The Shittiest Story Ever Told

We are frequently told to treat religious texts as literary masterpieces, speaking of them in hushed, sacred tones. Phrases like "the greatest story ever told" are treated as established consensus, and even secular biblical scholars like Bart Ehrman often praise concepts like the "genius of Mark."

Yet when evaluated on objective literary merits, there is no inherent genius to be found. The fundamental mechanism driving the perceived greatness of religious literature is audience confirmation bias. People deem a work of literature "great" primarily when it validates assumptions, emotional desires, and theological biases they already hold.

When an individual desires to believe in a benevolent, supreme deity for which no empirical evidence exists, a narrative that affirms "God exists, and He loves you" is inevitably judged to be profound and high-quality. This psychological mechanism also explains why believers universally praise their own scripture as sublime while dismissing the sacred stories of competing religions as crude, absurd, or low-quality. The evaluation of literary quality in religious contexts is entirely compromised by bias.

Nobody reads the other side's masterpiece

The simplest test makes this concrete. There are over two billion Christians, close to two billion Muslims, over a billion Hindus and some fifteen million Jews, and each of these groups is told that its own scripture is the most sublime text ever written. Yet almost none of them has ever read anyone else's. Ask a devout Christian for their favourite sura of the Quran, or a Muslim which chapter of the Bhagavad Gita moved them, and you get a blank stare. This is not how great literature behaves. Homer, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and the Thousand and One Nights are read with pleasure by people of every faith and of none; their greatness crosses every border without a visa. Scripture does not travel at all: outside its own flock, its only readers are scholars and critics.

So every believer on earth, by their reading habits, delivers the same verdict: the other religions' sacred books are at best average, not worth an evening. The single exemption each of them grants is to the one book they were raised to revere. Put the verdicts together and every scripture in existence has been judged unremarkable by the overwhelming majority of humanity. The minority that dissents is, in every single case, exactly the group that was taught to love the book before it could read it. That is not a literary judgement. It is a tribal one.

Even the believers need to be made to read it

Inside the flock the picture is no better, because nobody reads scripture for pleasure. It is consumed as a duty: a weekly portion, a lectionary cycle, a "read the Bible in a year" plan, a verse at a funeral. It takes a calendar and an institution to get people through it. No one has ever needed a reading plan to finish a novel they enjoyed, and nobody leaves free copies of Anna Karenina in hotel drawers. A book that has to be assigned is a book that cannot hold a reader on its own.

It cannot stand without an interpretation industry

Two thousand years of commentary, the Talmud, the Church Fathers, the tafsir, and a professional clergy whose job is to explain what the text "really means" exist because the plain text does not work. In any other book, passages that need a trained expert to make them coherent would be called bad writing; here the incoherence is rebranded as depth. And when the reader still fails to be impressed, the fault is placed on the reader: a hardened heart, a missing Holy Spirit, or insufficient Arabic. Nobody claims you need Russian to tell that Tolstoy is good. Translation is the great filter of literature, and real literature survives it. The Quran's "inimitability" is a doctrine, not a critical finding, and the challenge to "produce a sura like it" is judged by the believers themselves.

The adaptations give the game away

Every film, play, and novel built on scripture has to invent what the source lacks: motives, dialogue, inner life, a plot that goes somewhere. Milton had to build Satan's character almost from nothing because Genesis gives him a handful of lines. The Bible stories people think they know, Noah, David and Goliath, the nativity, are the children's retellings, and they are smoother than the original because someone finally edited it. The best "biblical" literature is the fan fiction, not the canon.

It loses to its own contemporaries

Age is no excuse, because the text does no better against books of its own era. Gilgamesh tells the flood story earlier and better. Greek tragedy, written in the same centuries as the prophets, has plot, character, and irony. What the Bible offers instead is two creation stories stitched together, two flood accounts interleaved, four contradictory gospels, and whole books of census lists and legal code that no editor would have let through. It is a compilation, not a composition. Its protagonist is the most poorly drawn character in literature: omnipotent, arbitrary, and without a single explained motive. Job gets his children killed over a wager and is compensated with replacements.

The good parts are the least religious ones

Notice which books secular readers do praise: Job, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs. These are precisely the ones with the least theology in them. The Song of Songs never mentions God; Ecclesiastes is a step away from nihilism. The text is good exactly to the extent that it is not religious.

Finally, the slogan itself

"The greatest story ever told" is not a critical verdict. It is the title of a 1949 bestseller and a 1965 Hollywood film. It is marketing. And a product that needs blasphemy laws, excommunication, and in places the death penalty to protect it from reviewers is not a product confident of its reviews. No one has ever been executed for finding Hamlet overrated. Great literature survives criticism; scripture had to make criticism a crime.

To properly evaluate religious narratives, one must look at how they are received by individuals stripped of faith — those who do not accept the supernatural claims or believe in the divine authority of the texts. Without the emotional buffer of confirmation bias, the facade collapses: the narratives emerge as poorly constructed, repetitive, primitive, and logically incoherent. In short, stripped of belief, the story is not a masterpiece; it is a piece of shit.