ways I almost wanna be, uh, controversial and say that. Christianity did invent redemption.

John Dickson:
You go there. I don’t care. That’s great. You are the expert. You’re allowed to say stuff.

Jessica Hooten Wilson:
Some things in the ancient world that are unredeemable. There’s just act, there’s actually a lot of things that are unredeemable and like the gods will punish you whether right now or later. But like you will get just desserts, like just desserts is all over the ancient world, right? Um, there, there are just some things that are not, you can’t come back from. And instead, in Christianity it’s like. You are not being, um, condemned by the worst thing that you do. Like the worst of murderers throughout the Christian tradition can be redeemed. They can even become saints. Right? And that idea is just, and that’s so hard for us even to swallow as contemporaries and moderns, right? We. We want some people to be worse than us. We hate to think that we could be the worst. And, um, and yet in our worst moments, we find it impossible to believe that we could be redeemed and be saved. Right? So there’s this, you know, we understand that from a, um, from a deep inner level, that contradiction. And yet Christianity says, yeah, if you can do the worst things possible, and yet the Lord can redeem anything big, and that’s pretty crazy. Um, so you see that a lot in, in Christian stories especially. Um, there’s a lot of 20th century narratives. Which forgiveness doesn’t look possible. So you think of totalitarian stories, stories about, um, the Holocaust, stories about people who were Nazis, who were, um, convicted murderers, or people that were part of the, the slave trade. Um, people that did things that most, you know, we would just condemn.

John Dickson (Studio)

Characters like Oskar Schindler, Derek Vinyard—even Darth Vader—show how central redemption is to our storytelling. (How did Director Mark slip Darth Vader in!!!!) And not just in entertainment. Stories of redemption have shaped the moral imagination of the West. Take Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which exposed the horrors of slavery. After a brutal beating, Uncle Tom says, “I forgive ye, with all my soul.” His suffering and death spark a moral awakening in others—like George Shelby, who vows before God to fight the evil of slavery.

Jessica Hooten Wilson:
You know, so it, it had its moment and it definitely took the Christian story and tried to do some really good work with it. Um, and it, it was powerful and it moved people right, even if it was as sentimental as possible. And it’s telling, um, I don’t know why that’s the one that first comes to my head too. Um, I, I wish I had the, you know, sometimes I wish I could judge the things that come outta my, my mouth before they hit there, but, um, but I think those are the kinds of stories that really did shake the world and move the world, and, um, because they were able to take the Christian story and put them into a different context and say these truths that were true a thousand years ago, 1500 years ago, 1700 years ago are still true.

John Dickson:
Do you think that turn in recent years of negation in stories, you know, like relentlessly dark. We don’t give happy endings. We don’t give redemption. Um, do you think even that is in a sense, parasitic on the redemption story because it’s trying to negate it?

Jessica Hooten Wilson:
Uh, there’s a both and there there’s two different ways you can go. So, um. One of my professors when I was at University of Dallas, she founded University of Dallas. His name Louise Cowans. She’s just amazing and I have to give her credit. So she used to say that you, you almost have to imagine stories as though they take place, genres take place on a circle. So there’s, um, epic, you know, tragedy, comedy, and she said, you know, when you go all the way around the circle, um, in Christian stories, we always expect that even if a story looks like it’s ending in tragedy, it hopefully is pointing toward comedy.

John Dickson (Studio)

Just a quick note: when Jessica says “comedy,” think less SpongeBob SquarePants (Director Mark’s favourite) and more Mamma Mia! Since Aristotle, tragedy is a fall—a great character declines, and the story ends in loss or ruin (think Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight — oh, Mark!!). Comedy is the mirror image: disorder and conflict give way to restoration—often a reunion, even a marriage. Tragedy moves from order to chaos. Comedy moves from chaos to order. And Jessica argues this kind of restorative comedy—repentance, forgiveness, transformation—is peculiarly Christian and is found everywhere in Western literature. She highlights the stories of the great American novelist Flannery O’Connor.

Jessica Hooten Wilson:
They take place, um, in a segregated world, and a lot of times the, usually the racist characters end up dying, you know, and they’re being judged and condemned almost in the stories, and they, um, they die at the end. And there’s this moment where they have a chance for revelation. That points to a potential afterlife that would be comedic, an afterlife in which maybe they would see something better than they lived for in their own life. So it’s like pointing towards comedy is not nihilistic. So that’s one way of, of doing that that is not parasitic. The other way is what Flannery tried to point out sometimes happens, and she often said French novels, that French novels don’t point toward anything after. They look at the tragedy and say, that is all there is, and that’s all we’re going towards. And there is nothing else besides this. And that – 

John Dickson:
Albert Camus.

Jessica Hooten Wilson:
Yes. Right? Yes. Right, right. And so I, you know, that ends up being parasitic because it’s just, it’s, it’s a hopelessness. There is absolutely no hope. Um, if, if that’s all there is, is this.

John Dickson (Studio)

It’s impossible to talk about the Bible’s influence on English literature without mentioning the King James Version. We could do a whole episode on it (and probably will). For now: it helped stabilise and elevate English prose at a time when the language itself was still settling. It also enriched English idiom—phrases like “the powers that be,” “the writing on the wall,” and “by the skin of your teeth” all come from it. And its style—parallelism, repetition, short, forceful clauses—shaped generations of writers: John Bunyan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Abraham Lincoln. Especially John Milton—we’ll come to him shortly. And just for our Undeceptions Plussers, I asked Jessica what she makes of the King James Bible—and why our Catholic friends are a little jealous of it. (It’s worth the price of a cup of coffee to hear her answer.) Stay tuned. After the break, Satan. 

Break

Reading

And thence in Heav’n call’d Satan, with bold words
Breaking the horrid silence thus began…
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That Glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me…
Farewel happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells:
Hail horrours, hailInfernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

John Milton – Paradise Lost

John Dickson (Studio)

The ‘Fall’n Cherub’, ‘the Lost Archangel’, the ‘Arch fiend’. John Milton’s Paradise Lost gives us one of the most vivid and powerful portrayals of Satan in all of English literature. But Jessica says John Milton’s genius is just one of many literary minds we have no hope of understanding if we let go of the Bible.

Jessica Hooten Wilson:
So I’ve been teaching Milton for 20 something years in. It’s just gotten harder in the last four or five, really hard. Um, I feel like it was a lot easier to teach in the early two thousands than, than now. And people just, they have, they have zero conception of the Genesis story, let alone to know what happens with Milton’s version and adaptation of the Genesis story. Um, or the, the character of Satan. The romantics, when they read the character of Satan and Milton, they just, they understood it. They understood what was going on. They had the background, they had the biblical knowledge. They could argue with it, they could reinterpret it. Um, nobody has that anymore. Satan just comes on the scene like a brand new invention. For, for most of these readers, uh, young readers. So there are actually quite a lot of works like that. Um, you know, the divine comedy, um, bunions, pilgrims, progress Heavens term, um, you know, things that Zal Hurston, she does a lot with the, the Great King Herod novel that just came out last year that she did, but she did it in the thirties. Moses Man of the Mountain. So there are a lot of African American writers, um, Tony Morrison, that just rely heavily on biblical knowledge for, for their paradigms. And without, without knowing what the Bible was doing, it’s almost impossible to read some of these African American writers, um, and understand what they were up to.

John Dickson (Studio)

Let’s press pause. I’ve got a 5 minute Jesus for you. Working on this episode about the Bible as literature, it struck me that Jesus himself read the Bible as one story—an unfolding plot pointing in a single direction. Historically, he meant the Jewish Scriptures—what Christians call the Old Testament. But I wouldn’t argue with the theologian who insisted Jesus envisaged the story continuing, even reaching its climax, in what we now call the New Testament. There are lots of ways to see this. I’ll give you two. First, pretty much all scholars agree the central theme of Jesus’ life and teaching is summed up in one phrase: the Kingdom of God. And this isn’t about escaping earth for heaven when we die. It’s about God’s reign coming to bear on this world. The backstory begins in the opening chapters of the Bible. God is the king of creation, and he entrusts humans—made in his image—to share in that reign. We’re meant to reflect his care and kingship in the world. But humanity drifts. Chaos follows. The world we know. From there, the whole Old Testament is looking for the recovery of that lost rule. Maybe through Abraham. Maybe through the law of Moses. Maybe through the judges—Samson, Deborah. Above all, through King David, promised an eternal kingdom. But it never quite happens. David and his line fall short. So the prophets begin to speak of a day when God himself will act—when his kingship will be unmistakable. Isaiah 52 puts it beautifully:

How beautiful on the mountains
are the feet of those who bring good news [the word is gospel]
who say to Zion,
“Your God reigns!”

“Reigns” in the original just just the verb form of the noun king or Kingdom. It is the promise of a gospel of God’s own Kingdom. If you’ve ever wished the Almighty would step in and fix the chaos injustice of the world, you’ve longed for the Kingdom of God. And here’s the point: the Gospels present Jesus as the one bringing that long-awaited kingdom. Right at the start of Gospel of Mark: “The time is fulfilled… the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the gospel!” From there, the story unfolds. His teaching shows what life in this kingdom looks like. His healings are previews—trailers, you might say—of the mending of everything. His welcome of outsiders is an open invitation to the unworthy. His death absorbs the judgment evil deserves. His resurrection is the promise that life can break out of death. The rest of the New Testament reflects on this—climaxing in the vision of the end found in the Book of Revelation. Secondly, Jesus was also really explicit about the Bible having a single narrative arc, like a good piece of literature. He repeatedly stated that the Scriptures are about him. In Gospel of John chap 5: “You search the Scriptures… and it is they that bear witness about me.” And at the end of the Gospel of Luke, chap 24, he tells his followers “Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms. Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures.” So despite its many authors, genres, and centuries of composition, Jesus reads the Bible as a single story—pointing in one direction. And here’s the confronting bit (for regular Bible-readers and for those picking up a Bible for the first time): he says it’s all about him, the king of the kingdom … He’s not just the main character in a great work of literature … He’s the through line of the cosmos. You can press play now.

 John Dickson:
I wanna ask, um, a question for my more skeptical listeners. Mm-hmm. Uh, who may have never read the Bible. Um, what do you think an intelligent human today misses if they never open the Bible?

Bill Creasy:
I think that if they never read the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Niad, the divine comedy. They’re missing really important parts of life and the Bible is that times 10. Uh, the Bible has influenced Western civilization for 2000 years. And if you don’t know that you, you’re, you’re living a very intellectually shallow life, you might be greatly immersed in other literature, uh, but the Bible is the key work. A, as we’ve noted, you  know, Read Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom. Mm-hmm. Moby Dick. Um, if you didn’t know the Bible or at least be acquainted with it, you’d be doing a very shallow reading.

John Dickson (Studio)

The Bible doesn’t just illuminate other literature—it’s the story that helps make sense of life itself. Like the greatest works, it lifts us out of the everyday and lets us see a bigger picture. But let’s be honest—it can be hard going (anyone who’s reached Numbers knows that). Then again, so are John Milton, William Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy—all shaped, in different ways, by the Bible’s grand themes and epic scope. So what do you actually need to follow the story from Genesis to Revelation?

John Dickson:
Yeah. Um, my final question is really for that sceptical listener who may have been listening to our interview and think. Oh, yeah. I could maybe read the  Bible as a literary work. You know, if, if, if the professor thinks so, maybe I should, what tips have you got? Just leave us with a few tips for the person who doesn’t really know what to make of the Bible, and they’re gonna open it and start reading it.

Bill Creasy:
Yeah, tip number one. Um, I, I, it’s a big book, you know, it’s about 2000 pages long written. A long time ago in languages that, that are for the most part, dead languages. Uh, in a time and culture we know virtually nothing about. You know, at one time in education everybody read the Bible. It was just a, a, a key work, but we don’t teach that way anymore. Um, so I think it’s important to engage the Bible with a guide. Um, I’m a guide. I’ve been down the trail countless times. If you were going off to, uh, climb Mount Kilimanjaro, we, we did that in the year 2000. We climb Kilimanjaro. And if I had done it myself, just me, I’d probably still be there, lost somewhere. You need a guide to do something extraordinary like that. 

John Dickson:
What do we lose intellectually, morally, imaginatively … you know, when a culture no longer knows the biblical framework you, you just mentioned your teaching Milton becomes nearly impossible. But I mean, more broadly, what, what do you think our culture suffers as a result of this loss of knowledge?

Jessica Hooten Wilson:
So life doesn’t make sense, and I think that if we’re only trying to live through our own experience, we are a lot of lonely, isolated people. I think what the greatest stories have always done is try to show us what it looks like to see the meaning in our lives because they’ve shown us how to understand stories, beginning, middle, and end. How to understand our different places and stories, the roles that we’re playing, um, how to see our life as what kind of story we’re in genre wise. Um. They’ve showed us how to take the, the fragments that look like a lot of pieces of broken glass, and especially the story of scripture as a meta narrative has seen, like this is how you make it into stained glass. This is how it becomes a picture of something else. And without those meta narratives as well as all the threads of narratives where we get to see these repeated patterns of what it means to be a human being, we don’t understand what we’re doing. We’re making it up as we go, and that making it up, that lost sense. You just have a bunch of wandering zombies, like for me, as far as culture’s concerned. What do, what do you do without a compass? Right? Do you, do you have a destination? Do you even know where you’re going? And we, so we just have a very, um, lost group of people wandering the world, um, trying to make it up as they go, as though they’re blank slates and nobody’s ever done this before them.

Undeceptions theme