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.

If anything, that sort of thing has been taken too far in the other direction. It's anachronistic to cast the first century in twenty-first century racial terms in the first place. Of course nobody at the time would have called themselves "white", because that category didn't exist, and for much of the past few centuries, different varieties of racists wouldn't have counted first century Jews as "white" for various reasons.

Nevertheless, the Middle East has been populated (long before any European colonialism) by many ethnic groups that, if seen on the street in 2023 New York City, would be identified as "white". "White" people were not exclusive to northern Europe. Some even have light blond/red hair, or blue or green eyes. Did Jesus? Nobody knows, and those aren't the most common hair or eye colors there. And most people who spent 10x more outside than we do at that latitude probably had a deep tan. (Some, at least according to Xenophon, couldn't tan.)

So, it's likely that if we teleported a random first-century Jewish man into NYC, he would be considered white-passing. Looking at very insular groups, like the Samaritans, from the same area who never left probably gives us a good idea. But this is theologically totally irrelevant. I'd just say we shouldn't push "Jesus was a brown guy" any more definitively than we would push "Jesus was a white guy."

> the New Testament books called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not written by those people (if they even existed)

That's what a lot of scholars believe now, but this belief (and the converse!) is not based on extraordinarily strong evidence. A lot of historiography is fad-driven, and the NT authorship and dating issue is no different. For example, one of the most common and strongest arguments mustered for the late dating of the gospels is that they refer to the destruction of Jerusalem in prophetic terms. Thus, the argument goes, they must all postdate the 70AD destruction of Jerusalem at the very least.

But even from a purely secular perspective, this is not exactly an ironclad argument. Jerusalem had been destroyed before and sacked repeatedly, and that theme made a strong mark in Jewish literature and imagination. Jerusalem was at the time once again ruled by a foreign power. Revolts and messianic movements had already happened. Predicting the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans would not require an extraordinary prophetic miracle.

But for a lot of historiography, this is the only type of argument you can make. Reams and reams of paper are written about things like this, where there's really very little objective evidence.

> the texts do not even make any claims about their own authorship.

John does in fact make a claim about its authorship in John 21:4 and by the indirect way it always refers to John. Luke-Acts cannot be strictly identified as Luke through the text, but the author does claim to be one of Paul's companions and an eyewitness to those events.

But moreover, the tradition of ascribing the gospels to those individuals was carried through from very early on in the history of the church. It is entirely possible that this ascription was wrong, or mistaken, based on the evidence we have. But it's far too strong a statement to declare they were definitively not written by those individuals.