REL 201: Biblical Literature — An Introduction

That's a good question. The short answer is that neither the Hebrew scriptures nor the New Testament scriptures may be regarded as the Autobiography of God. Nor are they the Biography of God.

Although many of us regard the scriptures as inspired by God, it is not doctrinally accurate, in either Christian or Jewish tradition, to regard the scriptures as the "ipissima verba," that is, the very words of God himself.

Rather, Christian and Jewish doctrine teaches that the scriptures must be seen as human words which have been generated as the result of a revelatory experience or a prophetic commission.

The Bible is therefore "God's Word" to Christians but only in this more nuanced sense: that God's revelation to human beings takes place in scriptural form, mediated by human voices of prophets, priests, storytellers, scribes, etc.

Incidentally, this is one of the points which distinguishes Christianity and Judaism from Islam: the Muslims believe their Quran to be directly dictated by God; the narrative voice in the Quran is God himself. You can ask yourself what kind of difference it makes for religious believers to think this about their scriptures.

Sometimes, it can be shocking to realize that our basic assumptions about the authorship or narrative voice of Biblical texts are not accurate. But close, literal reading, reading that is faithful to the actual content of the text, not our idealization of it, is the surest path to accurate understanding and insight.

There are many different genres of human discourse in the Bible, including story, letter, prophetic oracle, song, etc. Almost all of them concern God in some way, but only when a prophet purports to relate the words of God himself do the texts actually claim to represent God's words directly. This is a relatively small portion of the book.

Instead, the central focus of the narrative books in the Bible are the human creatures of the world, not God. The narrative books manifestly present a human voice narrating, in a classic third-person narrative style (reminiscent both of classic storytelling and of historical writing) the actions of humans and their interaction with God. God is one character among many in these narratives.

It is possible, after reading these scriptures, to attempt to derive a biography of God (not an autobiography, but a biography) from them... but much about God remains mysterious and unclear from the scriptures. A recent book by Jack Miles, God: A Biography purports to tell the story of God's life based on Miles' reading of the scriptures. This book may interest you, but it's failings illustrate the problem with considering the scriptures as a source of biographical (let alone autobiographical) information about God.

For further reading on the literary aspects of this question, I can recommend to you the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Biography (you can link to it through the library website, via the Electronic Resources link) if you'd like to read further on Autobiography versus Biography. You can also read this article on Wikipedia: Point of View (Literature).