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March 26, 2005
Mark Twain on the Bible
There is a raging email debate in the Mark Twain Forum over the reliability of the Bible. It is motivated by a reference a forum member made to the following quotation from Twain,
It (the Bible) is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.
This quotation appears from time to time in the upper right hand corner of the front page of this blog. It is from Letter III of Letters From the Earth, a posthumously published work written by Mark Twain. At the request of Twain's daughter Clara, it was not published until 1946.
To put the quotation in a larger context, Letter Three begins,
You have noticed that the human being is a curiosity. In times past he has had (and worn out and flung away) hundreds and hundreds of religions; today he has hundreds and hundreds of religions, and launches not fewer than three new ones every year. I could enlarge that number and still be within the facts.One of his principle religions is called the Christian. A sketch of it will interest you. It sets forth in detail in a book containing two million words, called the Old and New Testaments. Also it has another name -- The Word of God. For the Christian thinks every word of it was dictated by God -- the one I have been speaking of.
It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.
This Bible is built mainly out of the fragments of older Bibles that had their day and crumbled to ruin. So it noticeably lacks in originality, necessarily. Its three or four most imposing and impressive events all happened in earlier Bibles; all its best precepts and rules of conduct came also from those Bibles; there are only two new things in it: hell, for one, and that singular heaven I have told you about.
What shall we do? If we believe, with these people, that their God invented these cruel things, we slander him; if we believe that these people invented them themselves, we slander them. It is an unpleasant dilemma in either case, for neither of these parties has done us any harm. [Emphasis added]
Twain arbitrarily, "for the sake of tranquility," resolves this dilemma by putting the "whole ungracious burden upon" God.
This is a very funny treatise and, in my view, it should be taken to reflect what Twain actually though of these matters. He was deeply skeptical about the Bible and religion, all religions. He even thought all religions could be evil at times.
The debate in the Mark Twain Forum will die down if it is not stoked by name-calling. It began as a non-sequitur and will end that way. However, one of the participants called the group's attention to an abnormally interesting web site, The Skeptic's Annotated Bible. The Skeptic's Annotated Bible reproduces every verse in the King James Bible, annotating various phrases as containing or pertaining to, "injustice," "absurdity," "cruelty and violence," "intolerance," "contradictions," and nine other classifications. For the record, one of these latter classifications is "Good Stuff." Just to be ecumenical, the site does the same thing for/to the Koran and the Book of Mormon. One can quibble about many of the annotations but it is great fun and, if used critically, a useful reference.
Mark Twain buffs might want to read The Bible According To Mark Twain by Howard G. Baetzhold and Joseph B. Mccullough, Touchstone, 1996.
Posted by Duane Smith at March 26, 2005 2:39 PM | Read more on Mark Twain |
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