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Comment by mminer237 | Hacker News Reader

The Bible is about ten times the length of the Quran though. Some people like John Goetsch and Tom Meyer currently have most of it memorized nonetheless, but Christians largely believe that God will supernaturally preserve the Bible no matter what, so memorization is just for personal betterment and to better share it with others.

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The Bible’s also not generally regarded as wholly and precisely an exact, unaltered, unfiltered, and unadulterated message directly, syllable-by-syllable and letter-by-letter, as written on the page, message straight from God, not so much as a word out of place for its entire length, all as revealed in a single (long) event to a single person and recorded without error. I think that has a major effect on how important precise preservation of the Quran is to believers, and how interested in memorizing part of all of it they might be, versus the Bible.

To add, Jesus only commanded the spread of the Gospel, and not the books or writing, but rather just teaching about Jesus and how he provides salvation through his sacrifice.

After all, the point is not that a certain selection of appropriate texts be considered the end all and be all of existence, but rather that the Bible is supposed to be a history of what other people did while under Gods rule during their lives so that you can get an idea of how to live under Gods rule in your life.

People get hung up on the dead past rather than the living present. They say God is unchanging and eternal and neglect that he built an ever-changing universe of entropy for us to live in.

Even the "Gospel" means "Good News" or "Glad Tidings". What good news comes from 2,000 year old texts? It's not news at this point, it's history.

The Good News comes from people today choosing to be better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil acts against others but to do good things to other people, to say kind words from a good heart because they believe in a better world coming tomorrow.

> After all, the point is not that a certain selection of appropriate texts be considered the end all and be all of existence, but rather that the Bible is supposed to be a history of what other people did while under Gods rule during their lives so that you can get an idea of how to live under Gods rule in your life.

There's lots of stuff in the Bible. Much of it falls under the category you describe, but not all.

> The Good News comes from people today choosing to be better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil acts against others but to do good things to other people, to say kind words from a good heart because they believe in a better world coming tomorrow.

Different people have different interpretations. What you describe sounds nice, but I don't think it's exactly the orthodoxy for many Christians.

I see what you're saying, but that's literally the point. Jesus was hardcore, but that's because he had a mission.

Children understand how to get into heaven. Adults are the ones who have problems with it.

Be nice. Be better. Do your best. Apologize when you mess up. Grow.

If God wants more from you, God will tell you personally, in a way that can't be confused with schizophrenic mania or paranoid delusion.

Anything else is part of some hokey religion masquerading as spirituality.

> Children understand how to get into heaven. Adults are the ones who have problems with it.

You get in because you're predestined to? Sounds pretty simple to understand.

Or go to heaven because of faith alone, if you subscribe to a different strain of Christianity.

Or go to heaven because of faith and good works, if you subscribe to yet a different strain of Christianity.

Or any number of other interpretations you can find.

I don't think your homebrewn theology is necessarily better (nor worse) than the other guys' versions.

> If God wants more from you, God will tell you personally, in a way that can't be confused with schizophrenic mania or paranoid delusion.

I'm not doing anything at all, and God hasn't told me anything ever. So I guess I'm good by your interpretation?

Non of the gospels were written during his presumed lifetime.

> Non of the gospels were written during his presumed lifetime.

More importantly, none of the gospels were created during his presumed lifetime.

(For the Christian tradition this seems like a minor difference, but we are exactly talking about oral vs written preservation and transmission here.)

Homer's works are an interesting parallel, because they are believed to have been transmitted orally first, before being written down later.

Correct, the gospel was originally spread by word of mouth.

Just in case you don't realise the Gospel is 'the message of salvation through Jesus' and is not the books in the New Testament called "the gospels". In the Bible when Jesus tells disciples to teach the gospel, the Greek word can be translated 'good news'.

A similar reference-instance error occurs with the Bible itself: 'the Word of God' is Jesus, not the Bible, the Bible is a pointer to the Word.

Perhaps too much of a digression for this forum.

Any reason to assume that common folks in the Roman province of Judea were preached to in Greek?

As to the actual gospel you may be interested in this

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

> but Christians largely believe that God will supernaturally preserve the Bible no matter what

You know, until you put it in this context, it hadn't occurred to me how--from some perspectives--"convenient" that is. :)

I mean. Bibles are everywhere. It is really hard to imagine all of them getting destroyed all at once. Even harder to imagine a scenario where that happens and yet we have humans still around after that.

We have left one on the moon! https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2019/07/19/the-only-bible-o...

I'm American and have spent the majority of my life in the US, so limited perspective and all, but Bibles are literally disposable here. There's plenty of instances of overzealous churches setting up on a corner and forcing cheap mass produced pocket-Bibles into the hands of college students or pedestrians on the street who walk past them. The Christians already have usable full sized copies and will eventually realize they don't need a hard to read $0.10 copy and the unreligious mostly don't want it at all, neither group revere the physical item and will commonly throw it away. Some Christians take even take pride in showing off they have a well used Bible, to the point that they purposefully let it get worn and ragged. Eventually they will also just replace it with a fresh copy. I think you could excavate any random landfill in the US if you absolutely needed to retrieve a few hundred intact copies of the Bible.

Also convenient that the church leaders 350 years later chose the correct books to put in the Bible when they canonized it.

That's what divine inspiration is for.

Forget the entire Bible, how about memorizing just the Gospel or the New Testament that's pertinent to Jesus, I think that all the Christians will fail that too including the Pope.

Another fun fact is that there is nowhere in the Bible either in the Old or New Testaments that the God had promised to preserve its content and its veracity, only in the Quran that Muslim consider the Last and Final Testament [1][2][3].

Another reason it's a living miracle by the fact that many thousands of these Hafiz don't even understand Arabic but they can read it, just like you can learn Hangul characters in a few days but never understand Korean at all. It is like trying to memorize War and Peace in its original Russian (and French) in its entirety but your only language is Mandarin and the alphabets are totally differents. Heck, even Tolstoy’s wife Sofia who reportedly personally and manually copied the original manuscript twenty one times did not memorize it [4].

[1] https://quran.com/en/al-maidah/48:

"We have revealed to you [O Prophet] this Book with the truth, as a confirmation of previous Scriptures and a supreme authority on them."

[2] https://quran.com/en/an-nisa/82

"Do they not then reflect on the Quran? Had it been from anyone other than Allah, they would have certainly found in it many inconsistencies"

[3] https://quran.com/en/al-hijr/9:

"It is certainly We Who have revealed the Reminder, and it is certainly We Who will preserve it."

[4] Ten Things You Need to Know About War And Peace:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5lrPL2vWJG6Th9zmh1...

The Gospel is literally the good news of God coming to earth as a man to die for our sins, not the literal words of the Bible. It's this message that is to be shared, not necessarily the exact words on the page, especially because it's going to be translated anyway.

But the Bible does promise that it will be preserved to the letter regardless:

Isaiah 40:8

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

Matthew 5:18

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

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