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you have to keep in mind something that has already been raised but merits repeating that the status accorded the bible is a strict function of belief (your relationship to a religion/religious cultural space)--if you do not work from within a space that accords a specific position to the text, its status floats about. for me, the bible is interesting only as a text that others refer to, recycle, reprocess...you have to know it to know what the moves are, what the jokes are.
if i was interested in understanding (pace dilthey) how, say, pentecostal chrisitianity (still the fast-growing social movement in the soouthern hemisphere) generated effects on, say, politics, then the role of particular ways of reading the bible might be important analytically.
the short version: the bible is only an interesting source if the community you are either part of or looking at understands it as such. it has no more transcendent value than that.
as for the claim that the writers were among the leading thinkers of the age in which they were writing--i have no idea how you would even start to demonstrate that claim--except one--which would require that you relativize how importance is accorded to particular bodies of thought, not on the basis of content, but on the basis of the activities of particular social networks of critics/academics/writers who occupy particular status positions in a given cultural field. for an example of what i am talking about, you could read some recent work on the legacy of j.s. bach, for example, which pushes to the center how 19th century critics revised the understanding of his work in a direction of composition and away from improvisation as a function of the shifts in how music production was understood. reputations of figures from the past are more reflections of particular power relations in the present of the critic than of the meaning of the figure from the past.
i do not see anything in the gospels that is anywhere near as developed as what you find in plotinus, for example, if you want to play the rate-your-favorite-neoplatonist game. but plotinus was not christian, so he tends to get pushed to the side in canon-formation (the list of legitimate texts, the main space for the exercize of cultural power).....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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