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.
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"...