PETERSON: Introduction To The Idea Of God

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series exploring the psychological significance of the biblical stories in the book of Genesis. You can now listen to or watch the lecture series on DailyWire+.

The Conceptual Framework of the Bible

Let’s take a look at the structure of the book itself. The first thing about the Bible is that it’s a comedy. And a comedy has a happy ending. That’s a strange thing because the Greek gods’ stories were almost always tragic. Now, the Bible is a comedy. It has a happy ending. Everyone lives. There’s a heaven. What you think about that is a completely different issue. I’m just telling you the structure of the story. It’s something like: There was Paradise at the beginning of time, and then some cataclysm occurred and people fell into history, and history is limitation and mortality and suffering and self-consciousness. But there’s a mode of being — or potentially the establishment of the state — that will transcend that, and that’s what time is aiming at. That’s the idea of the story.