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Elvis Never Did No Drugs

Published by marco on

The Bible is Bullshit is a video of an old Penn and Teller show[1] in which they spend some time gleefully debunking some of the more obvious contradictions in the bible. They actually provide a lot of decent historical background from the annals of biblical scholarship, which basically accepts that the bible is a work of man and has made some inroads into discovering exactly which men wrote which parts and when.

The biblical scholar they interview is completely incapable of formulating an argument that holds any water when the audience is even slightly skeptical. He often ends his argumentative ripostes by leaning back, tilting his chin into his hand and smirking, but he hasn’t made a point a 10-year-old shouldn’t be able to poke ten holes in. The most interesting point they make is comparing Elvis to Jesus; they show that, even only 30 years later, the history of Elvis has at least two main versions and many adherents for both.

“Elvis Presley died in 1977. He was born and lived at a time when most of the people in his land were literate. We have many first-hand reports about Elvis’ life. We have many reliable records: medical, musical and otherwise. Even so, there are people—lots of people—who insist that Elvis is not really dead. Sound familiar? Even the dozens of books written by the people who actually knew Elvis contain conflicting stories of his life. Sound familiar? There are people who insist that Elvis didn’t take drugs. … We have photographs of Elvis, in the morgue, dead as a fucking doornail and in just 25 years, there are stories that he’s not dead.”

Now, imagine trying to discover anything useful after 2000 years from a time when almost no one was literate and stories were transferred by word of mouth rather than written down. Penn and Teller’s effort is both funny and laudable, but it’s not the only one out there. It doesn’t show as much effort as this book, Der große Boss. Das Alte Testament. Unverschämt fromm neu erzählt (The big boss. The old testament, an outrageous retelling), which literally rewrites the bible in more plebian language, skipping a lot of the window-dressing and keeping all the violent plot points. It’s clearly a labor of love/hate, which, when compared to verse by verse, holds up as a faithful retelling of the actual happenings in the bible. However, when the story is told using less flowery and pious language, it comes across as the self-contradicting, war and empire story that it is.


[1] A two man magic team, which includes Penn, larger and easily more loquacious, paired with Teller, mute (by choice) and incredibly deft.