Contrary to Bill Kettenhofen beliefs in the October 3rd Record Bee, my observations about the world are not aimed solely at small sections of the Bible but are the same for all narratives, God given or man-made; all narratives contain both fiction and non-fiction and the difference between fiction and non-fiction is simply a matter of degree. I have no doubt that the past was real but the stories historians tell us about the past are simply constructions.
We tend to think that history is written in stone and that it is unchanging and immutable; but history is a continuing dialogue between the past and the present. It is as if each age writes its own history, as each age makes a different evaluation of what is significant in its own past in the light of its own preoccupations and prejudices.
In 1892 Marian Cox wrote a 538 page volume entitled Cinderella; Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants, emphasizing the fact that the origins of the story have never been determined and in fact, the story”s origin is unanswerable. She finds the framework of all narratives goes like this: a call to adventure; suddenly a magical helper appears; our hero is confronted by a universal evil; then suddenly re-birth. In the Cinderella story we find: the upcoming ball; the fairy Godmother; the evil stepsisters; and our hero, Cinderella, becoming a beautiful princess and she and the prince live happily ever-after.
Ever wonder why we seem to get a new book on the Kennedy assassination, Lincoln, or Washington every few years? It is because the past is not discovered or found, it is not simply an interpretive narrative that just organizes evidence but it uses effective and persuasive language strategies.
The bottom line is simply that we may think, or even believe, that God inspired the original words of the Bible but we do not have the actual original words. We have words that were copied by unknown scribes, from error-ridden copies of copies that are centuries removed from the original oral histories. We are stuck with the conclusion that if God didn”t preserve the words that were supposedly spoken, He/She/It didn”t find the words important enough to be perfectly understood by all religions and that divisiveness and misunderstanding are God”s goal.
From Samuel Butler: God cannot change the past, but historians can.
Greg Blinn, Kelseyville
