Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ethics in the Bible

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. WP:SNOW - I note that a WP:RM is open on Talk:Ethics_in_the_Bible and discussions about the content/style of the article are better handled there. (non-admin closure) power~enwiki (π, ν) 20:49, 17 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Ethics in the Bible

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Ethics in the Bible (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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An irredeemable hotbed of extremely cherry-picked WP:OR and WP:SYNTH and WP:ESSAY, most of it bafflingly stated in Wikipedia's voice. Ignores the overarching problems/facts that the Bible frequently contradicts itself; there are dozens if not hundreds of different interpretations of any given Bible chapter, verse, or line; there is a noted and noticeable difference between the Old Testament and New Testament; etc., etc., etc. Softlavender (talk) 06:37, 13 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia isn't a Biblical teaching site. It's an encyclopedia of facts. Softlavender (talk) 09:06, 13 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Religion-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU(T) 08:31, 13 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • disambiguate? The problem, of course, is that ethics belong to the religions which take the bible as an authority. Nobody else is a reliable source, as it were. Assuming there are articles for Judaism and the major strains of Christianity, it would make sense to replace this with links to those articles. Mangoe (talk) 12:56, 13 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, but rewrite: The quality of an article is not a valid argument for deletion per Wikipedia policy—notability of the subject is. All arguments made in the rationale above (An irredeemable hotbed ...) are therefore moot; notability is not even mentioned in the rationale.
Ethical views in the Bible is a subject that is widely discussed in secondary, scholarly literature, and therefore notable. But the article definitely still needs improvement with regard to use of sources and style of writing.--Farang Rak Tham (Talk) 15:27, 13 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Christianity-related deletion discussions. Farang Rak Tham (Talk) 15:28, 13 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep I agree with Frayae. I went asking for help, because I recognized the article is all over the place. I got this. I will fix this article if it kills me. I promise. I have made a commitment to it, and I will. I took Biblical criticism from a worse state that this to a current FAC candidate, so I can, and I will. I can figure out this one too, if I am just given the chance, please. Biblical ethics is a sub-field of Christian and Jewish ethics and as there are multiple books specifically on the topic, and it's an important topic, I am not having any trouble finding multiple sources. It's true, so far, the majority of sources so far are Jewish, but that doesn't prove bias. The Encyclopedia should have an article on this topic. It will improve. Please give me the opportunity and time. Jenhawk777 (talk) 21:25, 13 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep It's a hard topic to do WP-right (I don't know how), but we should have this article, at least as some sort of overview with many "For the main article, see..." Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 21:32, 13 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep The topic is highly notable. For example, here's an entire encyclopedia about it: The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Ethics. The rest is then a matter of ordinary editing, not deletion, per our editing policy. Andrew D. (talk) 21:42, 13 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Those encyclopedias are beautiful and I want them. Bit pricey though. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 21:55, 13 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Philosophy-related deletion discussions. Farang Rak Tham (Talk) 22:57, 13 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, trusting that OR concerns are being addressed in the ongoing exhaustive rewrite. The Bible in Ethics, The Use of the Bible in Christian Ethics, Understanding Old Testament Ethics, and Bible and Ethics in the Christian Life could be useful sources to help summarize and abstract the enormous amount of scholarship that has been done in this area. FourViolas (talk) 23:23, 13 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Speedy keep This proposal is frankly ridiculous. It is entirely true that the current version of the article in question is overwhelmingly problematic. Unfortunately, the editor who is currently rewriting it has taken the article in the wrong direction. However, there is no doubt here that the subject of the article is highly notable. The Bible contains a vast number of very different ethical systems, all of which have been highly influential in the history of western civilization and have played a role in the development of western ethics and culture that can hardly be overstated. Scholars, philosophers, and theologians have written countless books on this subject. In fact, I would contend that, if we did not have a article on this, we could hardly still continue to call ourselves an "encyclopedia." --Katolophyromai (talk) 01:55, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • delete I am going to ask people to think a bit more. The problem here is that the Bible (which ever one of the many Jewish or Christian versions of "the bible" we happen to be discussing) is not a philosophical treatise. To say this a different way, there is no such thing as "ethics in the Bible." There is for sure all kinds of "stuff" in the Bible - there are proverbs, and bodies of "law", and lots of preaching/prophecy... many stories... but no coherent ethics in the Bible. To try to talk about "ethics in the Bible" is a making a fundamental genre error (like reading a poem like you would a textbook, or vice versa).
If this page is going to exist, it should be very, very, very short. I am !voting delete because as long as this page exists, people are going to try to fill it up with all kinds of confused stuff, that is not about "ethics in the Bible" but is rather some person's ethical work, that uses biblical material as starting point or a discussion point. If we want to have a page called "Use of the Bible in ethics that would be fine. It would be clear. This page "Ethics in the Bible" invites endless confusion. Ethics and the Bible might be workable... maybe. Jytdog (talk) 02:02, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The claim that there is a correct way to read a religious text, and a correct way to understand its relation to ethical discourse, is so far from an encyclopedic NPOV that it's hard to know what to say about it. After all, this is the field that came up with the concept of hermeneutics, specifically to help discuss how there are myriad ways to read the same text, each generating a different set of meanings.
The books I linked are not, as Jytdog says, written by moral philosophers who take scripture as some kind of epigraph; they are the work of biblical scholars articulating the ethical frameworks used in various parts of the Bible, pointing out how the text appeals to moral reasoning as well as simply asserting that it is the word of God, assessing how the Jewish and Christian testaments describe the moral status and obligations of gentiles, reconstructing the ethical discourses apparently present in ancient Israelite and Judean society, etc., etc. I've pointed out before that Jytdog seems to have beliefs about the definition of "ethics" that are not widely shared by academics in relevant fields, and this !vote perhaps shows how that can lead to confusion. FourViolas (talk) 12:41, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Lovely. Please also see your talk page. Jytdog (talk) 21:31, 16 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Look at the sources people have brought -- they are almost all the inverse of this article's title: The use of the Bible in ethics" That is a very different topic. "ethics in the bible" =/= "use of the bible in ethics" Jytdog (talk) 02:14, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Did you read beyond the titles? The abstract of "the Bible in Ethics" is as follows: This article begins with a discussion of the methodological issues faced by scholars of ethics in the Old Testament and New Testament. It then identifies the basis of Old Testament ethics in law, natural law, and the imitation of God. This is followed by a discussion of New Testament ethics covering Jesus and the law, Jesus and eschatology, the background of Paul's ethics, and Paul's Christology and eschatology. Obviously talking about ethical structures of the Bible itself, not reviewing how ethicists have appealed to the Bible. FourViolas (talk) 12:45, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Did you read the whole article that you are citing, or look at its context or actual title? If you look at the main page for the book, you will that "the bible in ethics" (an apt title) It is in a section about "interpretation" along with Old Testament Theology, New Testament Theology, Biblical Theology, and Jewish Interpretation of the Bible. All interpretation. Not what is "intrinsic". Additionally the article itself includes "The difficulty encountered by the morally dubious passages of Scripture has been resolved in a variety of ways (see E. W. Davies 2005), but the presence of such passages in the Bible should serve as a reminder that its readers have an ethical duty to evaluate its norms and to resist those elements in its teaching that appear to be destructive, harmful, or detrimental to human well-being. Instead of tacitly accepting the standards of judgement established in the text and capitulating uncritically to its demands, they must be prepared to challenge its assumptions, question its insights, and (if necessary) discredit its claims." There is so much there, that is not about "ethics in the bible", but (as I have said) is about doing ethics with the bible. Btw, it is generally unwise to cite a source that you have not read. Jytdog (talk) 21:44, 16 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think any of the scholarship being discussed has the naive view that the ethical teachings in the Bible are so obvious and unified that it requires no interpretation to apperceive them; it's understood that any discussion of "ethics in the Bible" is contingent on doing some work to extract them. But there could hardly be a duty to resist uncritical acceptance of the Bible's ethical teachings if there didn't appear to be ethical teachings in the Bible! There is an immense tradition of scholarship arguing about what these ethical ideas in the Bible are and what normative frameworks they imply, leaving aside the questions of whether and how they are normatively binding. Therefore, we should have an article on the (various) ethics in the Bible. FourViolas (talk) 22:32, 16 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
See your talk page. I will not be responding here further. Jytdog (talk) 23:54, 16 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Your point is not well founded. Articles are not narrowly about their title. The difference between ethics being in the bible, and ethics directly relating to the bible is a difference that makes no difference. GliderMaven (talk) 03:10, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It is very well founded. "Books in libraries" is not the same topic as "libraries in books". And the Bible is what it is, namely, a collection of a lot of disparate material. People make all kinds of things out of it. All kinds of things, and it is very hard for people to self-aware as they move to make those things. Jytdog (talk) 05:53, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Jytdog: This notion you keep propounding that there are no "ethics in the Bible" is entirely incorrect and based on a very narrow and confused conception of what "ethics" is, one which ignores the broad areas of thought that the field of ethics actually encompasses. You seem to be conflating "ethics" with "a single, internally consistent and logical ethical system that is clearly and explicitly laid out in the text and never contradicted." Obviously, the Bible does not have that. Instead, there are many different (and admittedly often incomplete) ethical systems in various parts of the Bible that are sometimes explicitly stated and sometimes implicit in the text. Some of these perspectives directly contradict each other; others are compatible, but have different nuances and different focusses. There are still, however, large amounts of teachings on the subject of ethics in there. The article, before you eviscerated it, admittedly failed to convey this fact, but, just because this article happened to do a poor job of explaining ethics in the Bible does not mean that the Bible does not contain any material dealing with the subject of ethics.
You to be missing the point that a text or passage dealing with ethics does not have to be complete, comprehensive, consistent, or even explicit to qualify as being about ethics. Even Plato, arguably one of the greatest and most historically significant philosophers of all time, never laid out a single, comprehensive ethical system as far as we know, but there are certainly large amounts of material concerning ethics in Plato's dialogues. The same is true for the texts included in the Bible. Ethical principles can also be implicit; to give another non-biblical example for the purpose of clarity, the Iliad hardly says a word explicitly about how members of its audience ought behave, but it is very clear from the interactions and sayings of the characters described in it that it has an ethical system founded on the ideals of τιμή ("honor") and κλέος ("glory"). In short, "ethics in the Bible" do exist; they just are not always consistent or explicitly stated. They are sometimes stated explicitly, but not always. Ideally, we should also have a series of articles dealing with ethics in the writings of specific biblical authors as well, but a high-level overview of the entire collection is certainly necessary and justified in this instance.
Finally, this idea that you keep repeating that "there is no such thing as 'Ethics in the Bible'" is not founded on reliable sources and it seems to be nothing more than your own (poorly founded) original research. We have already established that there are plenty of scholarly sources on this subject, but it seems you are objecting that they are not relevant because they do not fit your pre-drawn personal conclusion that the Bible does not contain any "coherent ethical teachings."
I am currently working on a much longer response with suggestions for rewriting the article and, unfortunately, a great deal more reprovement for all parties involved in this dispute. --Katolophyromai (talk) 05:13, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The sources cited do ethics using the bible. High quality "biblical theology" efforts (including "biblical ethics" works) acknowledge the author's a priori's (which immediately and firmly draw a line between the constructed "biblical ethics" and "ethics in the bible"). If we keep this article under this name, there should be none of that stuff in the article.
It is interesting that you bring up the Iliad as something where ethics are putatively so clear. The complexity of Odysseus' character (for example) and his trickery is one of the things that makes those stories so enduring and that quality is both valorized and looked on with askance. It is not simple.
I will grant that it is perhaps maybe ~possible~ to write a description of the ethicalish ... bits.... in the Bible, honestly and neutrally. If we do, it will leave readers with more of a sense of aporia than certainties.
But my sense of what people here want, looking at the !votes and the sources cited above, is content about Use of the Bible in ethics. Which is a different topic. Jytdog (talk) 06:01, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Some sort of renaming may be a way to go. I've noticed that people can read in/and in titles like this very differently. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 06:50, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Jytdog: My example involving the Iliad was speaking in terms of generalities. Obviously there are plenty of more complex factors that go into it and I was not in any way trying to diminish those. There have been scholars who have devoted their whole lives to trying to understand the ethics underlying the Iliad, just as other scholars have devoted their whole lives to trying to understand the ethics of the Bible. My point was that an ethical system can be implied by the deeds and sayings of persons described in a work. --Katolophyromai (talk) 14:24, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I hear most of what you wrote there. but "the ethics of the bible" (a phrase you used) is -- not a thing. and as long as people are thinking that way, an NPOV article is impossible. with regard to the iliad, the analogy is poor. the corpus of "the bible" (again, which ever "bible" we are talking about), is much larger and more diverse and was assembled over such a longer period of time, and has much more layered over it. Jytdog (talk) 14:45, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Jytdog: That is not how I was using the analogy. I was only using the analogy to show how an ethical system can be implied. I was not in any way suggesting or trying to suggest that the Bible and the Iliad are of equal complexity in terms of their textual histories. In order for an analogy to be valid, the two things being compared only need to be alike in the specific way in which they are being compared. It does not matter whether they are alike in other ways or not. You are reading too much into what I wrote. --Katolophyromai (talk) 14:54, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for making it yet more clear that you are arguing for an article titled something like "ethics implied in the bible". Or, as I said "Use of the bible in ethics" Jytdog (talk) 17:09, 15 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Jytdog: No. That is not at all what I was arguing for. First of all, you apparently missed the whole part where I made a point to say that the ethics in the Bible are sometimes stated explicitly. In fact, there are tons of places where they are stated explicitly. For instance, to give a famous example, there is Matthew 7:12 where Jesus says "In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets." I think that is pretty clearly an explicit statement concerning ethics. Pretty much the entire Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:1–7:29 is explicitly about ethics.
There are tons of other explicit statements like this throughout the Bible, especially in the gospels and epistles of the New Testament and the Books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. I would recommend reading those books to find more. Even the statements expressing ethics that most people today would disagree with, such as that infamous passage in Deuteronomy 7:1–2 in which the Israelites are commanded to destroy other nations "totally", are still explicit statements concerning ethics. Obviously, the ideas expressed in passages such as that one are certainly not ethics that very many people today would admire, but they are still explicit statements concerning ethics. Second of all, you also seem to be missing that "ethics implied in the Bible" are still in the Bible, so, even if implied ethics were the only ethics in the Bible, that still would not warrant changing the title of the article to something different. --Katolophyromai (talk) 18:01, 15 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I fully understand your argument. I am saying that your argument includes slippage that is disastrous and that leads you to keep writing unsupportable generalities like "the ethics in the bible". I have already said above, that will grant that it is perhaps maybe ~possible~ to write a description of the ethicalish ... bits.... in the Bible, honestly and neutrally. If we do, it will leave readers with more of a sense of aporia than certainties. But I believe that this AfD will close "keep" and then we can turn to discussing a more appropriate name for this page. It has already started on the article talk page. There is not much point in continuing this discussion, but I do urge you to write more carefully. Jytdog (talk) 18:08, 15 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep -- although the current article is weak, ethics in the Bible is unquestionably a major subject. Any decent Into. Philosophy of Religion, Christian Religious studies course (e.g. [1], [2]) would at least touch on it. Is there possibly another title that covers this? I'm a bit shocked our article has so little in it. Has someone been deleting all the WP:RS? --David Tornheim (talk) 08:42, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@David Tornheim: before the AfD it was longer, check Special:Permalink/859298346. — Frayæ (Talk/Spjall) 09:21, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Frayae: "Holy Smoke, Batman!" What happened? Did a tornado come through? --David Tornheim (talk) 09:25, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think someone decided to deal with the "irredeemable hotbed of extremely cherry-picked WP:OR and WP:SYNTH and WP:ESSAY". 😉 — Frayæ (Talk/Spjall) 09:30, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I have reverted the removal of most of the content as this seems to pre-judge to our purpose here, which is to discuss it. Andrew D. (talk) 09:37, 14 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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