Today, Elizabeth Corrigan, the author of Raising Chaos, is stopping by on her Raising Chaos tour to explain her views and twists on worldbuilding Christianity in her books. Look for the Giveaway at the end of the post.
Worldbuilding Christianity
I don’t remember when I heard someone suggest that the Bible
may have happened differently than what is explicitly stated. I’ve seen the
movie Dogma many times and
consequently know that the 13th apostle, Rufus, was left out of the
Bible for being black. (Actually, I’m pretty sure that if this were the case, a
good many of the apostles would have been left out of the Bible for their dusky
skin.) I read The Red Tent by Anita
Diamant, which informed me that Jacob’s daughter Dinah wanted to have sex with
the guy who her family killed for raping her. And I’ve read my children’s
Bible, which decided to tone down the bit about Moses killing the worshipers
of the golden calf by saying he just made them drink water with gold in it (so
they would have died of heavy metal toxicity anyway).
When I decided to feature angels and demons in Oracle
of Philadelphia, I knew I had to include some of the versions of the Bible stories
and characters that had floated around in my head. For example, I envisioned
the Archangel Gabriel as a kind, generous, holier-than-life kind of guy and
Michael as something of a jerk, so I made them prominent figures in the plot.
But my interpretations of the Bible and its veracity became more than just
flavor for the story. They became the basis of the entire world. My characters
had witnessed and participated in Biblical events. The tales from Scripture
were the defining moments in their lives. And things didn’t always happen as
the Church taught.
In some cases, I didn’t make up anything new to the Bible
stories, but I told them from the point of view of someone who experienced the
events. The language of the Bible is often distant and epic-narrative style, so
when I rewrote the stories in concrete terms with details and emotions, the
results sometimes surprised me. Before I had Bedlam talk about the Israelites
in the desert, I never understood that they had escaped from slavery only to
kill each other for temporarily worshipping the wrong god. I’m working on some similar stories for book
3, and have come to realize that the ten plagues of Egypt wreaked an insane
amount of suffering on a lot of innocent people.
For other back stories, I did imply that the Bible got some
stories wrong. In the case of the virgin birth, I indicated this was somewhat
deliberate on the part of historians—no one wanted to know that Mary’s family
didn’t react very well to her pregnancy. In other cases, I attributed the
changes to the natural ebb and flow of the oral tradition. People forgot about
the nephilim in Abraham’s story and just remembered angels visiting his wife
and God ordering him to kill his son.
I guess the best way to describe it is that I treat
Christian scripture as mythology instead of religion and consequently feel
comfortable playing with it in the same way I might Greek or Norse myths. I do
sometimes worry that people will be offended. But then I remind myself that I
can always tell them that my book, unlike the Bible, is shelved in fiction.
Elizabeth Corrigan has degrees in English and psychology and has
spent several years working as a data analyst in various branches of the
healthcare industry. When she’s not hard at work on her next novel,
Elizabeth enjoys singing, reading teen vampire novels, and making Sims
of her characters.
She drinks more Diet Coke than is probably optimal for the human body
and is pathologically afraid of bees. She lives in Maryland with two
cats and a purple Smart Car.
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