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Comment by programmer_dude | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the whole bible a collection of fictional stories / articles? Who cares if some one tacks on extra "forged" chapters? What does forged even mean in this context?

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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 Juliet was a fictional story, who cares if we find out that Shakespeare didn’t write it”.

And 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.

I 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.

Agree to that point of view.

I 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.

Do 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

No, 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"...

Indeed, 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.

Yes, 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”).

No, 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.

Plenty of stories in the Bible have historical basis

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_the_Bible

Imagine you are trying to assemble a history of Ancient Rome. You have inscriptions, 5% of the literature (a patchy mix of non-fiction and fiction, and the non-fiction is open to a lot of interpretation), and various secondary sources that summarize and write about primary sources that are lost to time. You also have archeological digs.

Now apply that same scientific mind to the Bible. A group of people decided what was in and what was out. If you can prove what they thought was valid because so-and-so apostle or a related person wrote it, and we can determine they did not, it’s certainly interesting even without the religious element.

Isn't the whole US constitution a collection of human-made sentences? Who cares if some one tacks on extra "forged" sentences? What does forged even mean in this context?

>Isn't the whole bible a collection of fictional stories / articles?

It isn't, according to my Catholic upbringing. It's the word of God, which he dictated through the people who originally wrote it. There are supposedly 1.345 billion Catholics. So, I think there are many people who care.

Truth is so, and I learned that, funny enough, during Catholic religion calsses in Bavaria of all places, that the bible as we know it was in fact not written by contemporary authors but much later by different authors. And multiple ones at that.

I was so surprised after learning all this (outside of chruch of course). That there are multiple authors, the compilations came later, and how it was translated multiple times later, and what version I had at home. Talk about the One Book!

The Catholic Church declaring that a collection of fictional stories are the word of god and 1.345 billion people believing that does not make the collection of stories not fictional. You're appealing to authority and the populace.

I'd rather appeal to, let's say, popularity. So, because a lot of people take it seriously, to a degree, it's important to look at it how valid it is really, instead of just dismissing it all as fake, or forgery.

The article is unclear and IMHO confusing and badly written.

The forgeries are fake fragments made in the late 20th century of the very real, authentic and ancient Dead Sea Scrolls.

See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34258102

It's not the bible, it's the Dead Sea Scrolls.

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