If I had shown up on the right day for the panel review of Hector Avalos’s book The End of Biblical Studies (Prometheus, 2007), here are some things I would have said, time permitting, on the topic of “relevance.”

Hector argues that, despite rhetoric to the contrary, the Bible is functionally “irrelevant” even to most modern Christians and Jews. Hector defines “irrelevant” as follows: “‘Irrelevant’ here refers to a biblical concept or practice that is no longer viewed as valuable, applicable, and/or ethical” (p. 17). Curiously, when Hector seeks to demonstrate the Bible’s irrelevance to modern Christians, he offers up survey data. One set of survey data relates to “biblical literacy,” and shows low numbers of respondents able to identify quotations from the Sermon on the Mount or able to put five biblical events in canonical sequence (to name two specific examples). Hector recognizes that some might consider such tasks mere “Bible trivia,” so he cites a Baylor University study revealing that 21.9 percent of mainline Protestants and 33.1 percent of Catholics ‘never’ read Scripture” (p. 19).

I’ll take these up in reverse order. First, note the populations Hector cites: mainline Protestants and Catholics. Let’s be blunt: neither of these broad categories contains members renowned for frequent Bible reading. The Baylor study treated all Christians under four subheadings: Black Protestant, Evangelical Protestant, Mainline Protestant, and Catholic; there were also categories labeled Jewish, Other, and Unaffiliated. We could quibble about the appropriateness or felicity of these labels, but instead let’s look at the survey results. Remember, Hector cites as evidence of the Bible’s “irrelevance” the survey’s revelation that 21.9% of Mainline Protestants and 33.1% of Catholics “never” read the Bible. Of course, these data imply that 78.1% of Mainline Protestants and 66.9% of Catholics sometimes read the Bible, which is hardly as dire a finding as Hector implies. To be more specific, though, the Baylor study found that 16.0% of Mainline Protestants and 7.1% of Catholics read the Bible “weekly or more” (in the study’s jargon). Perhaps those numbers do not give much impression of “relevance,” but please realize that Mainline Protestants and Catholics represent only 43.3% of the entire respondent pool. 38.6% of the respondents were Black Protestants or Evangelical Protestants. Guess what? 54.4% of Black Protestants and 42.1% of Evangelical Protestants reported reading the Bible “weekly or more.” These numbers do not suggest widespread “irrelevance.”

But there’s something even more important than measures of Bible reading frequency or biblical literacy. One of Hector’s premises reads, “Modern biblical scholarship has demonstrated that the Bible is a product of cultures whose values and beliefs about the origin, nature, and purpose of our world are no longer held to be relevant, even by most Christians and Jews.” Note that this premise focuses on “values and beliefs about the origin, nature, and purpose our world,” not on Bible reading frequency or Bible trivia mastery. Overlap between biblical “beliefs and values” and modern Christians’ and Jews’ “beliefs and values” provides a more relevant measure of “relevance.” After all, if one were to give the Baylor survey to Jews and Christians in any period before the invention of the printing press, figures of Bible reading frequency and biblical literacy would of course be very much lower than those discovered by the Baylor survey. If you want to look at congruence between “values and beliefs” held among the Bible’s producers and its modern consumers (so to speak), you need to look at actual values and beliefs, not reading practices.

Let’s continue to use the Baylor study as a benchmarking tool. 100% of Black Protestants, 86.5% of Evangelical Protestants, 63.6% of Mainline Protestants, and 74.8% of Catholics (as well as 42.9% of Jews and 11.6% of unaffiliated respondents) have “no doubts that God exists.” Only 0.0% of Black Protestants, 0.4% of Evangelical Protestants, 0.7% of Mainline Protestants, 1.1% of Catholics, and 7.2% of Jews “don’t believe in anything beyond the physical world.” (Incidentally, a friend pointed out to me last night that atheism doesn’t break the “first commandment,” because it does not place any other god before or beside God.) 95.1% of Black Protestants, 94.4% of Evangelical Protestants, 72.2% of Mainline Protestants, 84.9% of Catholics, and a startling 9.6% of Jews (perhaps a sampling problem, with “Messianic Jews” reporting themselves as Jewish?) agree that “Jesus is the son of God.” Other measures could be cited, such as frequency of prayer or attendance at religious services, which make more sense than literacy tests as measures of congruence between the values and beliefs of the Bible’s producers and its modern readers. By these measures, I think one would have to conclude that at least some major biblical beliefs and values do remain “relevant” by the definition of “relevance” proferred in Hector’s premise 1.