What if Judas didn't do it?

[Belacqua]

Narratives are laid out across "human time" rather than "clock time." This is time as you experienced it, and as you remember it—an abstraction of the real thing. To quote Jerome Bruner, "It is time whose significance is given by the meaning assigned to events within its compass." This is what I mean when I say the Bible is narrative. It isn't written in expository form, like a textbook or encyclopedia. It is written with a point of view, it is embedded across human time, and often written with self at the center of the narration.

I think this is crucial. It also pinpoints the difference between those who are comfortable with narrative literature and those who feel that only science can tell us things worth knowing. 

You're way more up to date on the subject than I am, but to me it goes back to good old Freud. As you know, he wanted to be a scientist but instead ended up inventing something like "applied literature." The analysand makes sense of his life by making it into a story. 

So someone who can say: "I was abused as a child but in the long run it has made me stronger," has created a story arc that gives meaning. The abuse is no longer random stuff that happened but an event in a narrative with significance to a personal history. 

(And not only Freud. Proust teaches us that the way to redeem a life that's less than admirable is to make it into art.)

Earlier I was saying to somebody that to read the Bible one must be familiar with narrative techniques, and this is what I meant. Human time is not science time. The kind of objective empirical truth that science aims for removes the personal subjective experience which is exactly what gives one's life meaning. Reading the Bible as if it's a timetable of events takes out everything it's meant to do.