Schweitzer, Strauss and the discovery of fiction

As H. Wheeler Robinson wrote in 1940, ‘books about the Bible have legion for their name (and some of them deserve a Gadarene destiny)’. There have been well over 400 new versions of part or all of the Bible published so far this century; one survey of twenty of these published in 1975 runs to over 200 pages; another covering eleven versions is nearly twice as long. John H. Gottcent's The Bible as Literature: A Selective Bibliography (Boston: Hall, 1979) is over 150 pages long. I have noted not far short of 1,500 — a figure that, like a crocodile, never ceases growing — books, articles and stray comments from the present century that have some relevance to the story, and many of them deserve a far from Gadarene destiny. In short, there is not just the obvious difficulty of writing a history of the present: the comprehensiveness that was the unattainable ideal for some parts of the story becomes an impossibility in a work already so long. This is not wholly a matter for regret. It is the development of ideas rather than their repetition that is of primary interest, and most of the patterns of thought that have been observed continue to show themselves in the modern dress of the last hundred years.