Doug Shaver

Wickedly seductive, that one is.

gstafleu

I had just typed in a response, and then Toto closed the thread. I won't comment on whether he over reacted a bit to one short phrase: I'm here to praise moderators, not to bury them.

Having said this, and in the spirit of trying to give the discussion some real data, here is the posting I had prepared:

Let's look at what "the Christians" themselves have to say, from http://www.adherents.com/largecom/com_christian.html (I'm assuming these are Christians, anybody know?):
(note the Monty-Pythone-esque 11th position occupied by Nigeria, where, no doubt, the Spanish Inquisition will show up any minute now).

So, unless there are an awful lot of NT scholars in China, and possibly Nigeria, it would look as if we can expect a majority of NT scholars to be Christians, unless the distribution of Christians among NT scholars is very different from the surrounding populations. Or it could be that these numbers are overly biased (they'd have to be very biased in order to affect the present discussion). Does anyone have better numbers?

Gerard Stafleu

Toto

Some posts have been split off

Toto

OK - this thread will remain open if people stick to the topic, although I am not sure it really belongs in this forum.

Gerard: America is a majority Christian nation, but the profession of Christianity is much less among university graduates, and university professors in particular, and the definition of Christianity in educated circles tends to be a little creative. For many years, evangelical and "Bible believing" Christians have worried about sending their children into secular educational instutitions, where they might be corrupted by Evolution or Higher Criticism.

So you can't look at general population statistics and get any idea of whether NT scholars are Christians, or what sort of Christians they are.

All that said, a non-believer is less likely to go into NT studies. The more prominent non-believers in the field seem to have gotten into it when they were Christians, and then just kept up even after they lost their beliefs because that was the only job skill that they developed.

And anyone considering a career in NT studies has to reckon with the market for his or her services - many jobs are in seminaries, or in state universities funded by legislatures with substantial Christian influence, teaching students from Christian homes.

Ben C Smith

Hi, Gerard. Your stats have France at 98% Christian, yet Wikipedia claims (and this particular claim is footnoted):

In France, 32% declared themselves atheists, and an additional 32% declared themselves agnostic.

I count four options here:

• Your stat is wrong.
• The Wiki stat is wrong.
• Both stats are wrong.
• There are a lot of atheist and agnostic Christians in France. (There is an old saying: We Frenchmen are atheists. We do not believe in God, and Mary is His mother.)

Ben.

gstafleu

The numbers did look a bit () high to me. Of course established scholars would usually be older, and afaik the main group causing the %Xian to go down is younger people. Still, that is why I asked if anyone had any better numbers.

Gerard

gstafleu

I found some more data:
(from http://www.joshuaproject.net/assets/UnreachedEurope.pdf).
No doubt there are issues as to what counts as a Christian. But this data seems to confirm what I said.

Gerard

gstafleu

And then there is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_by_country. It has Germany 85%, France 85-90%, US 78.5%, UK 71.6%, Netherlands 51%, to mention just a few.

Gerard

Ben C Smith

Perhaps option 4 is the correct one; perhaps Frenchmen are labelling themselves both as Christians and as atheists. If this is so, I think we all need to carefully consider what this does to those labels.

Ben.

gstafleu

Maybe so, but in the meanwhile this is the only data we have. So going by the only data we have, the majority of people in the places from which one would expect NT scholars to come call themselves Christians in one way or another. I would suggest that we therefore have good reason to say that the majority of NT scholars is Christian, until such time as anyone shows that either these base numbers are actually wrong (as opposed to saying they might be wrong), or someone shows that the distribution of Christians among NT scholars is substantially different (to wit: substantially less) then in the surrounding population.

Gerard