Does the bible have intrinsic value?

[Angrboda]

The bible has a few virtues, but many, many more faults. And as Esquilax pointed out, those virtues would still be virtues whether or not they were 'god-breathed' or not.

If you believe the bible is good literature, I have to suspect it is you that haven't read the thing. Most of its value as literature comes from the creativity of the translators of the King James version, as well as a hindsight bias from our cultural aesthetics having been strongly influenced by its influence on literature as a whole, largely by virtue of its ubiquity and religious centrality. I rather suspect its literary virtues in the original Greek or Hebrew are largely unknown to any but experts. As a work of pure literature, it is easily outdone by any modern classic of fiction. Moreover, since the bible as we know it was the process of centuries of after the fact selection, including a very late fixing of the Jewish canon, any virtues it has are likely as much due to that selection process as any original virtues. Do you believe their selection and political maneuvering to secure 'their bible' was god-breathed? More often than not, it was breathed into existence at the point of a sword or through political leverage. As an example of wisdom literature it is perhaps worthwhile, but the bulk of it isn't wisdom literature, and again, we have a bias towards it for reasons having nothing to do with its virtues as wisdom literature. And again, even restricting it to wisdom literature, it is easily matched or outclassed by, to my view, the Tao Te Ching, Sun Tzu's Art Of War, the Bhagavad Gita, the poetry of Rumi, and many others. The Eloquent Peasant is far more compelling in its simplicity and given its source. No, the Christian bible is shit, and holding up the opinions of a few people who are either too polite to say so, or are simply wrong, doesn't change that.