<p>How is this even news? There are classes based solely on the works of shakespeare, so why cant we have classes on THE most influential piece of literature in history?</p>
<p>the issue is HOW it is taught, the curriculum, the people pushing the courses…and when you look at the sources of the curriculum, it raises eyebrows…</p>
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<p>You’d certainly get some debate on that. For instance, almost all the Western literature that has come down to us from about the 2nd century CE back can be traced to Homer. Neither the Greeks of the Classical Age nor Romans such as Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Caesar, et. al. had probably ever seen or heard of the Torah or any other books of the Tanakh. After that, the Bible was pretty much the province of the Church until the rise of Protestantism, so most people didn’t really get a look even at the Vulgate. Of course, most people weren’t literate.</p>
<p>Shakespeare uses many biblical references, but he also uses many classical ones. And Shakespeare almost certainly must be considered the most important influence on English literature.</p>
<p>And then, of course, this is only Western literature. The I Ching was very influential in China and much of the rest of East Asia. The Vedas in India.</p>
<p>I think the Bible can certainly be considered a finalist for the most influential piece of literature in history, but it might not win the grand prize.</p>
<p>Yes, I’ve been thinking about the influence of the Bible since yesterday, and I’ve been scratching my head trying to come up with some body of pre-20th Century literature for which the Bible is truly necessary background. It’s surprisingly difficult. As Tarhunt says, before the 16th Century in northern Europe, the Bible was pretty much the property of specialists in the Christian world, Jews didn’t write much that we study, Muslims paid attention to other texts, and the rest of the world didn’t know or care. Renaissance literature is overwhelmingly concerned with classical sources, and the Bible is curiously inessential even to works like the Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost. (Understanding Christian doctrine is not inessential to those works, but what’s relevant is Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, not the Bible itself all that much.) Shakespeare has a smattering of biblical references, but you can get an awful lot out of Shakespeare without paying much attention to them.</p>
<p>For all the familiarity of the Bible, its beauty, its function as a common cultural reference point, it really doesn’t show up that much. If you were going to measure “the most influential works of literature,” I suspect Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe would beat out Whoever The Author Was.</p>
<p>I’m not arguing against teaching the Bible, because it does serve as an important cultural reference point, and it is beautiful in places and challenging in others, and people care about it. It is an important source of ideas and inspiration, although I think many of the ideas sourced in the Bible, especially the Old Testament, are difficult to extract on a fresh reading without a lot of context, and the New Testament is only a little more user-friendly. In fact, one of the supreme functions of the Bible is that it’s so subversive – going back to this supposedly authoritative text tends to undermine a lot of traditions about what it says. That was true during the Reformation, and it remains true now.</p>
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I feel pretty safe in saying that Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare and especially Goethe would take exception to your analysis here, JHS. There are more than enough references to the authors in question to prove this…in their own words. </p>
<p>I just finished Prof. Hollander’s (Princeton) course on Dante. To the best of my knowledge he is one of the worlds foremost scholars on Dante and I can assure you that he would take an exception to your assertion, at least on Dante. We have developed quite a relationship during and since his Dante course and I feel safe in speaking for him here.</p>
<p>Whether their are specific references, of which there are a great many (a quick google will bear this out) the table is always set by the metaphysics and rhetorical style (which evolved over time) by the sacred text of <em>any</em> culture; in India the Bhagavad-gita; for a quarter of the worlds population the Koran and hadith; in the West the Bible.
I don’t see how this is disputable…or even why anyone would choose to dispute it–beyond irrational fears.</p>
<p>–As to the Bible and the dominion of specialists:</p>
<p>again, I do not see the specific relevance. Certainly Shakespeare was completely immersed in the literature of the Bible (according to Ackroyd, GreenBlatt, Shapiro and even Frye), even if he himself was not monastically inclined or religiously dogmatic.
Dante–please.
Milton? </p>
<p>And that the general population was not adept at the literature of the bible only sharpens an already lethal point:
the general population did not read the authors you site above, even <em>if</em> not the Bible–that was the province of the elite–which was as equally, if not far more, familiar with the Bible than Dante and the rest of classical literature.</p>
<p>Of course classical literature was the other great touchstone of great literature: that’s one of the reasons why it is taught–so why not the Bible?</p>
<p>In the end, most of our literature and art and music of almost the last 2000 years was inspired by or contended with the Holy Writ such as it was…even if only, to coin a phrase, motivated by the “anxiety of influence”–or to, as it has been said, “ruin the sacred truths.”</p>
<p>…work your way through Medieval or Renaissance painting at your own risk without a knowledge of Scripture–even if only through oral transmission and the repetition of the art itself.</p>
<p>It is Athens <em>and Jerusalem</em> not Athens alone that created the singular dynamic of Western culture. Again, indisputable.</p>
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