I realize you're speaking from experience (a good thing to do) but this comment contains way too much religious flamebait, with predictable results. Please omit that from your HN posts in the future—especially on divisive topics like religion.
Putdowns of entire groups ("Don't discuss a topic that requires nuance with a Christian") are particularly to be avoided. Nothing good comes of those.
This is an ignorant comment. Christianity is an extremely large and diverse group, the vast majority of which doesn’t agree with your statements here. The approaches taken by American Baptists, Russian Eastern Orthodox, and South American Catholics are very, very different from each other.
Even then, the entire history of the Western world, of publishing, and even of information itself is pretty much directly because of interest in the Bible. It’s relevant purely in a historical sense.
IMO it’s a tragedy that “religious literature” has become designated as something non-religious people shouldn’t bother with, because it’s pretty much just willingly ignoring the entirety of human culture and history.
I can only speak for the US but I've also found that I can't speak about the Bible with most Christians. Most of my experience has been with Catholics and various flavors of Evangelicals. It's very frustrating. I can read Ancient Greek and have a degree in Classics and that makes no difference. I've had people argue with me that the NT was written in Aramaic or Latin or that Jerome's translation is more authoritative than the earlier Greek texts. I was raised Christian and I can't discuss religion with anyone I grew up with regardless of how respectful I am. There are opend-minded Christians but they are very rare.
I recognize what you’re saying and you’re right. I’m well aware of different approaches and traditions. And I completely agree that ignoring religious writings across history deprives us of understanding the full range of human experience. I for one am not one of those people. I realize that I’m engaging a bit in the very thing I’m criticizing, but this is a comment on HN not a well thought out and twice revised essay.
Most Christians I know about are extremely interested in the origins of the Bible, and tend to be intellectual. What you are saying is true for American evangelicals, and not even all of them. Have you ever, for example, met a Jesuit?
"they believe the Bible is divinely inspired"
There is a big difference between divinely inspired, and divinely dictated.
Many of the people who do this research are Christians. The people who buy books and read the articles about it are mostly Christians. The same with the many books on topics such as interpreting "books" of the Bible in the context of the original culture and what we know of authors, intended audience, etc.
There is also a difference between "bible study" and "historical criticism", where the later is devoid of any specific religious interpretation.
I am secular person and I find it interesting how ideas evolve over time. I think it was around the year 1000 that Jewish scholars started to wonder why the old testament didn't mention the planets which where a Greek discovery and cultural "meme". People where worried about things like that, but couldn't formulate a good answer. Also most people don't know but ancient Judaism was a polytheistic religion, and only became monotheistic after the return from the Babylonian exile.
>Most Christians I know about are extremely interested in the origins of the Bible, and tend to be intellectual.
I think a lot of christians give this impression, but ultimately mostly of them give up studying when their studies start to diverge from what they've been taught or what they want to believe. The ones that are actually interested in fact finding tend to stop being christians after a while.
Thanks for sharing your experience.. I do find that it's a lot of negativity expressed against Christians supposed lack of intellectual curiosity though. Especially given that this is off the back of a fairly* well written article concerning the origin of the gospels.
My own experience is completely opposite in that I grew up in a completely secular atheist environment and found it direly lacking in spiritual and philosophical enquiry and have later in life found faith. The type of Christianity I'm exposed to (ranging all the way from the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin to modern day Baptism) is, and has been, a fresh breath of life for me and has lend me far more zest for science and life in general than atheism ever did. The caveat here is of course that I never attended a faith based university - I may well have ended up writing a very different comment!
*actually feel it's got a touch of GPT here and there..!
> By and large, Christians are extremely anti-intellectual and hostile to research into the origins of the Bible as they believe the Bible is divinely inspired.
I have yet to find a strongly dogmatic tradition where this doesn't apply, religious or not. Many intellectuals also fit your description, you just have to find the right context.
Despite what they might say outloud, most people (including many who identify as intellectual or rational) are not looking for truth, but rather confirmation for their dear held beliefs. Beliefs they're sometimes unaware that they hold, but around which rest the foundations of a sizable part of their identity. An expensive investment. Nobody wants to be told, "yeah, you were doing it wrong all these years". Better people find out after we've passed. In that context, research is a gamble, a risk, as each truth invalidates multiple wrongs. Very upsetting.
> By and large, Christians are extremely anti-intellectual and hostile to research into the origins of the Bible as they believe the Bible is divinely inspired.
Some books of the Bible don't even claim to be divinely inspired. Corinthians is a set of administrative memos. From: Paul, head of the church. To: Christians at Corinth. Subject: Plans and operating rules
I think you’re over generalizing. I understand you’re speaking from your personal experience, and I believe that’s what you encountered, but still, n=1.
There are, unfortunately, a huge range of people with widely varying beliefs who refer to themselves as “Christians.” Some of them are indeed not actually interested in theology, only in their own subcultural tradition.
But there are also Christians who are extremely interested in textual analysis, understanding the original languages of the texts, seeking out archaeological evidence to understand events better, etc. In my experience these are also the people who follow Jesus’ teaching to love their neighbor, not judge others, and to “give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” (ie. don’t be a political movement).
You will find no bible more dogeared and highlighted than from an American evangelical, who so strongly needs to justify the reasons for their superiority and hatred that they will beat a concordance to death. They aren't interested in facts, they're interested in their version of "truth," which are two completely disparate and antithetical concepts. Just look at their support for the idea of the Rapture, a concept which is found nowhere in the Bible, and whose very idea has been incredibly harmful given how religion informs voting decisions in the US.
Another point: while there are some unique religious aspects to your experience, it also sounds pretty similar to complaints about secular universities.
Very common to hear about students who don't care about the material at all, they just want a job. So they are bored and frustrated by anything, especially theoretical material, that isn't going to be obviously useful for interview prep or their future careers.
Your experience is probably of American conservative evangelicals. Even within that triple subset I could find you people deeply interested in the origins of texts (e.g. the translators responsible for the NET Bible (http://netbible.org). Your experience is narrow. If I can give an analogy from IT, this is like talking to a few people training for an MCSE, and concluding that no-one is interested in computer science.
> So who is this research for?
The first work on links between the gospels goes back to about the 3C, and there have been discussions on the origins of the different books since before there was a canon of the Bible - in fact this was one of the early motivations. The academics currently working on origins of texts are a mixture of Christians and non-Christians, and as such, their motives differ. These academics are usually found at traditional universities, not the Bible colleges you refer to. Non-Christian scholars have the usual motives of academics. Christian scholars have the same motives, but add the drive to get back to the original teachings as far as possible. As to who uses it: generally priests, preachers and the like preparing services, and Christians in private study. It tends to be discussed in commentaries working at the level of whole books of the Bible rather than verse-by-verse commentaries. For the specific case of Q (or the alternative Farrer hypothesis), this will generally be found under the heading "The Synoptic Problem", though verse-by-verse commentaries will often discuss parallels between gospels.
By the way, for those who are interested, there is a reconstruction of Q here: https://www.livius.org/sources/content/q-text/ - but bear in mind that this assumes a single Q document, which to my mind is not necessarily true.
there are other Christian communities than American-style Evangelical Christianity who tend to be more intellectual and do like arguing about this kind of thing.
Well, most PEOPLE are disinterested in history, except when it's presented to confirm their own views. That's a shame for those Bible school students because learning those things involves learning how people respond to religion, which can profoundly help them in ministry.
What variety of Christians were these? I’m guessing evangelical Protestants? Catholics and Anglicans are often far more into this sort of thing, and of course there are plenty of non-religious theologians as well.
> The two things I learned from my experience at the Christian "University" are . . .
You also seem to have become a bit of anti-intellectual yourself. Dismissing a fundamental question in textual criticism (about one of the most influential texts of all time) to a mere "interesting puzzle" and "fodder" for academic journals strikes me as openly hostile to scholarship as such.
But even leaving that aside: Do you really think it would make no difference to our understanding of early Christianity were it conclusively demonstrated that a collection of Christian logia were circulating prior to the writing of the canonical gospels? Or, conversely, that no such collection existed?
People have devoted their scholarly lives to this, because the question is so rich. Did Paul have any knowledge of this collection (and if he did, why doesn't he appear to quote it)? Did only Mark have access to it, or is it the source of sayings in more than one gospel? What is its relation to the Gospel of Thomas (and is the GoT itself a "sayings gospel" akin to Q?) If Q existed, why wasn't it preserved? What if (and this isn't a mainstream view) some kind of "proto-Matthew" existed in, say, Aramaic? Could Mark -- again, a minority view -- be, as some ancient commentators seemed to have believed, a condensation of Matthew?
It just goes on and on. I fail to see why the idea that "most Christians" (an already problematic generalization) are bored by the subject has any bearing on whether this is important work. It's like saying, "theoretical computer science has no bearing on the lives of working programming. So who is it actually for?"
The answer is, other scholars trying to understand the the subject at hand more deeply.
Sorry, but your flame bait is written from a point of ignorance. You don't know how deep the rabbit hole goes. Your Bible courses mean that you have perhaps brushed the surface, but not more. The standard track for priests is 5.5 years in Western European countries (same as for engineers) followed by one or more years of working as an adept. There are of course multiple courses about Koine Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. As I've learned, the quality of American institutions varies a lot, so perhaps you attended a particularly bad one?
Btw, it is a myth that the Council of Hippo established the Christian canon.
If you were ever looking for "good" Christianity. I attended a bible college in Canada, and to put it politely, I was heartbroken over the types of people who were being trained to lead and manage churches. I'd say a good majority of them were sent by their parents rather than on their own initiative; they were culturally, ethically, and spiritually not Christian. I'm not perfect, either, but you expect a certain level of effort to be put into spiritual and theological mental investment, which unfortunately was not the case.
After that experience, I basically left the church for 10 years, I was so frustrated with many human-related aspects of the church, and I knew I couldn't sit under the leadership of the types of people I went to college with.
---
Now, to answer your first question, yes there is value. In the same way I'm a programmer, but I don't care about the historical authenticity of who actually discovered the Pythagorean theorem. Some people care, and I think that's great, that's an area of interest for them. Now, the flip side is, Christians should care that they can trust the documents that form the basis for their beliefs.
For your next statement, "most of the students were bored and frustrated...didn't want to know anything about the texts themselves," a person who has no historic knowledge of the scripture should never be a pastor. It sounds like you went to university with people who liked the idea of being a respected leader, and the power that comes with it, and you'll find people like that everywhere, even in your secular workplace.
If you truly believe Christians are extremely anti-intellectual, you need to remember, basically every educational organization (ie even secular universities) were originally founded by Christians in the western world, and many of them were likely far more intellectual than you or I. What's crazy is you can also find extremely anti-intellectual non-Christians, too - there are anti-intellectuals everywhere. Typically big sweeping statements like this are from hurt people, and that's horrible that people claiming to be part of the church were so destructive on the things you previously believed.
There are a lot of bad apples in the bunch, even the bible says a little leaven will work it's way through the whole dough [1] [2].
You're absolutely right. The thing is that in America, Catholicism isn't the cultural force that it is in other parts of the Americas or in Continental Europe. Protestantism is the brand of Christianity that fights the culture wars here. So for me "Christian" has become a shorthand for "Evangelical Christian." This is somewhat intellectually dishonest and definitely sloppy.
Is this a goal to which we should aspire? I’m a former evangelical, now atheist and I thought that it was but now I’m not so sure. Darwin’s Cathedral made me rethink this position and I encourage you to read it.
Either the beliefs of religion are true, or they aren't. If they're true, then they are worth upholding, if they aren't then they aren't. That's all that matters. "Moving past religion" as an end unto itself is not a worthy goal and is in fact giving into man's base instincts to hate on the outgroup.
dang|1 year ago
Putdowns of entire groups ("Don't discuss a topic that requires nuance with a Christian") are particularly to be avoided. Nothing good comes of those.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
keiferski|1 year ago
Even then, the entire history of the Western world, of publishing, and even of information itself is pretty much directly because of interest in the Bible. It’s relevant purely in a historical sense.
IMO it’s a tragedy that “religious literature” has become designated as something non-religious people shouldn’t bother with, because it’s pretty much just willingly ignoring the entirety of human culture and history.
sapphicsnail|1 year ago
redwoolf|1 year ago
graemep|1 year ago
"they believe the Bible is divinely inspired"
There is a big difference between divinely inspired, and divinely dictated.
Many of the people who do this research are Christians. The people who buy books and read the articles about it are mostly Christians. The same with the many books on topics such as interpreting "books" of the Bible in the context of the original culture and what we know of authors, intended audience, etc.
FjordWarden|1 year ago
I am secular person and I find it interesting how ideas evolve over time. I think it was around the year 1000 that Jewish scholars started to wonder why the old testament didn't mention the planets which where a Greek discovery and cultural "meme". People where worried about things like that, but couldn't formulate a good answer. Also most people don't know but ancient Judaism was a polytheistic religion, and only became monotheistic after the return from the Babylonian exile.
Suppafly|1 year ago
I think a lot of christians give this impression, but ultimately mostly of them give up studying when their studies start to diverge from what they've been taught or what they want to believe. The ones that are actually interested in fact finding tend to stop being christians after a while.
tzs|1 year ago
Isaac Asimov had an amusing very short story about the practicalities of divine dictation [1].
[1] https://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2011/12/how-it-ha...
Woshiwuja|1 year ago
[deleted]
dingdingdang|1 year ago
My own experience is completely opposite in that I grew up in a completely secular atheist environment and found it direly lacking in spiritual and philosophical enquiry and have later in life found faith. The type of Christianity I'm exposed to (ranging all the way from the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin to modern day Baptism) is, and has been, a fresh breath of life for me and has lend me far more zest for science and life in general than atheism ever did. The caveat here is of course that I never attended a faith based university - I may well have ended up writing a very different comment!
*actually feel it's got a touch of GPT here and there..!
mekoka|1 year ago
I have yet to find a strongly dogmatic tradition where this doesn't apply, religious or not. Many intellectuals also fit your description, you just have to find the right context.
Despite what they might say outloud, most people (including many who identify as intellectual or rational) are not looking for truth, but rather confirmation for their dear held beliefs. Beliefs they're sometimes unaware that they hold, but around which rest the foundations of a sizable part of their identity. An expensive investment. Nobody wants to be told, "yeah, you were doing it wrong all these years". Better people find out after we've passed. In that context, research is a gamble, a risk, as each truth invalidates multiple wrongs. Very upsetting.
Animats|1 year ago
Some books of the Bible don't even claim to be divinely inspired. Corinthians is a set of administrative memos. From: Paul, head of the church. To: Christians at Corinth. Subject: Plans and operating rules
burlesona|1 year ago
There are, unfortunately, a huge range of people with widely varying beliefs who refer to themselves as “Christians.” Some of them are indeed not actually interested in theology, only in their own subcultural tradition.
But there are also Christians who are extremely interested in textual analysis, understanding the original languages of the texts, seeking out archaeological evidence to understand events better, etc. In my experience these are also the people who follow Jesus’ teaching to love their neighbor, not judge others, and to “give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” (ie. don’t be a political movement).
redwoolf|1 year ago
MisterBastahrd|1 year ago
currymj|1 year ago
Very common to hear about students who don't care about the material at all, they just want a job. So they are bored and frustrated by anything, especially theoretical material, that isn't going to be obviously useful for interview prep or their future careers.
tengwar2|1 year ago
> So who is this research for?
The first work on links between the gospels goes back to about the 3C, and there have been discussions on the origins of the different books since before there was a canon of the Bible - in fact this was one of the early motivations. The academics currently working on origins of texts are a mixture of Christians and non-Christians, and as such, their motives differ. These academics are usually found at traditional universities, not the Bible colleges you refer to. Non-Christian scholars have the usual motives of academics. Christian scholars have the same motives, but add the drive to get back to the original teachings as far as possible. As to who uses it: generally priests, preachers and the like preparing services, and Christians in private study. It tends to be discussed in commentaries working at the level of whole books of the Bible rather than verse-by-verse commentaries. For the specific case of Q (or the alternative Farrer hypothesis), this will generally be found under the heading "The Synoptic Problem", though verse-by-verse commentaries will often discuss parallels between gospels.
By the way, for those who are interested, there is a reconstruction of Q here: https://www.livius.org/sources/content/q-text/ - but bear in mind that this assumes a single Q document, which to my mind is not necessarily true.
currymj|1 year ago
redwoolf|1 year ago
That being said, even if we did find Q or something like it, would it change much about our understanding of that time in history?
ldargin|1 year ago
bonzini|1 year ago
Out of curiosity, Catholic or Protestant?
redwoolf|1 year ago
rsynnott|1 year ago
sramsay|1 year ago
You also seem to have become a bit of anti-intellectual yourself. Dismissing a fundamental question in textual criticism (about one of the most influential texts of all time) to a mere "interesting puzzle" and "fodder" for academic journals strikes me as openly hostile to scholarship as such.
But even leaving that aside: Do you really think it would make no difference to our understanding of early Christianity were it conclusively demonstrated that a collection of Christian logia were circulating prior to the writing of the canonical gospels? Or, conversely, that no such collection existed?
People have devoted their scholarly lives to this, because the question is so rich. Did Paul have any knowledge of this collection (and if he did, why doesn't he appear to quote it)? Did only Mark have access to it, or is it the source of sayings in more than one gospel? What is its relation to the Gospel of Thomas (and is the GoT itself a "sayings gospel" akin to Q?) If Q existed, why wasn't it preserved? What if (and this isn't a mainstream view) some kind of "proto-Matthew" existed in, say, Aramaic? Could Mark -- again, a minority view -- be, as some ancient commentators seemed to have believed, a condensation of Matthew?
It just goes on and on. I fail to see why the idea that "most Christians" (an already problematic generalization) are bored by the subject has any bearing on whether this is important work. It's like saying, "theoretical computer science has no bearing on the lives of working programming. So who is it actually for?"
The answer is, other scholars trying to understand the the subject at hand more deeply.
bjourne|1 year ago
Btw, it is a myth that the Council of Hippo established the Christian canon.
mrozbarry|1 year ago
After that experience, I basically left the church for 10 years, I was so frustrated with many human-related aspects of the church, and I knew I couldn't sit under the leadership of the types of people I went to college with.
---
Now, to answer your first question, yes there is value. In the same way I'm a programmer, but I don't care about the historical authenticity of who actually discovered the Pythagorean theorem. Some people care, and I think that's great, that's an area of interest for them. Now, the flip side is, Christians should care that they can trust the documents that form the basis for their beliefs.
For your next statement, "most of the students were bored and frustrated...didn't want to know anything about the texts themselves," a person who has no historic knowledge of the scripture should never be a pastor. It sounds like you went to university with people who liked the idea of being a respected leader, and the power that comes with it, and you'll find people like that everywhere, even in your secular workplace.
If you truly believe Christians are extremely anti-intellectual, you need to remember, basically every educational organization (ie even secular universities) were originally founded by Christians in the western world, and many of them were likely far more intellectual than you or I. What's crazy is you can also find extremely anti-intellectual non-Christians, too - there are anti-intellectuals everywhere. Typically big sweeping statements like this are from hurt people, and that's horrible that people claiming to be part of the church were so destructive on the things you previously believed.
There are a lot of bad apples in the bunch, even the bible says a little leaven will work it's way through the whole dough [1] [2].
[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians%205%2... [2] https://www.gotquestions.org/little-leaven-leavens-whole-lum... (does a decent enough overview of the verse and other references)
unknown|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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timcobb|1 year ago
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gjsman-1000|1 year ago
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redwoolf|1 year ago
ruthmarx|1 year ago
[deleted]
dang|1 year ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
wussboy|1 year ago
bigstrat2003|1 year ago
gjsman-1000|1 year ago
[deleted]