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Originally Posted by Quicksilver
OK I'll take the bait. As i understand it The Illiad is a story that consists of 24 books. It starts with the apple of discord, and continues through the Trojan war, which took place five hundred years before Homer's time. The story is some fact and some fiction. it is the oldest surviving Greek epic, and it is debated whether Homer truly composed it. The same doubt goes for the Odyssey. Everyone agrees wih that.
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Yes, everyone agrees with that because there are no longer large populations of Greece that believe in the old Greek religions and gods that are written about in the Illiad. BTW, the Odyssey is the same as the Illiad, but just translated to Latin. They are the same stories.
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Originally Posted by Quicksilver
Which part of the Bible is in the middle between fiction and non fiction?
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Well, if you are a religious person, very likely you believe that there is no fiction in the Bible, just as I'm sure religious Greek people in the year 300 BC would have believed the same thing about the Illiad, and just as Muslim people would say there is no fiction in the Quran.
But if you look at the Bible from purely a non-religious historical view, there are things in the Bible that are obviously true. For example, it is known for sure that the Egyptians had Jewish slaves, and that a leader named Moses lead them to freedom. But whether or not it happened the way depicted in the Charlton Heston movie -- that would be the "sensationalized" part I am talking about.
The problem with both the Bible and the Illiad is that there was no written language at the time of the events in these books. Archeologists agree that the first written language appeared in Greece around 500-600 BC. The Trojan war, if indeed a real event (this can be debated), happened around 1200 BC. So for 600 years the specifics of this event was passed on by word of mouth.
Did you ever play the "telephone" game in kindergarden when you were a little kid? The story at the end of the line rarely has much resemblance to the original story. You can bet that both the Bible and the Illiad suffer from this fate as well.
Unless of course you believe that the Bible is the word of God and the earth is 6000 years old, is the center of the universe, God made the world in 6 days, etc....
If that is your viewpoint, then obviously you would disagree.