Reply #15: That's exactly how it was taught when I took this class. [View All]

[Moosepoop]

I was either a sophomore or a junior, so it was in the late 1970s.
My high school -- in southwestern lower Michigan -- offered a class called "The Bible as Literature". It was part of the Language Arts curriculum, otherwise known as "English". I signed up for the course thinking it would be an "easy credit", after all, I already knew the major Bible stories so this would be a piece of cake, right?
Wrong!!! It was actually covered as an historically influential piece of literature, and the students were expected to approach it with the same analytical skills that were applied to the works of Shakespeare or Mark Twain or Charles Dickens. This involved deconstructing the various styles of writing found in the Bible, examining the influences of the times on the authors of it, considering the aspects of writing to a certain audience and who that audience was at the times in question, and so on. It was one of the driest and most boring and difficult courses I ever took.
It was taught, unfortunately for me, exactly as it was billed: The Bible as Literature. Nothing more, nothing less.