Sunday, April 14, 2013

Is the holy bible an academic or non academic text?

The Holy Bible is a non-academic text. It is primarily the main religious text of the Jewish and Christian faiths and is seen by those groups as a sacred, or divinely inspired, document. The Jewish people call the first section of the Bible the Hebrew Bible and consider that their foundational scripture. Christians consider both that and the shorter second part of their Bible, called the New Testament, their most important religious text.
The Bible is not primarily scholarly because it is not considered a debatable theory in the way most academic texts are. It is not peer-reviewed and does not have a bibliography, as most academic texts do. To it adherents, it is the word of God. Different religious groups argue over what it means and have even killed each other over interpretation, but they do not argue about whether it is divinely inspired, in a special category apart from human-inspired works. Further, even religious people such as Hindus understand the Bible as a religious work, although not one that guides their own faith.
The Bible, however, can be studied in the classroom and often is. There are many courses on the Bible as literature or courses that look at Hebrew or Greek texts of the Bible. That does not make the Bible primarily an academic text. In the same way, courses may study children's literature, popular literature, or pornography, but that study does not make those texts academic. What the courses do is apply rigorous academic principles to the study of these texts.

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