Jeopardy! and Paul

For those of you who follow my wanderings, you know that I enjoy watching Jeopardy!

I learn a lot from watching the show, and many times the answers and questions get my mind wandering.

Currently the Tournament of Champions is underway and it is getting excited as the end is nigh.

Earlier this week there was an interesting question and I was mystified when the wrong question was awarded during Final Jeopardy.

I was excited when New Testament was given as the category and was looking forward to see what the answer was.

Paul, letters, new testament, quotations, hebrews, romans.The answer was “Paul’s letter to them is the New Testament epistle with the most Old Testament Quotations.”

How would you answer this in the form of a question?

The winning question was unexpected as it was not the right one.

The correct question, according to Jeopardy!, was “Who were the Hebrews?”

There are at least two problems with this being correct.

First, was Hebrews written by Paul? This has been debated for centuries and there is no firm evidence that he wrote it. Growing up I have witnessed many debates between Christians about who wrote Hebrews. Was it Luke? My current level of understanding is it was written by Luke based on the teachings of Paul. So, maybe you could say that Paul was a co-writer of the epistle.

Second, there are more citations from the Old Testament in Romans than in Hebrews so even if Hebrews was written by Paul the right question would have been “Who are the Romans?”

Will the contestant who answered “Who are the Romans?” get an apology from Jeopardy! I hope that he will as he would have won the round if it would have been accepted.

Steven

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