It was a rough three days, but now I’m back. Covered in stomach juices, it’s true, and far wiser about the digestive tracts of cetaceans than I ever expected to be.
By the way, have you ever read the Book of Jonah? Really read it, in modern translation? It’s a comedy. A pretty good one, too. Jonah is a buffoon and the whole thing is a comic satire on his meanness and lack of charity. It’s full of jokes, absurdities, and punch lines. When God calls Jonah to go preach in Nineveh, the angry little prophet immediately runs in the opposite direction. God brings him back — the whole episode with the ship, Jonah getting thrown overboard, the whale — and forces him to go to Nineveh. But Jonah doesn’t want the Ninevites to be converted; he wants them to die! He wants God to fry ‘em up! But God keeps pestering him, so finally Jonah pokes his head inside the city walls and says, “Repent or in forty days you’ll be destroyed, okay I’m outta here.” Upon hearing this exceptionally brief sermon (all of five words in Hebrew) the entire city of a million people instantly repents and dons sackcloth and ashes. Even the animals put on sackcloth and ashes. Jonah is pissed! Goddamnit, he wants the Ninevites to roast! Surely God won’t spare the city after all its perfidy and sin, will He? So Jonah plops himself down on the hillside in a funk and waits for the firestorm to ensue. God, whose persona in the book is not unlike a wry Jeeves, makes Jonah comfortable by growing a giant plant over his head to shade him, and so forth. The whole thing is a comic masterpiece.
So how can people read Jonah and not get the joke? It’s because of what I call Magic Book Syndrome. The literature that comprises the Hebrew Bible is no longer recognized by naive Christians as literature, which of course it is: history, myth, fables, romances, love poems, proverbs, humor. To Christian fundamentalists — which, up until a couple of centuries ago, was all Christians — none of these categories exist. Everything in the Bible is the word of God. The book itself isn’t even a book in the normal sense of the word: it’s a holy communiqué from God to us. It’s magic.
Protestants suffer from Magic Book Syndrome far more than Catholics do, for the simple reason that Protestantism is actually based on the primacy of the book — sola scriptura — and the concomitant rejection of Church tradition as a parallel fount of authority. Protestants have nothing but the book. Whereas Catholics have the apostolic succession, the Pope, the councils, and the whole magisterium of the Church.
Magic Book Syndrome also occurs with Jewish sects, of course, and is a fricking epidemic among Muslims, who have taken book-worship to an even higher level than Christians. Mormons have it too. It seems to be a potential of all book-based revealed religions.
And so we have intelligent Christians with Ph.D.s (though not in zoology, I think) earnestly discussing what kind of whale or fish or sea monster might have hosted Jonah for three days. You might as well speculate on what kind of wolf Little Red Riding Hood encountered that was able to speak human language and disguise itself as an old woman.
Posted by Violet in Godbags, Religion
