How current events influence the Bible
As we know the Christian Bible has two sections, the Old Testament and the New Testament. These were approximately written between 1200 and 165 BC. And throughout time different interpretations of the bible have given life to new religions. But for as old of a scripture there have been many revisions, some of which people have grammatically fixed and others were fixed because they just didn’t agree with it. And unfortunately, we don’t have the technology available to analyze the data pertaining to the bible, but we do have the technology to analyze the revisions and popularity of the Wikipedia page about the bible.
To most of us Wikipedia is a popular resource for people to educate themselves on an almost indefinite array of topics. But people have the freedom to edit and make changes to any Wikipedia topic in order to provide the most accurate information. And because people have the freedom to make changes to these articles it becomes difficult to eliminate all biases. In today’s world there aren’t that many revisions being made to the actual bible itself, but as of recently there have been a ton of revisions made to the Wikipedia page regarding the bible. And because of this and current events the Wikipedia page has received a lot of attention making it a trending topic for the last few years.
In the graph above we have a few things that are being depicted. The blue line represents the number of pageviews the bible has received over time, and for reference I have added the red line representing the pageviews of the Christian Wikipedia page and the orange line representing the pageviews of the Catholic Wikipedia page. First starting off with the blue line, we can see that shortly into 2019 we see a massive spike in the number of page revisions being made to the bible, and I have gone and marked this spike with the vertical blue dashed line. This forced me to think, what event in early 2019 would cause the number of pageviews to skyrocket? Especially considering the low attraction the Wikipedia page had in previous years. After doing some research I found that on April 15th 2019 the Notre Dame cathedral caught on fire, and that is exactly when that spike occurred.
After that event the bible Wikipedia page has maintained a steady level of attraction despite some bigger events going on within the world. For example, I marked the start of the covid-19 pandemic with the red vertical dashed line occurring on December 12th 2019. Even at this point we see a dip in attraction to the page despite thousands of people dying around the world.
Later on in the graph we can see yet another significant spike similar to the one that occurred with the Notre Dame cathedral. Now it is unclear if one single event had caused this spike but instead I believe it is a combination of events that would give attraction to the Wikipedia page. And looking at some of the top news in October of 2020 we see that former president Donald Trump had tested positive for covid-19, the BLM protest continues and that there were are number of Coronavirus updates going on. With the pandemic ramping up in cases and spreading throughout the world I think a lot of people were looking towards religion for aid.
It seems interesting that for how old the bible is that we are constantly revisiting and making edits to the Wikipedia page describing this document, and that events that happen in the present influence our perception and information about it. And for a reference I added a faint purple line at the bottom of the graph, and from a distance it looks like a flat line, but I can assure you that there is information in there. And this purple line shows the pageviews of Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. And despite all of the current events going on within the world it does not seem to have any influence on how the information of the book is portrayed. While it is estimated that 5 billion copies of the bible have been sold and only 8 million copies of Green Eggs and Ham have been sold so it is hard to directly compare the two. But it is curious to see that life events will forever influence the information and perception of the Bible.