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Man, it's about time someone pointed this out.
I have to correct my students all the time about what they think is in the Bible and what isn't. If I'm lucky, it's only to correct them that something they quote as Biblical actually comes from Christian scriptures, which Jews of course do not count as Biblical scripture, or from later Christian thought, which again we don't accept theologically; but usually, it's just something bizarre that somehow they got into their heads was from the Bible.
I had a high school student who swore up and down to me that democracy came from the Bible. And I had an adult student (for a conversion class) that legitimately thought that it was prohibited by the Bible for Jews to eat soy bacon or vegetarian chicken with cheese, because not only can we not eat nonkosher foods, "we can't eat anything that resembles them!" (Untrue, and weird.)
Not to mention, of course, the legions of students who are convinced that the Bible prohibits masturbation (it doesn't), or sex before marriage (it doesn't), or suchlike....
After college, when I was very poor, and had no budget for entertainment, I used to entertain myself by going over to the main street of the town, where lots of missionaries hung out, and I would debate them, and find the errors in their scholarship, or the holes in their theology. I remember with some amusement once causing great dismay to a couple of young Jehovah's Witnesses by explaining to them how the name "Jehovah" is a misnomer-- a total error-- caused by Latin translators and German academics misunderstanding the Hebrew name, for which the pronunciation was lost long before the end of the Second Temple period....
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Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.
(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)
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