It is a collection of writings containing some of the oldest recorded human stories, poetry and philosophy, law, history, and myth. Reading it is no more a waste of time than reading the Iliad or Plato.
The Iliad is both entertaining and well written, while Plato is intellectually stimulating where he's not just wrong. The Bible is not remotely as well written as the Iliad, nor is it comparable as a work of philosophy to Plato.
I'm in the middle of a philosophy 101 class. I had been meaning to read the works of Plato, but until now I was busy learning other stuff.
I have to say that surprisingly, I have lost all respect for Plato after reading Crito (It's Plato's take on what Socrates' reasons for not escaping his execution.) It contains the most illogical, oversimplified, flat-out erroneous thought processes I've ever encountered. If Crito is an accurate representation of Socrates' philosophy, I have to question the intelligence of anyone who felt that he was "wise."
I was pretty dissapointed by this, because I enjoyed some of Plato's other writings.
I do happen to agree that the Iliad is far superior to the quality of writing found in the bible.
I'm not sure why you were expecting to respect Plato for everything he wrote about. Plato may have been one of the brilliant minds of all times and have produced some of the most valuable bits of Western culture, history and philosophy, but even for his own time the guy had some seriously disturbing ideas about what the world should look like. The Republic for example has been a great inspiration for fascist ideas or the promotion of human inequality.
I didn't expect to agree with him on everything, but I did expect the quality of his writing to be pretty consistent. Crito is often used to illustrate logical reasoning, yet the arguments it presents are so ridiculous that no reasonable, logical person would agree with them.
You may be interested in Diogenes the Cynic, a contemporary of Plato. He hated Plato, he accused him of entirely misunderstanding Socrates and regularly interrupted Plato's lectures to ridicule him.
Considering the bible is not even a cohesive work with a single style, language, or even writer, it really never stood a chance of standing next to the Illiad as a work of literature. It's importance, besides the obvious importance of a particular translation itself, is solely historic, cultural.
This is so tendentious a thing to say as to just be weird. Do Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, M. H. Abrams, and pretty much every other scholar who has written about it, not know what literature is?
If they think it stands on it's own literary merits, then they are deluded. The Iliad is far more sophisticated.
If we want to talk about importance then that is another story, but merely on the quality of writing there is hardly a comparison between the two.
"The Bible" is a curated though disorganized collection of confused and contradictory prose and poetry, many of which were evolved rather than written, filled with massive sections of irrelevant tedium (Have you read Numbers? I mean honestly...). Together it only forms a cohesive work with logic-defying "interpretation".
The King James translation has literary importance for it's influence on the English language, and the collection in general obviously has immense historic importance, but other than that? Yeah... no.
On the other-hand the Iliad is a masterpiece of epic poetry and a fine example of writing by all standards. No excuses need to be made for it, and that really is the most telling thing to realize.
Thanks for expanding. But doesn't this boil down to hair-splitting over the definition of "literature"? Does folklore count as literature? Many scholars would say yes, and have given it serious literary study, yet it doesn't even exist as a canonical text.