Sunday, February 04, 2007

one of the two b's in bible is for me

You know the Bible 86%!

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! You find this blurb insipid and over the top! Fortunately, you can add a couple snarky sentences to the end of it!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
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Kieran got a 97% on this quiz. I decided to take it also because, in the course of my Lutheran upbringing, I actually read the entire Bible when I was in high school.* Cover-to-cover, alpha-to-omega, Genesis-to-Revelation, In-the-beginning-to-Amen.

The quiz provided some intriguing foggy mental nostalgia: several things I recognized as questions I would have once been able to answer but now the memory was past dim and into just plain dark. And then there was this one question about a donkey that I didn't even recognize as something I would have once recognized, although I'm sure it was something I once knew full well. Anyway, as you can see, my scriptural retention was much worse than Kieran's, and I will not be winning any games of Go To The Head Of The Sunday School Class.

BTW, the two parables of Jesus that still come to mind for me from time to time are that of Workers In the Vineyard and that of the Two Sons. Although, in neither case, do I take away the intended lesson: the former comes to mind as I think about how I should focus on my own rewards and not worry about things relative to the effort/reward of others, and the latter to mind when I think about how it is worse to tell someone you are going to do something and then not follow through than it is just to tell them you aren't going to do it in the first place.

* Granted, it was "The Living Bible," which is an attempted easier-reading translation. It says something about the readability of the Bible that while the most common word in written English is easily "the", and the most common word in spoken English is even more easily "I", the most common word in the Bible is "and."

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

100%. Got the same blurb, minus the afterword by Freese. Scores by faculty on this quiz should be part of the department quality ranking calculation.

Anonymous said...

Balaam's ass (donkey, not hind-side) talked to him. 100%, but seeing the posts at Keiran's site makes me agree - wasn't exactly Biblcial scholarship it was testing for. Donald Duck, Don Knotts and Donald Trump - Really?

jeremy said...

Yeah, I have zero recollection of the guy's ass talking to him. None.

jeremy said...

I looked Balaam up on Wikipedia. Now I remember. He's the guy whose ass kept him out of trouble.

Sure, there were a lot of easy questions on this quiz. This is how I got 86%.

Anonymous said...

I got the same score (86%), even though I'm largely New Testament illiterate.

Having "Hootie" as an option for the question "who was swallowed by a big fish?" reminded me of you, Jeremy. I hope you weren't upset by seeing your **favorite** band used as a trick answer in a Bible Quiz.

Sarahliz said...

Right. So this quiz is totally useless. I got 74% which is laughable given that I've a) never read the bible in its entirety (and have read very little of the old testament) and b) have never attended a Christian church regularly. The fact that I have family that is very bible-oriented probably gave me a bit of a leg up in terms of recognizing some of the names but most of the questions only have one or two choices that could possibly be right.

Anonymous said...

Is there an answer key? I suspect some of the questions are tricks or at least the "correct" answers are wrong.

Example 1: "After how many days was Jesus resurrected from the dead?"

I'm sure the answer is "3" but the correct answer is actually 1-2. If you die Friday afternoon and rise Sunday morning, then you've been down for < 48 hours. A person that actually know the bible would know this but someone who just remembers that Jesus rose on the 3rd day wouldn't.

Example 2: "Who led the Israelites into the Promised Land?"

The answer is probably Moses. I've only been reading Plotz's "Blogging the Bible" column, and I'm 99.44% sure Moses never entered the Promised Land. He led them to the border but he did not lead them *into* the PL. http://www.slate.com/id/2148437/

I'm not one for taking the Bible literally, but if you're going to construct a quiz based on the content of the book, you should take everything at face value, no?

-Matt B

jeremy said...

Joshua led the Israelites into the Promised Land, and proceeded to lead them to righteous slaughter of the people already living there (Jericho! the city of Ai!).

Anonymous said...

Answering the Q's one at a time, I see that Joshua is correct on both counts, so I happily retract that criticism. I stand by the three days thing though.

At any rate, 92%. (But which ones did I get wrong?!) Which is amazing considering I'm a seriously lapsed Catholic who has never actually read most of the book.

-Matt B

Ken Houghton said...

I'm now more encouraged that there may actually be a relationship between score and questions incorrect.

I suspect you were hurt by reading The Living Bible, but that may just be snarkiness, and you can take solace in that your source was not The Way, which has the substance of its homonym.

Anonymous said...

the more important question is will an 86% (B) get you into heaven? hope god is not a grade-snob...