徐静 圣经文学论文.doc

徐静
Bible As Literature
英文学院09级6班
0901010617
October 7th,2011
1. What is Bible as literature?
Before studying the teacher’s course documents, I think Bible is just a thick book with a lot of short Christian stories. But now I start to regard it as literature. Firstly, the idea of the Bible as literature began with the Bible itself. The writers refer to a whole range of literary genres in which they write: proverb, saying, chronicle, complaint, oracle, apocalypse, parable, song, epistle, and many others. Secondly, some of these forms correspond to the literary forms in the authors' surrounding cultures. For example, the mandments are cast in the form of the suzerainty treaties that ancient Near Eastern kings imposed on their subjects, and the NT epistles show many affinities to the structure of Greek and Roman letters of the same era. Thirdly, it has a great influence on the world’s literature. Many famous western writers quote words and stories from it in their own works. Even a lot of eastern writers are influenced by it, such as Xv Dishan, Lu xun and Ba Jin. So we can see that Bible itself is a literary book. And this is Bible as literature.
2. How should we read Bible as literature?
As I have said that the idea of the Bible as literature began with the Bible itself, so we should read it as literature just as we need to read it theologically and historically. Every st