At 19 or 20 I would not have written this article. Like many young people at the time, I was transfixed by the New Atheism of Dawkins, Harris, and Hirsi Ali. Religion was a scourge, making the world worse in every conceivable way. Recommending the Bible would have been like recommending The Lords of Elder Zion, a pointless recommendation for intelligent readers and a dangerous suggestion for gullible ones. After all, I had read the Bible several times throughout my Baptist upbringing and didn’t think myself any better for it.

But I was better for it. Throughout the years, I’ve come to realize, as both a reader and writer, that the religious education of my youth has been a tremendous advantage. From early childhood, I was exposed to epic poetry, metaphor, frenzied apocalyptic visions, philosophical dialectics, and ancient Near East history. Moreover, my family’s old-fashioned congregation preferred the King James Version, which is written in Early Modern English, an extinct historical dialect that couldn’t be further from our East Texas twang. The stark difference between what I read in the Bible and what I heard all around me taught me early on the first rule of writing: literature is a language unto itself, produced and consumed in a manner distinct from the conversations and communiques of everyday life. To put it more bluntly, I learned that one should not write how he talks if he wants to do it well. For example, someone might plainly state

God created the sun and moon.

But Genesis 1:16 says

God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night.

These two statements might mean the same thing, yet they are not 1:1 substitutes for one another. The gulf between the ordinary and profound is what separates literature from all but the best-spoken word. Thundered out from behind an austere Baptist pulpit in a dead king’s English, Genesis taught me this in elementary school. The Very Hungry Caterpillar did not.

Of course, you don’t have to read the King James Bible to know what beautiful writing looks like. However, if you’re reading in English, its influence is inescapable. According to one count, it’s contributed 257 phrases to the language, more than any other single source, including Shakespeare. Many would be familiar. He escaped by the skin of his teeth, saw the writing on the wall, and washed his hands of the whole thing. He’s the apple of my eye, the salt of the earth, a man after my own heart. There’s nothing new under the sun. That’s his cross to bear, his scapegoat, his golden calf, his forbidden fruit, his Jezebel, his Land of Milk and Honey. Some of these are so obvious, or so ingrained into the culture that one does not necessarily need to know their biblical providence to understand their meaning. But that’s not always the case. For example, secular listeners would understand a politician who said he “saw the light.” But they might not if he described his political awakening as a “Road to Damascus moment.”. Someone who has read the Bible would know both sayings derive from The Book of Acts, Chapter 9. Here, Saul of Tarsus, a persecutor of the early Church, is converted to Christianity — and changes his name to Paul — after he is blinded by a light on the road to Damascus and hears Christ ask “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Likewise, someone who has read the Bible would know the politician who alludes to either the “Road to Damascus” or “seeing the light” is saying several things. The first is that he was once firmly on the other side (he is very conservative now but was far left before, or vice-versa). The second is that his conversion was sudden and profound. And the third is that he is a zealous convert, and an ambitious proselytizer, much like the Apostle Paul himself. He’s here to spread the Good Word (about himself, most often).

Apart from mere phrases, the influence of biblical stories on the canon of Western art and literature is unmatched by anything except for, ironically, Greek and Roman mythology, the literary leftovers of the first pagan religion completely supplanted by Christianity. If public education deems it necessary for students to read The Iliad, The Odyssey, or Edith Hamilton’s Mythology as a basic part of their humanities education, the same should be true of the Bible. Like the Greek myths, it’s a foundational text upon which the bulk of Western literature and art rests. One cannot comprehend the title (much less the content) of Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem without reading Yeats’ The Second Coming. Likewise, one cannot comprehend Yeats without reading the Book of Revelation. In Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Didion holds a mirror to the utopian counterculture in 1968 San Francisco, revealing a dystopic, drug-addled nightmare. Similarly, in The Second Coming, Yeats does not celebrate the end of the “War to End All Wars,” but rather highlights the horror of its destruction and ponders the evils that might rise in its wake, asking, “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” (the answer is World War II, as we now know). In Revelation, Saint John is left to die on the Island of Patmos. As his co-religionists are fed to lions in the Colosseum for public entertainment, the old prophet has ecstatic visions of a beast — the antichrist — which has conquered the world but will soon collapse, when its filthy decadence becomes pestilence and famine, and its wars come home, and the God it killed as a carpenter comes back a King. Yeats’ poem put it more succinctly: “the centre cannot hold”; Didion agrees, after witnessing hippies give a pre-school-aged child LSD in the Haight, and opens her book with the quote.

What’s true for literature is true for art. I worry less that people fail to interpret the sultry (but allegedly repentant!) beauty of Domenico Tintoretti’s Mary Magdalene since it portrays her as a reformed prostitute, an old, persistent characterization of the saint with which even many secular people seem familiar, but which has no basis in the Bible. Instead, I worry that those who haven’t read the Bible will fail to interpret Donatello’s Mary Magdalene. Here, Mary Magdalene is neither beautiful nor seductive. Rather, she is stoic, mannish, weathered, and disturbed. Made of wood and therefore subject to rot, Donatello’s statue is much closer to the biblical Mary Magdalene, a victim of demonic possession who began following Jesus after he cast seven devils out of her. She followed him to his execution at the foot of the cross, and tended to his grave — becoming the first to see him risen — then spread the word of his resurrection to his disciples, all but one of whom had fled the scene after Jesus’ arrest. The biblical Mary Magdalene, like Donatello’s, is a madwoman turned ascetic. Her face is that of a traumatized witness, one who has faced her own literal demons and the violent crucifixion of her deliverer. Her masculinity is a byproduct of both life and metaphor. The biblical Mary Magdalene cast aside her worldly possessions and followed Christ throughout Roman Judea on foot, living off miracles, split loaves and fish, and water turned into wine. Such a lifestyle is not conducive to the good skin and sultry curves in Tintoretti’s painting, nor in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ for that matter, where she is portrayed by Italian sex symbol Monica Belluci. Symbolically, her masculinity in Donatello’s sculpture also pays homage to her bravery in contrast to the male disciples’ cowardice in abandoning the crucifixion, and her ministry to them after the resurrection. She stood resolute in the face of male failure, and became an “apostle to the apostles.” By masculinizing her appearance, Donatello is telling us: She’s more of a man than they were.

Someone who has read the Bible would understand Donatello perfectly, or at least understand where he’s coming from. Someone who half-watched The DiVinci Code on a plane once might wonder why the statue is so scary.

It’s worth noting that this category of person I’ve delineated, someone who has read the Bible, included virtually all highly educated people in the West — even vast swaths of the literate working class — until at least the latter half of the last century. While watching a famous debate at Cambridge Union in 1965 between conservative intellectual William F. Buckley and the writer and civil-rights activist James Baldwin, it struck me that Baldwin opened his speech by remarking, “I find myself, not for the first time, in the position of a kind of a Jeremiah.” This is not a mere “turn the other cheek”-level biblical reference, yet he felt confident the audience would understand him anyway. He assumed that his crowd at Cambridge would know Jerimiah was the “weeping prophet” of the Old Testament who had hopelessly pleaded with his people to turn away from their wickedness to save the country from the coming destruction he had foreseen. He also assumed that given the debate question at hand was “Has the American dream come at the expense of the American negro?,” his audience would contextualize the “Jeremiah” remark correctly: he saw the oppression of American blacks as an existential one for the country, but he was deeply pessimistic about the prospect of his warnings being heeded.

I doubt anyone, particularly a liberal, openly gay novelist, would make such generous assumptions about the biblical literacy of his audience today. It’s a great shame, not merely for the sake of art and literature either. Earlier this month the Israeli Prime Minister said “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.” In the Book of Samuel, the Amalekites launched a surprise attack against the Jewish people — about as clear cut of a biblical allegory to Hamas’s October 7th attack as one could imagine. The reference is somewhat obscure, but I wonder whether, a generation or two ago, we would have witnessed so many online conspicuously googling the word “Amalek” to understand the news. Even today, in Western history’s most secular era, there is no escaping the scriptures and their influence in our world.

You don’t have to be a religious fanatic, or even a Christian, to find great beauty and usefulness in the Bible. Its greatest version is named after a gluttonous drunk King who loved poetry and Scottish boys who had nothing. Turn off the news, put down your book, and exit the museum. Then read the King James Version and then come back to it, squinting no more.

— River Page