A Rationalist Reviews: The Holy Bible

It’s one you have to tackle eventually. It’s not so rare in this age of screaming superlative taglines to see a story labelled as “the best ever told”, but on the basis of sales alone The Holy Bible is head and shoulders above its competitors.

It’s not strictly speaking a book, but rather a clumsy stitch-job of two completely different stories. We all remember the runaway success of The Old Testament and quite rightly thought the series was over when the original authors died centuries ago. Now though, a bunch of amateur script-doctors have leapt upon the opportunity to tack their own novella onto the original, calling it The New Testament in a shameless attempt to curry favour with longtime fans. The whole package is called The Holy Bible, after that Manic Street Preachers album.

The deluxe version of The Holy Bible, exclusively on sale in Starbucks

Regular readers will recall that at the time I lambasted The Old Testament for its po-faced take on the epic family saga, calling it "Twin Peaks without the laughs". Come back Moses, all is forgiven! This latest addition to the canon manages to retain the dry genealogies and lists of rules and regulations that made the OT so hard to read, and ditch the parts that made it interesting. They take the best character from the OT – the vindictive and deliciously fickle ‘God’ – and utterly change his character. This time round, you half expect to see Him hugging a tree, rather than setting it on fire and shouting from inside it. Replacing such a popular, in-your-face fan favourite with a proverb-spouting liberal deadbeat might be the kind of thing that goes down a storm in the literary world, but you can’t see die-hard fans in Dead Squaw, Alabama taking it quite so well.

This ‘Jesus’ is somehow both the ‘God’ we remember and an entirely new character altogether, in a lazy move that is never fully explained. He spends his time dithering around the Holy Land, throwing out glib speeches about equality and justice, all the while followed by a dozen irritating literary props collectively called the ‘disciples’. I cannot begin to express my frustration at this gaggle of faceless drones, whose sole purpose seems to be asking asinine questions so that Jesus has yet another opportunity to sermonise and patronise his audience. Considering this guy is supposed to be recruiting for some radical breakaway sect, the fact that his right-hand men seem unable to tie their own sandal-thongs without his supervision stretches the credibility of the plot somewhat.

At times it seems as though the authors haven’t even read each other’s contributions. Luke and Matthew are the only authors who can be bothered to describe Jesus’s supernatural birth, John completely omits the exorcisms that in other accounts make Jesus look like the fifth Ghostbuster, and Paul doesn’t even seem sure that the character he’s writing about actually exists in the book's setting. I know that authors are often under a lot of pressure, but I don’t think a weekly meet up over coffee to swap notes would have been too much to ask.

Overall, there are some good scenes, and some engaging characters, but the NT suffers from the same flaws as its predecessor. Promising dramatic scenes are utterly squandered almost without exception. The authors are adept at creating perfect set-ups for action scenes that would make Michael Bay weep tears of pure adrenaline, but consistently fail to deliver anything but bitter disappointment. One minute Jesus is kicking ass in the temple and the next he’s wandering around in the desert doing nothing, or healing the sick. It brings to mind the depressingly anticlimactic battle for Jericho in the OT and I’d hoped we’d seen the last of it.

Although not strictly relevant to the quality of the book, you have to wonder who authorised such loose brand control. The dizzying array of spin-offs, continuations and reinterpretations are enough to give any new reader a headache. It’s bad enough having a single story told from four often wildly different perspectives, but poorly thought-out fan fiction like the Book of Mormon and the dozens of near-contemporary Gnostic gospels hardly improve matters. It’s as though the publishers let any idiot with a pen have a stab at writing a gospel in the race to make money off the franchise. People really love these books. I mean, really love them. Harry Potter fanatics have nothing on some of these ‘Christians’. Letting so many people dash off their own non-canon spin-offs is at best irresponsible, but at worst pretty damn dangerous.

Overall score: 2/5

Verdict: if you somehow find yourself trapped in a literary vacuum then reach for The Holy Bible with a happy heart, but there are so many superior fantasy novels out there it’s hard to see why you’d bother with this lacklustre effort.

Originally published in the first issue of Secular Future, the quarterly magazine of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies