Recently COSTCO apologized for its store in Los Angeles for
selling Bibles labelled as FICTION. It seems a religious fellow (pastor) was
shopping at Costco for a gift and noticed the labels on the Bibles for sales at
the store and thought he should make some noise about it.
Costco blamed the error on a distributor.
My question is WHAT LABEL SHOULD THE BIBLE CARRY?
The Bible (Old & New Testaments) cannot be labelled
NON-FICTION because that would imply that the stories in the Bible are actually
FACTUAL and that is definitely not the case.
There are many religious people that believe the Bible is
factual and some even go as far as to call words in the Bible as literally
factual even though the Bible has been translated zillions of times from and
into all sorts of languages; no originals exist.
Modern Christians will argue that even though the Old
Testament stories are quite suspect as to being actual history, they argue that
the New Testament is based on eye-witness accounts and therefore is factual or
non-fiction.
The case for the New Testament being more historically
accurate than the Old Testament has some merit since someone named Jesus of
Nazareth did actually exist according to most historians (unlike Moses, etc.
who probably were just made up to give the Jews a history of sorts).
The problem with the New Testament is that the writers of
the Gospels were not eye witnesses to what Jesus said and did but based their
accounts on a variety of sources none of which can be called factual or
historic and believe me, there are a ton of books discussing this very issue.
Should Costco have apologized?…probably so since it does not
want to piss off the people that buy Bibles.
Was the fiction label wrong? Well the Bible could not have
been labelled non-fiction or even history so what is left?
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