Sitting in a lecture hall in the Humanities Building, Alex Ball listens attentively as Jason Yost, professor of English, speaks to the class about the apostles, Galatians and the Corinthian church.
But Ball, a fourth-year English student, is a self-proclaimed atheist.
Despite his religious beliefs, Ball is enrolled in English 108B, “English Bible as Literature: New Testament,” along with 64 other UCLA students.
Yost teaches the Bible from a literary perspective to a diverse crowd of undergraduates, all of whom have their own background, beliefs and individual story ““ and all of the students assign their own personal meaning to the Bible.
David Carreon also sits in the lecture hall listening to Yost.
Carreon is an evangelical Christian who goes to church, usually once a week.
He began an informal section for the English Bible class ““ the class is ordinarily just a lecture with no discussion period ““ as a supplemental forum during which students can voice their opinions, he said.
He thought it was important to have this added setting, during which students could study the subtleties and language of the Bible for longer than time permits during class.
For Carreon, the Bible is much more than simply a piece of literature.
“I believe that the Bible is the word of God and that it is truth, and all that it teaches is accurate in its origins and its teachings,” Carreon said. “And I think the Bible is important and vital to Western culture, regardless of your religious beliefs.”
Carreon said he follows the Bible as a religious doctrine but sees validity in the writing even as a nontheological text.
He, despite his deep religious beliefs, is able to suspend them temporarily for the sake of the class.
“The syllabus explicitly says the thesis or the mind-set we are to go into the class with is the Bible is of human origins, with human purposes,” he said. “It’s not the mind-set that I take on the Bible, but I can adopt that mind-set during the course.”
Carreon has spent time studying the Bible as part of his faith and by analyzing the verses. But he said he wanted to learn more about the Bible as literature and to learn other’s outlooks.
“I enrolled in the class to get other perspectives on the Bible,” he said. “I was interested in learning about it and learning what the Bible would be from a literary perspective, and I wanted to learn what my peers thought about it.”
Yost makes it clear to his students that the aim of the English Bible class is strictly to study the Bible from this literary perspective.
For the two-hour duration of the class, students must think of the Bible not based on their own beliefs or theology but as a piece of literature, written by people.
“What I tell my students on the very first day (is there) is (an) assumption you have to hold for the class,” Yost said. “I don’t care what they believe in their everyday life, and I don’t care what they choose to believe on their own and in private. I’m going to expect them to ask questions and take exams with one critical assumption: that the Bible was written by human beings for human-driven purposes ““ it’s a human construction.”
Students, including Ball and Carreon, have been able to accept this “critical assumption” to learn from the class.
Ball decided to enroll because the Bible is widely influential in Western and world culture ““ many different religions and people take the Bible into regard despite who they are or what they believe.
“I feel the Bible is the most influential source of literature in the history of mankind,” Ball said.
The Bible influences mankind, even if it is not thought of as a religious doctrine, he said.
Second-year study of religion student Maggie Matthews decided to take the class to fulfill her monotheistic religion requirement for her major.
Matthews, born and raised Catholic but unsure of her exact religious beliefs, said the class interested her because of the constant quotations and allusions she heard from the Bible.
“Even if you aren’t religious you know the stories,” Matthews said. “Growing up I heard the Bible quotes or read allusions to it in other literature, and I wanted to learn more.”
Many aspects of modern culture, such as the calendar, have evolved from Old and New Testament writings and Judeo-Christian tradition, she said.
To teach such a lengthy, comprehensive piece of literature, the class is divided into three sections: Old Testament, New Testament and the Apocrypha.
“The course is primarily set up to introduce students to the Bible ““ mostly English students or students who have an interest but haven’t read it before,” Yost said. “I spend the first quarter of the course teaching highlights from the Old Testament, basically so they’ll have the cultural vocabulary to understand the New Testament ““ Genesis, Exodus. And then we work through the different books of the New Testament.”
As Yost teaches the class, he begins many of his statements with “from a literary perspective” to remind his students they are in a literary, not religious, class.
Carreon said that Yost doesn’t care so much about the historicity of the Bible or even whether the characters existed as human beings.
To Yost, the Bible is not about religious beliefs; it is about literary characters and how the writers of the Bible describe those characters, he said.
“In class, we learn about how the writer Luke describes the character Jesus as compared to how the writer John describes the character Jesus,” Carreon said. “Rather than from a Christian perspective, how does John describe the man Jesus? Or as opposed to how Luke describes the man.”
Students in the English Bible class analyze the language spoken and the techniques as well, Ball said.
“The Bible does have literary techniques based on the rhetoric of the writer, but it’s not a novel,” he said. “We deal with the writing styles of the authors, what literary techniques they use, and we analyze the specific verses of the Bible. And that’s what I’m interested in.”
Understanding such a piece of literature can provide evidence about the minds of the people of that time.
“I’m asking, “˜What does the Bible mean? What does it probably mean?'” Yost said. “I know we can’t deal in certitudes because we can’t see into the minds of the writer. We can’t be certain about a lot of this stuff, but we can come up with arguments that are probably what the author thought or likely what they meant by the text.”