Write a Review of The Bible (As If It Just Came Out Today)

A book of short stories which appear to be loosely tied into a coherent story trying to pass a moral message but internal contradictions, the late appearance of the central character and an ending Tarantino would think OTT make this an ultimately disappointing read.

Anyone looking for a coherent story or some insight into the human condition best go elsewhere, anyone looking for incest, rape, genocide, child abuse and what people hearing voices are willing to do have found their tome.

Ignoring the fact that this book’s genre has been mislabeled as “nonfiction” instead of “horror/fantasy”, I would definitely recommend this book to other hard-core literature-fanatics. I do not believe that those looking for a light read would enjoy this book. Content aside, story progression is not very fluid and requires repeated retelling of certain parts of the story (sometimes with completely different set-ups and endings even though its being perceived from the same point of view) in order to understand what is going on.

I also feel that this story would do well to be split into two separate volumes as the second half of the book has a completely different (slightly lighter – less people die) vibe than the first half and would, therefore, appeal to a different type of reader.

I would also suggest forgoing the reading of the last chapter, at least until you’ve been enrolled in a medical study that requires you to take crystal meth, or some similar hallucinogen. It’s really the only way to truly understand where the author (currently listed as Yahweh et al.) was coming from.

Happy reading!

“A nonstop thriller!” – New York Times Book Review

“This would make an epic movie!” – Roger Ebert

“The Holy Bible,” the new potboiler just hitting the shelves, promises a tale of salvation and the answers to life’s most pressing questions: where did we come from, and what is our purpose?

But this promising concept is quickly bogged down with the introduction of God, a protagonist who exhibits a mile-wide cruel streak, condemning people out of hand for breaking his rules, levelling entire cities, and, at one point, demanding human sacrifice from one of his most devoted servants.

The reader is left with a rambling narrative wherein they, as well as the characters in this epic-length novel, try to make sense of this ‘God’ fellow and what exactly he wants.

And the latter half of the book, described as a ‘New Testament,’ only adds to the confusion by introducing a slightly more likeable character named Jesus. Except his role is cut short by the not-entirely unexpected response to more of God’s meddling: they torture Jesus and make a spectacle of his death.

If you’re expecting salvation and answers, consider that God has a sense of pageantry that plays out like a John Woo action flick, where there’s lots of destruction and dead bodies, and the only answer you really want is to the question, ‘Why the heck did I just waste my time with this thing?’

I thought it odd that they told the story of Jesus four times in the second half of the book. The four versions were slightly different, but not different enough to make four versions necessary. I would have liked to see four alternate versions of the story – maybe have people stand up for him at the trial or maybe he gets married and raises a family. Even if they’d written from the perspective of different parties – third person (omnipotent narrator), Peter, Judas, and Jesus himself are the ones that come to mind.

Plagiarized allegory. Nothing more. Try again.

1 star

“Plot line hard to follow”

I bought a copy of this book because I have heard such a fuss about it, how great it is, it changes peoples lives, etc. I gotta say, I found the plot hard to follow. When I got to a chapter called “1 Chronicles” it became so tedious to read (it starts with an exhaustive list of lineage) that I put the book down for several weeks. Truthfully, after that I skipped around trying to find something applicable to daily life in this century, but it was full of barbarism and confusing parables. Finding characters that I identify with and like makes or breaks a book, movie or any kind of story for me and I couldn’t find one in this whole book (not even the guy called, Jesus, who I think was supposed to be the main character, but was hardly in the book and not until towards the end). My advice is that if you still want to read this don’t bother paying full price for it. Get a used copy. I have one to sell…

This horror story is an analogy of the danger that jealous, abusive husbands pose to their wives. The main character (whose name is Jealous) continually changes the rules and is not satisfied without complete dependence on him, forcing his victims to conduct horrifying crimes against their neighbors. The physical torture and psychological mindgames the petty tyrant plays on his Wife, who he renames to “The Church” (don’t ask this reviewer) are enough to send chills down your spine and motivate you to donate to the nearest womens shelter to rescue people from this abuser.

This collection of assorted narratives suffers from stodgy language, redundancy and unnecessary detail. The faux Elizabethan patois rarely rises to the level of Shakespeare. Many stories are told multiple times, sometimes with minor variation and other times with blatant contradictions. There are numerous lists of “begats” telling the (male only) lineage of the protagonists that drag on for twenty or more generations, and these lists serve absolutely no narrative purpose. The lineage of one principal character name “Jesus” appears twice, but other than an early forebear “David” they have no other names in common. Forget this one. It is nearly as bad as that Joseph Smith pseudo history called the “Book of Mormon”

A bad book that hasn’t caught on yet is indeed best ignored. A bad book that sells deserves, perhaps in fact requires, some really scathing reviews.

Better than a sleeping pill!
But it gave me nightmares.

0.5 stars.

The Holy Bible is an interesting piece of fantasy fiction. It tells a coming-of-age story about a magical being, the character known as God.

God first enters the story as the sole entity in a vast and empty universe. Using his magic powers, God creates stars, planets, and an entire physical universe around him. Paying special attention to the structure of one particular planet, he fills it with living organisms.

By the end of the first book it becomes obvious that God is a toddler. He destroys the vast must majority of his creation in a tantrum.

In the middle of the book, God becomes an angry teenager, looking for fights and not interested in civil discussion. At times the main character “reveals” secret knowledge and moral advice to his creation, but these revelations turn out to be nothing more than barbaric superstitions.

During his late teens, God experiments with sex and in an odd turn of events that can only take place in a fantasy novel, God ends up as his own father.

As God continues to age he becomes less and less involved with his creation.

The final chapter can only be described as the ravings of a senile old man, undoubtedly the author intended this chapter to represent the death of the title character.

Overall, I would give the book two thumbs down. The premise was interesting, and the story had promise, but readers are left wondering if the author is paid by the word. Several stories are repeated unnecessarily, entire chapters are dedicated to information which doesn’t play an important role in the plot, mainly genealogy.

P.S. — Jenny Bliss, I love the RED DWARF series too!

Lack of humor is a sin (or so).

Friedrich Engel’s last novel is situated in the plight of the working class in juxtaposition to the educated and industrial elites. His stern narratives fails to encode the humanity of all groups and paints a simplified economic picture. Needless to say the prose is terse and can hardly compete with real working class novels. Luckily we can relay on other books, such as Irvine Welsh “Trainspotting” to deliver a ripping description of the current day social struggles.

Agree with Cat’s Staff. Amazon is one of my favorite sites for LULZ, not just shopping! Oh, the fights that rage in the comments sections of polarizing book reviews! Oh, the fun reviews of the Three Wolf Moon Tee Shirt, Communion Wafers, Dover Galvanized Steel Buckets and Gallons of Milk! The joy! I have a few joke reviews myself. (under this name)

Several of the bibles for sale have great reviews, but I think this is the best:
http://www.amazon.com/Boldtext-Pew-Bible-James-Version/dp/0834003473/ref=cm_cr-mr-title

The opening sentences of the new quasi-theological literary collection, “The Bible,” treat its readers to an idyllic, yet darkly mysterious telling of the beginning of a world not unlike our own. Its final chapter, a whopping 1200 pages later, has that same world crashing into oblivion and destruction. In between, it’s anybody’s guess.

At once historical fiction and evocative poetry, this piece flows in and out of dreamlike reverie right in the middle of its most believable action scenes. True, there are sequences that draw you in: honest-to-goodness trials and tribulations of credibly, even painfully, human characters wrestling with sordid relationships, love, betrayal, and civil war. But what of the hundred or so pages titled “Leviticus,” “Numbers,” and “Deuteronomy,” which serve as an extended Constitution of sorts for the protagonists? (Or are they the antagonists? Who knows?)

It would be difficult to classify “The Bible” as strictly narrative. Characters who have been absent for many hundreds of pages pop up again, albeit usually slightly altered mirror versions of themselves and worse for wear. In an impressive but too often confusing metatextual device, other characters seem to have been molded from the very pages the reader has just finished, declaring themselves, in fact, to have been somehow called into being by words spoken, when? Are we to assume the book covers a literal span of thousands of years?

Showcasing a daring, experimental style of collaboration, the publishers claim each of the 30+ individual authors took content, theme, and style cues from the same as-yet-elusive editor. If this is the case, one wonders if several of them, especially the “psalmist” David and later the “apostle” Paul, might have been better served on their own.

All in all, “The Bible” is a text that can’t make up its mind about what it wants to be, or for that matter what it wants to say. Still, taken as a scholarly reproduction of ancient religious texts, it’s not poorly written, and its alternate world does pose some compelling questions about our own. Had it been published many centuries ago, as nonfiction, one cannot help but wonder how it might have been received.

It remains to be seen if anyone takes it seriously.

Atheist and hilarious musical comedian Tim Minchin did something like this in his song “The Good Book” (which I highly recommend to everyone, it’s hilarious). The whole song is about the absurdity of the bible and its followers, but the lines most pertinent to this post are:
“The Telegraph said ‘This god is reminiscent of the Norse,’ The Times said ‘Kind of turgid, but I like the bit with horses.’ The Mail said ‘Lots of massacres…a violent tour de force…’

Here’s a link to the song, everyone should check it out!
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa9xDar8rQg"&gt;

(I don’t own this song, the only way I’m related to Tim Minchin is also being named Tim, blahblahblahcopyrightbullshit)

@AZSuperman01:

During his late teens, God experiments with sex and in an odd turn of events that can only take place in a fantasy novel, God ends up as his own father.

Brilliant!

Forgive me for the length of my review, it seemed once I started I had trouble stopping.

———————-

“The Bible” hit the shelves today, and as the publishers have proclaimed it “THE Good Book” and “destined to become the bestselling book of all time”, I had to check it out. Unfortunately like most works hyped to this degree, it falls far short of the mark.

Before I get into content, I feel I should mention the length and structure. The book is big. I mean, really big. Perhaps because of this, it is divided into two parts, or “Testaments” Why the authors did this, I can’t say, because after reading it is plainly obvious that the testaments would work much better as two separate books. Each of these testaments are further divided into books, which are divided into chapters, which are divided into verses. In my experience, that much forced organization is usually indicative of an unstructured writing style, and that proves true here.

The first part meanders from subject to subject, sometimes telling stories, sometimes writing poetry. It attempts to tell stories that sound like our history, except that oftentimes it contradicts settled historical facts, so one is forced to conclude that either the authors are uneducated in the history of the world, or that this is a “parallel-world” book, though it doesn’t inform us of such. Also, the stories are often horrific. Murder, slaughter, slavery, mutilation, and mayhem abound. This book is definitely intended for adult audiences, and should be kept as far from children as possible. When they are older, they’ll thank you, not necessarily for keeping them from frightening stories, but definitely for keeping you from bad literature.

The author of this gargantuan text is anonymous, and I suspect that there are in fact many authors. It would easily explain why there is no consistent internal narrative, and why the style changes in some cases every chapter. It would also explain the great many contradictions, and in many cases, repetitions in the book, though we must assume that the authors had no respect for each other’s works in this case. However, it does not explain how any of this got past an editor, and certainly not a publisher.

That is not to say that the first part is all bad. Proverbs would be a great resource for a fortune cookie company. Some of the stories are interesting, as long as they are recognized as stories and not moral lessons or truths. However, these few nuggets do not make up for the excruciating reading experience of the first “testament” of this book.

The second, or “new”, testament has one thing going for it over the first: It’s much, much shorter.

In the first four books, the authors inexplicably decide to tell the same story four different times, in four of their “books”. It seems again here, that the authors, while they had been attempting a collaborative work, ran into creative differences in what they wanted to tell, and instead of coming up with one acceptable story, told it four different ways, each having their own version of it, that often contradicts each other. Other than the inexplicable redundancy of these books, they actually offer a glimmer of hope. As opposed to the seemingly ceaseless parade of atrocities in the first section of the book, the main character of the first four books of the second part, seems like a genuinely nice guy, though not without his own issues. Unfortunately, like all too many of today’s novels, it turns to zombies to try to spice things up. Thankfully, the zombie character is only very briefly front and center, though references abound the rest of the book.

Most of the rest of the second part of the book is given over to “letters” written to expound on the message of the first few books of the chapters, but you get the sense in some of the letters that the people writing them are subtly working against each other. Read from a different perspective, the letters actually offer an interesting tale of two competing takes on an ideology, and how one narrative takes over from the others, as it seems this “Paul” guy is going to win out over this “James” guy that doesn’t write as many letters. Still, though, as interesting as that aspect may be, it is not enough to ask anyone to slog through the letters themselves for.

There is a glimmer of hope for the final “book” in this overweight tome. The Apocalypse of John, as it is called, could be a very serviceable sci-fi/fantasy horror story, with two or three rewrites and a good editor. Of course it, like everything else in this “good book”, it takes itself entirely too seriously.

Sadly, in the end, I can’t recommend this book for anyone. It is of torturous length, and could easily be 1/5th the length it is now. Many of the tales it tells are certainly not age-appropriate for children, and it tries to teach “morals” and “truths” that are neither moral nor true. In fact it is frequently misogynistic and offensive to most. The method of storytelling and the ever changing styles implies that this book was meant to be a collaborative effort by several (perhaps many) authors, but that they obviously hated each other and attempted to sabotage other’s work by repeating it with contradictions and confusion. What we are left with is a jumbled mess with merely a few nuggets of interesting material. Unfortunately, this means that I cannot recommend it even as a bargain book. In truth, whoever edited (if there was indeed an editor) and published this mess should be ashamed.

This is a great idea. I checked Amazon, and found several amusing 1- and 2-star reviews of The Bible as if it came out only recently. That and the reviews I’ve seen in the comments here are awesome. I haven’t read this apparently over-hyped book in full myself, but I plan to do so in the future, provided I can get a copy for free -as I don’t want to waste my money on such a crappy book.

Sadly this journalist had the unfortunate duty of reviewing yet another unending serial that promises to generate continuous direction in the lives of the masses!
The “Pentateuch” is a novel that starts out rehashing several old creation myths and declares a character that uses the same tag line as beloved cartoon character Popeye; “I am that I am!” Filled with innuendo and rife in contradiction the first chapters give an extremely distasteful impression of women. This fantastical meandering eventually winds it’s way through fratricide, world wide floods and 40 years in the desert for a group of pariahs, exiles who seek to maintain their identity.
The writer referred to as “Moses” is known to be a meek guy who show us how to manipulate a people in a rather inventive way by having a supposedly powerful deity follow them around as “a chosen people” but only if they obey his commands. That invention along with insightful psychological tactics make for the development of a warrior class that then “submits” in the final chapter which ends in detailed instructions to be a “nation of priests.”
As an avid Sci-Fi reader these stories are Star Wars/Star Trek meets Harlequin romance and will show up in multiple installments with the sequels rumored to hit the book shelves every 50 to 75 years. This may take a thousand years to fully complete but by then who would care?

Holy? Wholey holey. Skip it.

Never before has a series needed a reboot so urgently and so soon after its first release.

Written by several previously unknown authors, “The Holy Bible” presents the story of a middle-eastern tribe called the Jews through millenia, starting with not one but two creation myths and ending with the eventual death and resurrection of their deity and primary antagonist, Yahweh.

While there are the occasionally interesting story arcs and characters, the vast majority of “The Holy Bible” is a slew of conflicted, inconsistent canon and poorly executed ret-cons to a plot so meandering that only the most devoted of fans could pretend to follow it. Characters change names, villains change sides, and everything change wording. Some stories are curiously inserted; others are noticeably absent.

Strangely, none of this tangle of a narrative has prevented any of several upcoming sequels, each as conflicting in canon as the last.

REVIEW: The Bible: An anthology of desert folklore

This tremendous book- also available as two volumes or 66 booklets- is a near-comprehensive survey of shifting ethical systems across time and circumstances from Ancient Egypt through the glory days of the Roman Empire in the east. Dramatic shifts in the same people-group over a period of thousands of years will prove a compelling and often disturbing read for any cultural anthropologist.

The first portion of the Bible records the tragedy of a small enslaved desert tribe known as the Hebrews, who fall victim to systematic infanticide to keep their male population under control. Due to the influence of an adopted prince of Hebrew parentage, the Hebrews are able to secure their freedom after severe misfortune cripples the Egyptian economy and military. From here on out, the Hebrews are forced to fight for their place in the world as they compete with other tribes for scarce desert resources. According to the narrative, they have an ongoing relationship with a specific local god, who requires to be worshipped exclusively and hailed as Lord. The Lord often rescues the Hebrews from danger, but he is the very personification of the harsh realities of the desert: he has the power to withhold water, food, land, and safety from his chosen tribe when they displease him or entreat the other local deities of whom he is jealous.

This early part of the Bible is a chilling narrative of uncertain survival: genocide, child sacrifice, sex, and gore are all part and parcel of this hair-raising window through which we see humanity darkly. Eventually, the Hebrews are successful in establishing a kingdom, and the tone of their surviving documents changes dramatically: poetry, romance, and ruminations on wisdom. It is a time of power and wealth, as the people of the countries called Israel and Judah enter cultural relevance. They have a healthy relationship with their Lord, who proves time and time again that he is more powerful than other gods such as Baal.

The story takes another twist when the Israelites are overtaken by Persian culture in what is known as the Babylonian Captivity. Here, we see their traditional religion strongly colored by the Zoroastrian view of monotheism, with one good god and one evil god locked in fierce battle over the world. The captive Israelites establish close ties with the Persian royal family, even marrying into it. After a time, many Persian-born descendants return to Israel with the king’s blessing.

Fast forward four hundred years: the much thinner second volume, written in Greek, brings us suddenly into the familiarity of the Roman Empire. The people collectively known as the Jews go about their daily lives under the supervision of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. The second volume takes the form of biographies and letters all concerning one topic: a radical left-wing reformer, Yeshua of Nazareth, who preaches the renouncement of wordly goods and an emphasis on personal morals over the letter of the law. The son of a carpenter distantly descended from Israel’s second dynasty, Yeshua claims the Jews should stop waiting for the physical Kingdom of his forefather David to be restored, and instead participate in a figurative Kingdom of those who honor the Father God above worldly concerns. He gathers such a large following of men and women that the priesthood becomes frightened of him, and has him put to death against the wishes of Pontius Pilate and his wife. The image of Yeshua’s mother weeping as he slowly dies of suffocation on a wooden spike is especially tragic and vivid.

Yeshua’s philosophy soon becomes popular among Greeks looking for something more deep and meaningful, as evidenced by the extensive collection of letters written after his death which preach equality between genders, economic classes, and nationalities, and offer comfort that the spiritual Kingdom of those who practice morality is becoming a reality. Some of the documents take a more mystical view than others; there are two markedly different versions of Yeshua’s biography, one staying largely grounded in his real life and the other clearly written to be a non-literal exposition using Yeshua as a character to explain the author’s ideas. The final document in-particular seem representative of a mystic branch of the Yeshua tradition which experimented with using drugs to see past the veil of reality.

Overall, a fascinating read for anyone interested in the evolution of a society and its morals, especially when compared and contrasted with today.

I am a former pastor and would love to receive a copy, the Bible has been a fascination of mine for years.