You know the Bible 97%!
Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses – you know it all! You are fantastic!
One of the questions — about a long-lived Biblical character — suggests the quiz author believes (amongst other things) in the existence of someone called “Strom Thurman.” It suggests a striking mental image, certainly. Via “PZ Myers”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/, who naturally also got an A.
_Update_: On the basis of the comments (and, to be honest, the questions), I think it’s fair to say that this post should probably be titled, “The Many Benefits of Taking Absurdly Easy Tests.”
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jim 02.03.07 at 5:07 pm
So which one did you miss? There’ll be a ruler waiting.
Richard J 02.03.07 at 5:08 pm
90%, and truth be told, most of that comes from the very handy The Unauthorised Version by Robin Lane Fox. The benefits of a nominally Anglican education…
Tim Bailey 02.03.07 at 5:37 pm
87%, and my most comprehensive study of the Bible has been at The Brick Testament. Before that, I hadn’t cracked a Bible since I was eight. It seemed to me that for a lot of the questions, there was only one non-absurd answer.
Nathaniel 02.03.07 at 5:46 pm
100%. The many more benefits of being raised by Lutheran pastors (though I now attend the Catholic college at the University of Toronto). Sola Scriptura and all that, I suppose.
voyou 02.03.07 at 5:54 pm
95%. The benefits of… er, “a daily act of worship of a broadly Christian character” in British schools? Seriously, if someone like me, who stopped believing in God before they stopped believing in Father Christmas (after all, there’s physical evidence for Father Christmas) is a “true Biblical scholar,” who isn’t?
Christmas 02.03.07 at 6:11 pm
100%. Raised by fundies, but that didn’t stop me – the questions were pretty easy.
gz 02.03.07 at 6:16 pm
Huh. 100%, somehow. Divine inspiration?
Catholic school certainly helped, but the orders of the books were mostly guesses.
Minivet 02.03.07 at 6:17 pm
I’ve never read the Bible, and I got 82%. A pretty bad test, truth be told.
eszter 02.03.07 at 6:18 pm
Too low to say, although better than my GRE verbal score, I think.
I was just thinking about all this earier today when I saw this book in the bookstore.
By the way, I thought the What American accent do you have quiz on this same site was fun.
I got:
“You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.”
On yet another note, anyone can make one of these quizes, does anybody want to make a CT quiz?:-)
Ken Houghton 02.03.07 at 6:30 pm
Has anyone scored less than 90% yet? (96 here—I note that it is difficult to reconcile that you can score 95, 96, and 97 percent on a quiz of significantly less than 50 questions.)
radek 02.03.07 at 6:42 pm
I think just the knowledge that Biblical events happened more than say 100 years ago is sufficient to answer about 80% of the questions correctly. And on the fourth day God created … myspace. The Israelites took a train or rode bicycles to Egypt. Etc.
josh 02.03.07 at 6:42 pm
95% — ah, the benefits of a half-remembered Jewish education, plus basic cultural literacy — and, um, a few lucky guesses.
(I did get 100% for the questions concerning the Hebrew Bible — so I guess Hebrew school wasn’t, contrary to my view of the time, a complete waste of time).
dsquared 02.03.07 at 6:54 pm
87% probably represents the baseline for a British education, although this apparently qualifies me as a “biblical scholar”, which might come in useful at a future date.
sharon 02.03.07 at 6:59 pm
And yet, if you’re English, everyone knows that Midlands accents are the most hysterical things on the planet, and if there’s a god, it must have been punishing the Brummies for something really bad.
(And even Americans know what it sounds like, even if they don’t know they know. Ozzy Osbourne.)
Also, 77%. I am, apparently, truly a student of the Bible. This is also rather amusing.
Jacob Christensen 02.03.07 at 7:05 pm
As minivet: 82% without ever reading the thing.
dr ngo 02.03.07 at 7:57 pm
100% – and this awarded by people so illiterate they say, “Who [sic] did Jesus raise from the dead?”
Fundamentalist upbringing here, if we’re listing sources of knowledge. Long abandoned, but apparently not entirely forgotten.
Adam Kotsko 02.03.07 at 7:57 pm
100%! The benefits of being raised in a church where detailed quizzes on the Bible (even aside from an actual “sport” called “Bible quizzing”) were a consistent feature of life, with good performance rewarded by candy. Plus general detail-orientation.
anon. 02.03.07 at 8:24 pm
100% – and this awarded by people so illiterate they say, “Who [sic] did Jesus raise from the dead?â€
Huh? Illiterate? I suggest you read this Language Log post and reconsider.
BlueStater 02.03.07 at 8:55 pm
Jeez, I’m disappointed to learn this was so easy (I thought I was being a genius). 100%, which I attribute to having gone, 50-plus years ago, to a prep school that obliged me to attend chapel four times a week and study Bible every year for four years.
Delicious Pundit 02.03.07 at 10:49 pm
Another benefit was summed up by John Waters: “I thank God for making me Catholic so that sex will always be dirty.”
nick s 02.03.07 at 11:02 pm
100%, which included a few educated guesses and a couple of coin-tosses between two non-stupid answers. I’m surprised they didn’t dock me a point for choosing ‘no’ on the final do-you-read-the-bible question.
I owe it all to staying in hotel rooms with no reading material save the book Gideon left behind.
Tim Bailey 02.03.07 at 11:43 pm
20: Wow, by the time I got to the end of that link, I forgot what was at the beginning. I prefer the shorter explanation of who/whom at Paul Brian’s site. YMMV.
radek 02.04.07 at 12:24 am
On yet another note, anyone can make one of these quizes, does anybody want to make a CT quiz?:-)
If you’re gonna get all ‘Kool Kids Klub’ on this then be serious about it and get ‘CT/HC’ (in Gothic script) tattoos.
trane 02.04.07 at 12:24 am
Well, hrm, uhm… 69% for me. No cross-checking of answers, no aides, no bad excuses… I did not go to Sunday school, that is all. Perhaps I should read the Bible, considering myself a believer and all.
Hopefully, the Kingdom of the Lord – as well as the comments section of CT – is open still to uneducated fools.
Katherine 02.04.07 at 1:03 am
100%. Some guesses in there.
eenauk 02.04.07 at 2:00 am
did anyone else get the impression that two very different people each wrote half of these questions? One of em having a blast at it and the other taking it all a bit too seriously?
Seriously, though. those were questions for non-christians. u should not be let into a church if u didnt scroe at least 90%!
jacob 02.04.07 at 2:45 am
I’ve never set foot in a religious school and haven’t been to synagogue since 11th grade, I don’t think. (Although I have been to church more recently.) Yet I still managed to get in the low 80s. And I am still, like Kieran, “a true biblical scholar.” If an athiest Jew who has to guess at most of the New Testament questions knows the books, characters, events, and verses, I wonder what kind of heathen gets a lower score.
bad Jim 02.04.07 at 2:50 am
95%, from an agnostic raised in an agnostic family. I have read some of the funny parts of the Bible, but I swear I was only looking at the pictures.
bad Jim 02.04.07 at 3:34 am
Yuck. I took it again with a Bible on my knee and got 100%. This time I claimed to be under 18 and said I read the book a book at a time. Also, Joshua instead of Aaron, friends of Job rather than Daniel, first miracle: casting out demons (though I’m not sure I first answered the last two differently).
Every time I dip into the book it seems stranger and stranger. Some of those characters make our current leaders seem almost reasonable by comparison.
a very public sociologist 02.04.07 at 6:49 am
Got 66% – shameful!
But what do you expect from a godless Brit?
dearieme 02.04.07 at 8:53 am
A catholic education bible-based? Luther would be so proud.
Anna in Portland (was Cairo) 02.04.07 at 9:45 am
95%. I think I missed some of the questions about the order of the books. Islam has the same stories in it, and I have read the bible, a long time ago.
harry b 02.04.07 at 11:30 am
87%, tied with dsquared (corroborating his conjecture). About 1/4 were guesses, and about 1/2 the rest were answers which did not require reading the Bible, just living a certain amount of time somewhere in the Christian world anytime in the past 1200 years or so.
Bernard Yomtov 02.04.07 at 3:09 pm
97%, guessing at all but the best-known New Testament answers.
Jim 02.04.07 at 4:24 pm
@19: Changing your response from “No” to any of the positive responses on the question about whether you read the Bible does in fact give you an extra point. It brought me up from 97 to 98.
radek 02.04.07 at 4:48 pm
Every time I dip into the book it seems stranger and stranger. Some of those characters make our current leaders seem almost reasonable by comparison.
Yeah I know what you mean. Especially if you read it in Lego:
http://www.thebricktestament.com/
(I think the guy who does this purposely picks out the most messed up parts cuz I don’t remember learning so much sex violence and petty jealousy)
Ben 02.04.07 at 5:48 pm
74% And some of my guesses were probably right too…
Thom Brooks 02.04.07 at 11:19 pm
82% thanks to Catholic high school…
Tracy W 02.04.07 at 6:19 pm
85%. The last time I read the bible I deconverted from Christainity.
I am however hopeless on which order the books are in once I get past Genesis.
harry b 02.04.07 at 6:20 pm
radek — I suspect you read the expurgated versions…
Timothy 02.04.07 at 10:11 pm
I suspect it’s more a test of cultural literacy, preformance on MC questions and deductive abilities than a real test of the amount of time you have spent reading the bible.
Gillian Russell 02.05.07 at 3:29 am
90% on the basis of a British methodist upbringing and attendance of an ecumenical religious school (and a “no” on the last question)
Shankar 02.07.07 at 5:04 pm
Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses – you know it all! You are fantastic!
The writers of the quiz are too generous. 90% from a half-Deist, half-agnostic Hindu.
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