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A few billion people in the world who consider it a sacred book, to begin with. And historians, obviously. But this is like asking “well clearly Romeo and Juli
by gattilorenz 4y ago
A few billion people in the world who consider it a sacred book, to begin with. And historians, obviously.
But this is like asking “well clearly Romeo and Juliet was a fictional story, who cares if we find out that Shakespeare didn’t write it”.
- ghostDancer 4y agoAnd not even among the ones that believe is sacred agree which parts are valid or not, not even mentioning the translations which it's own interpretations each.
- gattilorenz 4y agoI don’t disagree, but also don’t see in what way this is relevant to the original question or opposing my answer. If anything, two billion people care so deeply about it that they can have arguments about what’s “valid” and what the meaning is.
- ghostDancer 4y agoAgree to that point of view.
- hef19898 4y agoI kind of doubt that there are 2 billion devout Christians at the moment. Those devout ones, yes they care to some degree about the academic (for lack of a better term) merit of the biblical texts, those Christians I know are far less interested in the academic disputes about the bible than you make it seem.
- awestroke 4y agoDo you really think 2 billion people care deeply about the Bible? I think the number of Christians who spend any time at all reflecting on or debating validity and meaning of the Bible is in a small minority
- gattilorenz 4y agoNo, I don't actually think there's 2 billion people that care or reflect on the differences between "Bibles". Let's say it's 0.1% of them. Let's say it's 0.01% of them. Maybe it's even less. How many people care deeply about the works of Shakespeare or Homer, enough to think about the meaning and autorship of the texts (for example, to know that the story of the trojan horse is actually mostly told by Virgil, or that probably Homer, if he ever existed, didn't write both the Iliad and the Odyssey)? I think fewer than that. Is that a good reason to dismiss all research on it? That was the original implication, to which I was trying to answer. Admittedly I overly estimated the number of people to make a point, but I'd still say there's more people who care about the Bible than Lisp, yet we don't see many comments like "ugh, new article on Lisp, who cares? It's a dead language anyway"...
- tshaddox 4y agoIndeed, I suspect a large portion of those few billion people would in fact be surprised to learn that, for instance, the New Testament books called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not written by those people (if they even existed) and the texts do not even make any claims about their own authorship.
- gattilorenz 4y agoYes, and that is probably true for a lot of other things that we assume as cornerstones of Western culture (e.g. Homer). Many people would be surprised at the realisation that Christianity is a eastern religion (having originated in what we call “the Middle East”).
- nahill 4y agoNo, they would not. Everyone knows it's an eastern religion originating from the Middle East. Next you'll be saying Christians have not been told Jesus was not white! Like, that's also something that all Christians know.
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