Genre in the Bible (and around the blogosphere)

Many discussions about the Bible end up being unprofitable because they focus exclusively on whether the Bible is “true” or “false” but ignore matters of genre that are relevant to such questions.

A few recent posts around the blogosphere illustrate this point. Steve Wiggins discusses the dating of Daniel and its genre. We have enough examples of apocalyptic literature that we ought to approach any work in this genre with the assumption that it is pseudepigraphal and written after at least most of the events it “predicts.”

Likewise, we have enough creation accounts and cosmological statements both within and outside the Bible that anyone approaching a text like Genesis 1 expecting it to match up with modern science ought to have known that they would be disappointed. The blog Jesus Creed discusses this in its continuing series interacting with Denis Lamoureux’s Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution.

And Bob Cornwall shared this video illustrating why it is a mistake to think that the story of Noah is a story for children (“Can you say ‘collateral damage’ kiddies?”: