By: Matthew Diebel – usatoday.com – April 23, 2018

GQ Magazine placed the Bible on a list called “21 Books You Don’t Have to Read.” Veuer’s Sam Berman has the full story.

Well, it appears this group of scribes won’t be greeted very warmly at the Pearly Gates.

GQ magazine, a bible of “grooming” tips, gadget suggestions and style advice, has sparked a social media conflagration by calling the Christian Holy Bible “foolish, repetitive and contradictory” and placing it on a list of “21 Books You Don’t Have to Read.”

“The Holy Bible is rated very highly by all the people who supposedly live by it but who in actuality have not read it,” novelist Jesse Ball writes in the magazine. “Those who have read it know there are some good parts, but overall it is certainly not the finest thing that man has ever produced.”

Instead, Ball recommends reading Agota Kristof’s The Notebook calling it “a marvelous tale of two brothers who have to get along when things get rough.”

Also on the GQ list are such classics as The Catcher in the Rye, Lonesome Dove, The Old Man and the Sea, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Lord of the Rings.

In an introduction to the piece, GQ editors attempted justify their choices. “We’ve been told all our lives that we can only call ourselves well-read once we’ve read the Great Books. We tried,” the editors wrote. “We realized that not all the Great Books have aged well. Some are racist and some are sexist, but most are just really, really boring.”

Perhaps predictably, the provocative proclamation about the Bible brought instant ire from Christians.

“Even if you don’t believe this is an inspired word of God, in the last 50 years 3.9 billion have read the book,” Fox News religion contributor Father Jonathan Morris told Fox & Friends on Sunday. Morris also labeled the inclusion as “just foolish and a shame.”

And evangelist Franklin Graham, in a post on Facebook, said that the Bible is “sharper than a double-edged sword. There’s nothing more powerful, and there’s nothing more needed by mankind than the Word of God.”

Graham suggested that the GQ editors need to read it again. “The subject of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is Jesus Christ. And one day soon, every knee will bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord.”

On Twitter, a user called Bluestar called GQ “The Most Overrated Magazine Of All Time!” and said the choice was an “epic fail.”

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Source: GQ magazine puts Bible on list of 20 classic books not worth reading