The Story of Peter's Denial: A Literary and Atheological Criticism

This article presents a proposal for those who, in contemporary times, would like to read the Bible as literature. Studying the narrative peculiarities of the story of Peter's denial of Jesus according to the Gospel of Luke, we take one more step in the development of biblical atheology, an approach engaged in literary analysis that uses the biblical narratives to create new readings, which appropriates materialist philosophy inspired by Nietzsche and Michel Onfray in his criticism to avoid repeating the canonical and institutional readings, which exposes the plurality of possible interpretive ways to deny the dogmatic production that works to fix the senses. Starting from Richard Rorty's concept of literary culture, what we do here is to read the Bible as an inspiring anthology of human experience, a collection of textual fragments that, among other things, preserves something of the faith of ancient cultures, of art developed by historical subjects who, in their own way, sought their own redeeming truths.