How embarrassing.
You know the Bible 90%!
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!
Oh, well…Zeno did much worse.
Only 69%. Never had to go to church as a kid so never internalized this stuff through osmosis.
Embarrassing, why? Isn’t our comforting stereotype that atheists know the Bible better than believers do? :) After all, reading the Bible seems commonly cited as a reason for becoming atheist…
Holy crap, I got 100%. I need to get a life.
Nah, it’s a literary work–it’s like really knowing Ovid’s Metaphmorphosis.
(I got 85% and the same gushing prose–“Wow!” etc. I’ll take it again and deliberately do poorly just to see what they say.)
96%. I still remember the characters and plot, but a least I don’t remember what order they were in.
92%…how embarrassing indeed.
I swear I guessed in about 60% of them, yet I got a 61%!
100%
But then the test really did look to be designed to be easy for anyone of modest intelligence, with or without a good memory for Bible trivia.
Damn it, why won’t my info be saved?
Anyway, 93%. But it’s hardly a great quiz, not with answer choices like
Donald Trump
Donald Duck
Don Knotts
a Samaritan
First contumeliousness, and now piousness! (Jonathan Harris voice) You bibulous, Bible-babbling, bubble-headed booby!
(Oh….the pain….)
77%, and I went to a Catholic school for fifteen years. I suck.
In my defense, the Dutch version of the Bible we used messes up names a lot.
Wait a minute!
“You know the Bible 11%
Although you do not know a lot of specifics about the Bible, you are interested in learning, and that’s a great place to start! Do a little reading, and then come back and try again, as many times as you like!”
I deliberately answered every question wrong (unless I got one right by mistake) but I put my gender as male this time. It still shouldn’t be 11%. Interesting.
Well, everyone knows that men are better Christians then women, right?
100%. It was pretty superficial. Only one question even gave me pause: the one identifying Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. The choices:
wives of David
the magi who visited Jesus
friends of Job
friends of Daniel
I got it right, but I had to think about it.
100% too. I put it down to having studied theology as a youth…
Sign of a misspent youth
more like signs of a misspent evening.
I got 72%. Perhaps I ought to try reading it some day?
That looks similar to the one you had up a couple months ago, the traitor test first posted on Stranger Fruit. Did anyone ever find out if that was a sick joke or if it was a real?
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!
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^I must admit, though, that I was unsure about a couple.
88%. Heh. And I’ve only gone to church a few times. I went to a couple dozen meetings of Youth Group in 7th grade, but that was mainly because my friend’s dad was the pastor and of course he always went. Closest I’ve ever come to being a real Christian.
Read it and weep. Worst part of it is, not only am I an atheist, I’m an ex-Catholic atheist. We weren’t supposed to read the Bible, without a priest around to explain those unfortunate little passages about the Midianites and such.
It’s way too easy, though. Sort of a biblical self-esteem quiz.
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!
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85 %. But I definitely had to guess on a few of the english book names.
I also wonder if “no” reading is a wrong answer. :-)
85 %. But I definitely had to guess on a few of the english book names.
I also wonder if “no” reading is a wrong answer. :-)
I haven’t read the Bible in over half a century. My retention is better than I’d thought.
You know the Bible 74%!
A photo of the Bride of the FSM has been posted at http://curbstonecritic.blogspot.com/2007/02/bride-of-flying-spaghetti-monster.html
I got 98%. I did go to Catholic school, and scored high in religion class despite admitting my atheism and general disagreement with RC doctrine.
You know, it irritated me that here in Ontario, we still have publicly-subsidized religious education. But now I’m wondering–the best way to turn kids off something is to make it the focus of schoolwork…
Reading the Bible isn’t misspent time if you’re a student of literature. You’ve got to know all the allusions and references or else your life becomes very difficult when attempting to interpret a work. Also, there is some good poetry there near the middle.
In answer to Kristine, by deliberately getting them all wrong this time, and also putting myself as an under 18 female who doesn’t read the Bible, I managed to get 7 per cent. Let’s see if anyone can get below that.
I got 90%, too. Better than I expected, really.
85%
Know thy enemy…
This test isn’t all that accurate. First, it is multiple guess, so if you can eliminate one or two obviously wrong answers you have a better chance of getting the question right. Second, several of the questions don’t require biblical knowledge to answer. The phrase “good samaritan” is fairly common so you could probably get that one without actually knowing the parable itself. Finally, a lot of the questions are fairly easy/well-known. Unless the scores are weighted based on the difficulty of the questions, testtakers will score higher than is actually merited.
I agree, it was a poorly designed test. And anyone with a minimal understanding of Western culture would have scored OK. The Samaritan example was one. Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, Abraham and his son, and the ancient Methuselah are also familiar allusions. I got 95%, but only because I like to try to understand how they think.
Also they spelled Strom Thurmond incorrectly. (They put Thurman)
A friend of mine got irritated with this quiz, and designed one that is a little bit more challenging.
Check out The Bible Quiz of Greater Ultimacy. I got 100% on the first; and 43% on this one.
Your link is broken.
I got 82% (maybe — given that 11%-with-everything-wrong, maybe not) by looking only at the answers, not at the questions.
It’s a horribly designed test.
Granted, I test well, but not that well.
Oops. Let me try that link to the harder quiz again. The Bible Quiz of Greater Ultimacy
I got 100% too, but I’m sure I answered a couple wrong.. or did I?
I went to Catholic school too, whose library had some books on Hinduism and Greek mythology that led me to atheism by age 13.. I hope those books are still there!
100% … and I’m a nihilist.
87%, and I’ve never read the bible nor been to church or shul.
i got 74%. this is surprisingly high as i’ve never studied the bible. i wasn’t raised in a religious environment. i guess it says more about the societies i’ve lived in and how, like it or not, the contents of this book seeps into everyone’s consciousness.
I also got 74%, but I’ve never studied the bible and haven’t set foot in a church (apart from the occasional wedding or funeral) since Sunday School, more years ago than I care to admit! It was a combination of general knowledge and guessing.
70% on the original one, 18% on the new one.
And yeah, the first one is WAY too easy. Intentionally so, from the way it reads.
Another ex-Catholic atheist, scoring 97%. I know perfectly well that I was chancing my arm for most of the answers, so, yeah…
The quiz is inconsistent. It asks at the end ‘Do read the bible’, and I answered ‘No.’ (nearly true for last 19 years, since my early teens.) But in the blurb I got:
77%.
But I only saw the movie.
25 % on the new.
Um, Latin? Not in the bibles hereabout.
25 % on the new.
Um, Latin? Not in the bibles hereabout.
59%
I was raised by an atheist in secular Sweden. I’ve only read Genesis and Exodus (to see what it was all about) and a bit of John, in Ancient Greek class – I must say I prefer Plato; at least he’s wrong in an interesting way, rather than a banal and nonsensical one.
I only scored 77%. That mean that if I am a christian, I haven’t read it enough and if I am an atheist, I have read it too much.
90% for me, too.
66%. I like to think that if they’d gone another decimal point it would have been 66.6%. I was mostly guessing and/or relying on cultural knowledge. I haven’t read the Bible since high school literature class required me to.
Another 100%.
I’m an atheist because I know what’s in there.
18% (worse than chance) on the second quiz.
90% Those early days teaching the Bible in Sunday School must have had more of an effect than I thought.
I, too, scored 100%. My mother would be so proud….
100%, but it was easy. I’ll go try the other. Although it’s mostly abysmal as “literature” (ever try getting through 1 and 2 Chronicles in one sitting?), I think it is important to know about simply because so much of Western culture is based on it. Not just that it’s good to know the enemy, but it helps understanding simple idioms – “Good samaritan laws” and the like. Not that I’d advocate spending as much time on it as I did in my childhood.
Dang. 21% on the ultimate – I’ve been pwned. However, it is geared much more towards apologetics than actual Biblical knowledge (and that quite arcane).
100% and 29%
The first one is laughably easy; the second one focuses on the Other Testament, which I don’t know so well. What’s the word to describe recovered Catholics discriminating against recovered Jews? Maybe anti-post-semitism?
Obviously wasn’t paying attention in Sunday School. 74%.
I was going to ask if this was an “open-book” quiz but then remembered I don’t own a copy.
Okay, you brainiacs, here’s a question:
4) Who was Jabin’s commander?
No cheating!
http://www.biblequizzes.com/quest54.htm
I got a 92%, but I think it was more of a test of how closely we pay attention to cultural icons of The Bible than how much we actually read the Bible. I mean, I knew that Luke wrote Acts because I had read the thing, but many of the other questions were written so that elimination of incorrect choices was simple.
Statisticians who review the design of this quiz would have a hard time finding “external validity.”
88% — I blame the Jesuits…
I got 90%. My question is, If Donald Trump was a biblical character, which book would he be in?
100%. There were a lot of gimmes and joke answers in there. It would be hard for a normally literate person to go below 70%, though I see that Coturnix succeeded. (But the Serbs are all Muslim of course, so who can blame him?)
61% and never attended church in my life. Darn pervasive donkey crap.
100%. The only place I really hesitated was in remembering which book comes after Colossians.
snarly:
Gorging himself and shagging a harem girl at Nebuchadnezzar’s banquet in the Book of Daniel, maybe?
70% on the first one and 14% on the second. Obviously I’ve been an atheist all my life.
The first time around I got 100%. Lessons of a misspent childhood and a brush with a fundie life. Then I intentionally answered every one wrong, and still got 7% correct…I guess you get credit for answering your age range and whether you read the bible or not, even if you lie.
False Prophet prophesied: You know, it irritated me that here in Ontario, we still have publicly-subsidized religious education. But now I’m wondering–the best way to turn kids off something is to make it the focus of schoolwork…
You may have a point, but if you (or anyone else) is interested in participating in the campaign to end Ontario’s funding of Catholic schools, go to:
http://secularalliance.ca/cspe/
[I too got 100% on the first test, no doubt due to the several years of serious (lay) studies in late teens/early twenties which preceded my gradual slide into atheism. (I gave up on the 2nd test, but I suspect I would not have done better than 70-75%.) It’s a Good Thing for atheists to know *about* the bible, beyond just being able to quote contradictions (most of which Christians have been taught to rationalize away). Many Christians have been taught that if the atheist heathen would “just read the bible” they would immediately become Christians.]
Yes, the first quiz is pretty easy, although I guess I must have paid some attention in catechism and during all of those readings during 25 years’ worth of mass attendance.
The second quiz, however, is a tour de force of Bible trivia, including exact verse citations, Latin translation, and plenty of minutiae. Not my strengths, that’s for sure, but also a rather weak test of meaningful Bible knowledge.
I agree with the comments that Bible knowledge is extremely useful in predominantly Christian western society, as background in an English-speaking culture strongly influenced by the King James translation (that’s right, kids, Paul didn’t write his epistles in English and Jesus’s language was melgibsonese), and for self defense against the Bible-thumpers who keep trying to invade science labs and public school classrooms.
Eit. Of course, I meant Belshazzar‘s banquet, not Nebuchadnezzar’s. Typing before caffeine is a bad idea.
I, too, scored 100%. My mother would be so proud….
I only scored 87%, but my mother would be proud seeing as how she cried more when she finally accepted I’m an atheist than she did when she found out I’m gay.
97%
But some of those questions were pretty much “gimmes”
or
I think anyone with a 6th grade English reading comprehension, should be able to get those two (and a couple others).
88% I’m a biblical scholar!!! I’m so flattered, I might start going to church again. Which I suspect was the objective of the folks who designed the test.
Hooray! We finally knocked the Scott Adams flamewar off the #1 Most Active position.
Re: Post #69
I knew the right answer when I took the quiz, but one could argue that both ‘son’ and ‘task’ could be reasonable answers for the Isaiah question. With the ‘task’ being some kind of ‘divine’ mandate to raise the child.
100%. Of course, as noted, some of the answers were absolute gimmes. Others weren’t accurate – the flood? “the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days”, which wasn’t one of the choices, but you can guess which answer they wanted. The other quiz I got 43% with significant guessing. The two seemed to take in both extremes: one is really mostly testing cultural knowledge and the other details – unless how many fish is somehow meaningful to theologians. One is like knowing the broad outlines of LOTR, and the other like knowing who Gimli’s great-grandfather was because you memorized the appendices.
100%. That actually nauseated me due to it brining to mind the fact that when I was a fundy I read the entire bible cover to cover. That said, I bet that even given some of the easy answers on this, many Christians would be unable to hit 100%, as most that I know haven’t even read their bible, save for cheesy excerpts chosen by their pastors/ayatollahs.
87%/43% – at least in the hard one I still remember hearing about most of the stuff it is asking about.
brtkrbzhnv: Ironic, given that John begins with something sort of taken from Greek philosophy …
The Ridger: I always wonder about such numbers myself. Assuming naturalism (duh), the number came from somewhere in the author’s head … where did it come from?
If you get 101% you get to send one e-mail to god. You actually get his e-mail address. No promises he will respond though.
I know absolutely nothing about the bible, and I got 78 percent.
The trick is to remember who Don Knotts was.
93%.
It wasn’t Don Knotts who stopped to help the injured traveler?
Hehehehe.
77% Thought I would do better than that. Oh well – This post reminds me of a couple quotes:
It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.
Mark Twain
We need more atheists and nothin’ will get you there quicker than reading the bible.
Penn Jillette
100% on the one PZ linked to here, and 61% on the “Bible Quiz of Greater Ultimacy”. But my apostasy is quite recent. :-)
100% for me. Only had to think about a couple of the questions, and I ain’t never been baptized or nuthin.
Those hours spent in Sunday School finally paid off!
100% [I did kinda guess on about 2 and I picked up on the raining for 40 days & nights]
Yikes, I got 93%, despite having read the Bible only once, twenty years ago.
Then again, I learned a lot of paraphrased Bible stories in Catholic CCD classes as a kid, plus I know that pizza probably wasn’t invented 2000 years ago.
74% on 2 glasses of cabernet. I probably wouldn’t have bothered without the lubricant.
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!
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That was much too easy. Why not try your hand at that Bible quiz?
http://exchristian.net/3/
Heh. The Luke wrote Acts question threw me for a loop. I’m like, what none of those people wrote Acts. Oh, wait, don’t some Christians think it was Luke for a couple poppycock reasons. Fine, Luke.
I got 80%. I suck. Wasn’t raised religious. Kind of depressed I didn’t do better. Where the hell did I leave that Bible! It might be out in with the junk out back. Last place I saw it.
I’m an atheist but there is nothing to be embarasseed about if you know are familiar with one of the most important texts in Western history, and that has real literary, poetic and historical value.
I got 100%, though I guessed at a couple. Ridiculously easy.
I got really, really lucky: 100%
There is a clear error in the quiz: the Deluge lasted longer than 40 days and nights, that was the length of the rain.
I freely admit once picking one up. Well, also reading bits of it, but mostly recently as people point stuff out, and I still got 79%. Bets on how few “Christians” can even manage that…
100%
I wasn’t that impressed with the quiz. It was pretty superficial. I’ll have to go check the other quiz linked here in the comments.
Isn’t it interesting that so many skeptics here are eager to see how they do on a test of Bible knowledge, but the run-of-the-mill believer has virtually no interest in assessing their scientific literacy?
Makes my job (high school teacher) kinda frustrating.
SH
77%. Not bad for a Quaker who was raised Episcopalian. But you have to admit that any book that starts off with two naked people and a talking snake has something going for it.
Wow! You are truly a student of the Bible! Some of the questions were difficult, but they didn’t slow you down! You know the books, the characters, the events . . . Very impressive!
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64% I only live in this culture. Haven t been to church for anything but an event (wedding, funeral, etc) since I was 10…. which would be 40 years. But really, Whale and Jonah are taught by Disney fer cryin out loud, and Charlton Heston ran around on my television every Easter weekend when I was a youngster. You cant really escape this stuff.
95%… Sr. Johan would be so proud.
87%!
Actually, pretty bad since I once earned a 10 year perfect attendance pin from the Trinity Presbyterian Church Sunday School and was chosen at 17 to preach the yearly Junior Sermon to the full congregation. Of course I just recycled the same line of bullshit I’d been hearing every Sunday of the preceding decade but it was judged by many the best sermon they’d heard in years. Just goes to show…what?
85%. Hooray, Skeptic’s Annotated Bible.
In my experience, atheists tend to know more about the bible than Christians. Also, many answers were easy to infer from the questions themselves. Ergo, my result of 82% doesn’t seem that strange.
The Bible has provided us with powerful metaphors and allegory for over 2000 years; much of Western literature depends upon it. Knowing your Bible references is no more an admission of foolishness or belief than knowing your Greek or Nordic mythology. It deepens your ability to understand and enjoy the civilization in which you live.
93% which is not bad for an atheist raised by parents who were atheists. Perhaps being a Canaanite fertility deity as well as a professor of life sciences helped a little.
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!
Ultimate Bible Quiz
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WHAT
Yet another 100% score–yet another evangelical childhood to blame. Like Brian, I’d be curious to see how atheists and agnstics fre on this quiz as compare to self-professed Christians.
Zartregu: I like that one. I will have to recommend it to others.
A far more difficult and entertaining quiz can be found here.
http://ffrf.org/quiz/bquiz.php
This is the ‘Freedom From Religion Foundation’ Bible quiz.
If you think you know your Bible, try this one.
Enjoy.