By the way, that’s being charitable, because the answer is trivial if the reader’s Bible contains the traditional introductions to the two books (the answer is Luke, by the way, and the other answers are Jacob, Tubalcain, and Philippi, respectively.)

Actually, maybe flip the Acts questions.  Frankly, they should both be easy, but the Acts+Gospel question requires either extrabiblical study or a very perceptive ear for doctrinal distinctions between the four canonical Gospels.

The “essentially” qualifier is there because (sorry, gonna be a dick again) they’re also useful in understanding psychological pathology and the delusional beliefs of those disposed to treat them as inerrant.  At least as far as the believers have read the damn stuff, which is my first triage question when deciding whether a religionist is worth debating.  If I’m feeling uncharitable and think the person’s lying when he says he’s read the Bible, I ask a trivial reading comprehension question such as “Who wrestled with the angel?” or “Acts and one of the Gospels were likely written by the same person.  Which Gospel?”  I think in a candid moment my father would agree with me that the average Christian’s lack of even a basic familiarity with his own beliefs is breathtaking.

Those questions aren’t even hard.  “Hard” would be “According to Genesis, who invented metalworking?” or “When the author of Acts met up with Paul, from what port did they sail?”, and if a student in a college literature course couldn’t answer questions as trivial as the “easy” questions about a work studied (Moby Dick: “What was the name of the navigator?” or Hamlet: “What was Yorick’s profession?”, for instance) the student would not pass the class.  Basically: Christians want to live their lives according to a book, they want me to live my life according to a book, and they haven’t read the fucking thing?!

No, they refer to “all workers with dairy products”.    [Python reference]

Especially since the bible has been edited many times over

In my opinion, this is precisely why it’s interesting and worth studying.  Bit of a tangent, but: two posts before this I did some comparative analysis of Stephen King fiction.  I do that kind of thing a lot on mcgees.org.  But the modern literature stuf almost never gets comments, and the Bible stuff almost always does.  This is fascinating to me.  Not to be too much of a dick, but I believe they’re both fiction, and actually both genre fiction.  And, comparing the frequency of apocalyptic ideas, magic, powerful forces, incarnations of evil, etc. in each, really not in all-too-different genres.  It’s studying them as literature that I’m contemplating because, as far as I’m concerned, they’re essentially useless for any other purpose (sorry, but honest.)

That is unless you can read Greek.

A bit.  The grammar’s not very complex, and fortunately better lexicons exist for Biblical Greek than just about any other language I’ve considered.  If the Scots Gaelic references I’ve studied were anywhere near as comprehensive, I’d be fluent by now.

Rather than spend a year studying the Bible, try fishing. Those calm times on the water probably would be a whole lot more enlightening.

This is a great line.  And thanks also for the “special times” insight.