Are Bible Stories Really Stories?

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The Bible is filled with stories. Parents and churches teach children Bible stories. Preachers tell Bible stories in their sermons. Both believers and non-believers quote Bible stories.

What Is A Story?

But what exactly does it mean to refer to any part of the Bible as a story? To answer that question, we need to start with a preliminary question. What is a story?

The essential element of any story is that it makes connections between events. For example, if I tell you that today I bought a loaf of bread and I had a phone conversation with a friend, would you consider that a story? It all depends on whether or not I connect the buying of the bread with the conversation with my friend. If they are simply two separate events in my day, there’s really no story.

To make these two events into a story, I would have to connect them in some sort of causal way. I bought the bread because of something my friend said to me on the phone, or I called my friend because I bought the bread. Whichever way it goes, for there to be a story, there has to some way that one event led to the other. This causal connection between events is the essential element of a story.

Are Bible Stories True?

When it comes to Bible stories, so far, so good. Bible stories are narratives about connections between events. Few people would disagree with that definition.

Now we come to the tricky part of any consideration of Bible stories. Are Bible stories true? The word “story” isn’t going to help us much here.

Read through the definitions of “story” in the Online Dictionary and you will see that the single English word “story” can refer to true stories, fictitious stories, and outright lies.

So what do these definitions of “story” mean for reading Bible stories? Are Bible stories true, fictitious, or lies, or some combination of all of these characteristics?

In other words, are Bible stories accurate histories of actual occurrences? Are they fiction? Did someone make then up, the way novelists write novels and screenwriters write screenplays? Are they “myths”—a word so loaded with negative connotations that referring to any part of the Bible as myth is guaranteed to provoke an onslaught of outrage?

What better place to ask if Bible stories really are stories than with the biblical creation story—or is it creation stories?—of Genesis 1-3?

To be continued…

For Your Success,

Kalinda

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson