Karen Armstrong refutes literalists, blames Dawkins

[Brian Jordan]

Karen Armstrong discusses her latest book "The Bible: a Biography" with Andrew Marr on Start The Week BBC R4 1/10/07
She denies that the Torah is literal history and makes the interesting point that the early books of the OT represent a sort of polytheism, shading to "monolatory" before monotheism proper takes over. She goes on to say that nobody would have dreamed of taking Genesis literally until the 19th Century - people such as Calvin included.

She also says that the Koran was never read literally, each verse being described as a (Arabic word for) parable. This state of affairs, she says, came to an end and literalism took over because of Richard Dawkins et al. (Must post this on the RDF site too!)

Can be downloaded from http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/stw/ 20MB mp3, starts about 20mins in. (My copy seems to be broken at about 13mins on Zinf, but plays ok on Windows Media Player, if rather quietly.)

[Kekerusey]

She also says that the Koran was never read literally, each verse being described as a (Arabic word for) parable. This state of affairs, she says, came to an end and literalism took over because of Richard Dawkins et al. (Must post this on the RDF site too!)

... Freke and Gandy (Christians both though more gnostic inclined) would disagree with that, they believe that current day Christianity is wrong and has been since before Roman times, that early Christianity (like other mystery religions before and alongside them) were used to encode science and intellectual materials within their "inner mysteries", that Christ was never a physical being but a spiritual state achievable by anyone with the *right* mindset and that Christianity has been a literalistic bastardization of gnostic Christianity ever since (and I am not saying that to be insulting). To my mind their hypothesis makes a great deal of sense and I don't think it's because I'm an atheist.

Kyu

[Anonymous]

There has been a good publication released recently by a leading
Biblical scholar:
Karel van der Toorn. Scribal culture and the making of the Bible.

I received my copy today and highly recommend it.