A review of Contact, an alleged work of science fiction: Part One

I recently had the opportunity to view Contact, a movie that was released over two decades ago—almost the amount of time it would take for a transmission of it to reach the Vega system. I was struck from very early on in the production by the similarities between it and Isaac Asimov's famous story, Nightfall. I have written several posts reviewing that story, which are available here. I suggest reading them now, for background, before going any further. 

Now, I'll start out by saying that although I was aware of the movie when it came out, and that it was discussed in the Christian Media at the time, I've had no thoughts about it whatsoever for the past twenty plus years, so I trust that everything I say here will be uninfluenced by any other reviews. As I review Contact, I'll continue to allude to my earlier observations on this topic, which remain very relevant. Inasmuch as it's a long movie, I'll probably do this review in several installments. But, to begin at the very beginning:

The movie opens with the iconic roar of the MGM lion, framed by the Latin motto, Ars Gratia Artis--Art for Art's Sake. Not a single frame of the actual movie has yet been shown, but already we are being set up to believe that what follows is just pure entertainment--science fiction. But is it? Might there also be a deeper agenda, Art for the Sake of Persuasion? 

We then move into the opening sequence, which is a juxtaposition of animated video and archived audio. The animation is a zoom-out that begins with a satellite view of Cape Canaveral, tracking westward as the sun overtakes it from the east. Meanwhile the audio track is a montage of news broadcasts interrupted by brief bursts of contemporary music, working backward from the present day as the camera recedes from Earth, both tracks accelerating: the animation rapidly passes the Moon, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, Ceres, and Jupiter—already moving much faster than the speed of light—as the audio track has already reached a quarter century before present, to the Watergate Scandal of President Nixon, then immediately on to M.L. King's March on Washington. By the time Jupiter and its moons recede into the background we can hear an announcement of the assassination of President Kennedy. Then, as Saturn fades into the distance, we race through another two decades, passing through the McCarthy Era all the way to the beginning of the American involvement in World War Two. What is being hinted at is that news broadcasts are traveling into space at the speed of light, with the very earliest broadcasts leading the way into the rest of the galaxy. A bit of a stronger hint comes after the disappearance of Saturn, as the sun itself blinks out and we see a rapidly receding series of stars and galaxies as the audio takes us back through the Thirties to the earliest days of Radio. Then the audio itself gradually fades to background static, as we continue to back our way through a dusty nebula and into intergalactic space, where total silence reigns. Other galaxies zoom by with increasing rapidity, until the screen becomes a total blur which resolves into the left eyeball of our protagonist, the young Ellie Arroway. Meanwhile, the audio picks back up again as background static, resolving into the signal of a ham radio she is operating, with her voice now in real time, attempting to make contact with “anyone out there.” Thus the stage is set for a lifetime of hovering over a radio, seeking not only a signal from another rational being, but, most importantly, the opportunity for interaction therewith. And we see her determination as she scans the dials in search of a response, getting encouragement from her father to keep trying—then, when she finally lands a station out of Pensacola, he congratulates her for achieving the “farthest one yet.”

Okay, at this point in the actual screen-acting, we already move from the realm of science to science fiction, because that's just not how the propagation of ham radio waves works. One does not start out pulling in nearby signals, then progressively move to the outer limits on the country, then farther out into the hemisphere, and finally, with “a big enough antenna,” to the other side of the world. The propagation of radio waves on the frequencies of the amateur bands is such that one is actually more likely to land a station a thousand miles away, than an hundred. But, not to let the facts of science get in the way of a good story, the scriptwriters expect us to believe that Ellie will start small, and keep progressing until she is at the point of asking radio operators on the other side of the Universe to “come back.” 

But that's not Ellie's only goal: in the very next scene we see her asking her father, with growing excitement, how far out it is possible to hear: California? Alaska? China? The Moon? Jupiter? Saturn? Suddenly she grows reflective, and asks her dad the question only a ten year old could ask: Could we talk to Mom?

Ah, now the subject of Religion intrudes, because young Ellie is asking an existential question, one immeasurably beyond the reach of the technology that so fascinates her. Science she knows, geography and astronomy she is beginning to understand, but of the Eternal State, she is much the innocent child, asking questions far beyond her ken. Here her father fails her—being unable to give her the answer she wants—because he, like her, only believes in Science, and Science has no answers to any of the deeper questions of life. And here the movie reveals its main argument. Having, at the behest of her father, dismissed the possibility of making contact beyond the grave, Ellie turns to the next best thing: making contact beyond the Solar System. And here we stop to consider the implications.

”Hey Dad, do you think there's people on other planets?” she asks, again in all innocence. “I don't know Sparks, but it seems like if it's just us, that would be an awful waste of space.” And is precisely here that the movie lands on its main theme: this phrase will be repeated at crucial points in the plot, to drive the message home that somewhere, on a cosmic scale, there is a sense that it would be wrong for Earth to be the only populated planet. This doctrine is never proven, nor is there ever even seen any need to prove it. Ellie simply accepts it on faith, and goes on to make it the guiding belief in her life's work, which is to search for, and find, signs of intelligence in outer space. She will run into many obstacles in that quest—the entire plot of the movie consists of her overcoming them, one after the other—but she will never be shaken in her core belief that there MUST be someone else out there—and an unstated corollary to that belief is that they MUST be so immeasurably greater than humankind, both in intelligence and technology, that they will be able to bridge the unbridgeable gulf between us, and make meaningful contact. It only remains for us to let them know we are here, and to devotedly await their response.

Do you see where this is headed? One thing this movie does, and does well, is to demonstrate that humankind is incorrigibly religious: everyone is forced by their very nature to believe in a higher order of beings, ones whose powers and understanding are beyond our comprehension. And the movie will go on to demonstrate our absolute impossibility of approaching these beings using our own abilities, or of comprehending them using our own understanding. Atheistic Science is turned on its head, and shown to be just another religion after all. 

I think that's enough for the first installment; we are now fully seven minutes into a two-and-a-half-hour movie, and in the next scene we will see Ellie instantly transition to Dr. Arroway the astronomer, having finally achieved the ultimate in her muttered ten-year-old goal of "get[ting] a bigger antenna."

Wine and the Bible

So goes the title of an undated and unattributed article I found online. There's not much of the Bible in it, though; it's mostly extracts of centuries-old anecdotes about wine being preserved without the benefit of fermentation. All this is well and good, but there's one problem: we live in the present, and if we are going to enjoy the biblical blessing of unfermented wine, somebody needs to show us how to make it; some of us, like the ancients, don't have refridgerators. There's not a shred of scientific rigour in this article: assertion after assertion is made without any attempts to repeat the experiment and see if it actually works. Here is the article:

Did Jesus turn water into intoxicating wine? Did He serve alcoholic wine at the last supper? What does the evidence tell us? The Bible speaks plainly on this subject. Historical records regarding the preparation, preservation and use of wine are also clear.

Consider this report (1820) by William Patton. The term “alcoholic” is not used. He uses the Bible term, “drunkard.” The Bible does not recognize drunkenness as a sickness, but as sin. The drunkard is listed in scripture with thieves, liars, extortioners, murderers, etc., as being in danger of God’s judgment in hell unless he repents. Gal. 5:19-21; 1 Cor. 6:9-10. God will never consign a person to hell for being sick. Therefore the matter of drunkenness, and that which leads to drunkenness, becomes a very serious matter. Here is his report:

I found that all Bible passages where wine or drinking is mentioned, fall under three headings: a) where wine is merely mentioned, b) where it is spoken of as a cause of misery and the emblem of eternal wrath, c) where it is a blessing along with grain.

I began to wonder if the Bible makes reference to two kinds of wine. Such is indeed the case. I shared my findings with Professor Seixas, an eminent Hebrew teacher. He took my manuscript, and a few days later returned it with the statement, “Your discriminations are just. They denote that there indeed are two kinds of wine.” I have since learned much from others who have come to the same conclusion. I ran into much opposition from those who believe that all mention of wine in the Bible is to intoxicating wine, but here are a few counter-statements:

Dr. Ure, in his Dictionary of Arts, says: “Juice when newly pressed from grapes, and before it has begun to ferment is called must, and in common language new wine.”

Rees’ Cyclopedia: “Sweet wine is that which has not yet worked or fermented.”

Noah Webster: “Wine, the fermented juice of grapes…Must, wine, pressed from the grape, but not fermented.”

Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible “The wine was sometimes preserved in its unfermented state and drunk as must…Very likely new wine was preserved in the state of must by placing it in jars or bottles, and then burying it in the earth.”

These authorities make it clear that there were, indeed, among the ancients, two kinds of wine, the fermented and the unfermented.

Fermentation

The laws of fermentation are fixed laws, always operating in the same way, and always and everywhere requiring the same conditions. Lardner’s Cyclopedia says:

“1. There must be saccharine (sugar) matter and gluten (yeast).

“2. The temperature should not be below 50 degrees nor above 70 or 75 degrees.

“3. The juice must be of a certain consistency. Thick syrup will not undergo vinous fermentation. Too much sugar is not favorable for the process, and on the other hand too little sugar, or, which is the same thing, too much water, will be deficient in the necessary quantity of saccharine matter to produce a liquor that will keep, and for want of more spirit the vinous fermentation will almost surely turn to vinegar.

“4. The quantity of yeast or ferment must also be well regulated. Too much or too little will impede and prevent fermentation.”

Others confirm these statements. The indispensable conditions for vinous fermentation are the right proportions of sugar, of yeast, and of water, with the temperature of the air ranging between 50 and 75 degrees.

We see therefore that the process of fermentation is not a natural one. Chaptal, the eminent French chemist, says, “Nature never forms spirituous liquors; she rots the grape upon the branch; but it is art which converts the juice into (alcoholic) wine.”

Fruits Preserved

[Before there was refrigeration]

As grapes and other fruits were such an important part of the food of the ancients, they would, by necessity, invent methods for preserving them fresh. Josephus, the first century historian, in his Jewish Wars, book VII, ch. VIII, s. 4, makes mention of Herod’s fortress in Israel, called Masada, “For here was laid up grain in large quantities, enough to enable an army to survive for a long time: here was also wine and oil in abundance, with all kinds of herbs, vegetables and dates heaped up together. These products were also fresh and full ripe, and in no way inferior to such fruits newly laid in, although they had been there almost 100 years.”

In a footnote William Whiston, the translator, says: “Pliny (AD 27-79) and others confirm this strange paradox, that provisions laid up against sieges will continue good for 104 years, as Spanheim also notes upon this place.” Such facts regarding long preservation of fruit and other food are confirmed by many other historians.

Swinburn says, “In Spain they also have the secret for preserving grapes sound and juicy from one season to another.”

E. C. Delevon states that when he was in Florence, Italy, “Signor Pippine, one of the largest wine manufacturers, told me that he at that time had in his lofts, for the use of his own table, until the next harvest, a quantity of grapes sufficient to make 100 gallons of wine; that grapes could always be had, at any time of the year, to make any desirable quantity; and that there was nothing in the way of obtaining the fruit of the vine free from fermentation in wine countries at any period. A large basket of grapes was sent to my lodgings, which were as delicious, and looked as fresh, as if recently taken from the vines, though they had been picked for months.”

Fermentation Prevented

Professor Donovan, in his writing on domestic economy, mentions three methods by which all fermentation can be prevented:

“1. Grape juice will not ferment when the air is completely excluded from it.

“2. The juice may be boiled, thereby evaporating the water. The substance thus becomes a syrup, which if very thick will not ferment.

“3. If the juice is filtered and deprived of its gluten; or yeast, the production of alcohol will be impossible.” —Anti-Bacchus, p. 162.

Also, if the juice is kept below 45 degrees (in water or underground) it will not ferment.

Four methods were used by the ancients to keep their new wine from fermenting:

Boiling and Thickening

By this process the water is evaporated, thus leaving so large a portion of sugar that fermentation is prevented. “By boiling, the juice of the richest grape loses all of its aptitude for fermentation, and may afterwards be preserved for years without undergoing any further change.” —Elements of Chemistry, Herman Boerhave.

Liebig says, “The natural law causing organic substances to pass into a state of decay is annihilated in all cases by heating to the boiling point.” The grape juice boils at 212 degrees; but alcohol evaporates at 170 degrees, which is 42 degrees below the boiling point. So then, if any possible portion of alcohol was in the juice, this process would expel it. All yeast, which would cause fermentation, is also destroyed by boiling. The obvious object of boiling the juice was to preserve it sweet and fit for use during the year. The boiling continued for several hours until ¼ to ½ of the water had boiled away. Water was later added to the syrup when the host desired to serve new wine.

Some of the celebrated Opimian wine, mentioned by Pliny had, two centuries after its production, the consistency of honey. Professor Donovan says, “In order to preserve their wines to these ages, the Romans concentrated the must or grape juice, of which they were made, by evaporation, either spontaneous in the air or over a fire, and so much so as to render them thick and syrupy.”

Horace, born 65 BC, says, “There is no wine sweeter to drink than Lesopian. It is like nectar, and resembles ambrosia more than wine. It is perfectly harmless, and will not produce intoxication.” —Anti-Bacchus p. 220.

“The Mishna states that the Jews were in the habit of using boiled wine.” —Kitto, Volume II, p. 477.

W. C. Brown, who traveled extensively in Africa, Egypt, and Syria from AD 1792 to 1798, states, “Most of the wines of Syria are prepared by boiling immediately after they are pressed from the grape, until they are considerably reduced in quantity, when they are put into jars or large bottles and preserved for use.” He adds, “There is reason to believe that this mode of boiling was a general practice among the ancients.”

“It is observable that when sweet juices are boiled down to a thick consistency, they not only do not ferment in that state, but are not easily brought into fermentation even when diluted with as much water as they had lost in the evaporation.” —Caspar Neuman, MD, professor of chemistry.

Filtration

By filtration, the gluten or yeast is separated from the juice of the grape. While the juice will pass through the filtering implements, the gluten will not, and, being thus separated, the necessary conditions of fermentation are destroyed. The ancient writers, when speaking of the removal of the vim, vi, vires, that is, the potency or fermentable power of the wine, use the following strong words: eunuchrum, castratum, effaeminatum–thus expressing the thoroughness of the process by which all fermentation was destroyed. Plutarch, born AD 60, in his Symposium, says: “Wine is rendered old or feeble in strength when it is frequently filtered. The strength or spirit being thus excluded, the wine neither inflames the brain nor infests the mind and the passions, and is much more pleasant to drink.”

Again, Pliny said, “Wines were rendered old and castrated or deprived of all their vigor by filtering.”

Captain Treat, in 1845, wrote, “When on the south coast of Italy, I inquired particularly about the wines in common use, and found that those esteemed the best were sweet and unintoxicating. The boiled juice of the grape is in common use in Sicily. The Calabrians keep their intoxicating and unintoxicating wines in separate compartments. From inquiries, I found that unfermented wines were esteemed the most. These wines were drunk mixed with water. Great pains were taken in the vintage season to have a good stock of them laid by. The grape juice was filtered two or three times, and then bottled, and some put in casks and buried in the earth–some kept in water (to prevent fermentation).” Dr. Lees’ Works, Vol. II, p. 144.

Subsidence

[Meaning, to sink or fall to the bottom; settle]

The gluten may be so effectually separated from the juice by subsidence as to prevent fermentation. The gluten, being heavier than the juice, will settle to the bottom by its own weight if the must can be kept from fermentation for a limited period. If the juice is kept at a temperature below 45 degrees, it will not ferment. The juice being kept cool, the gluten will settle to the bottom, and the juice when siphoned off, and thus deprived of the gluten, cannot ferment.

“They plunge the casks, immediately after they are filled from the vat, into water, until winter has passed away and the wine has acquired the habit of being cold.” Kitto, II, 955; A.-B. 217; Smith’s Antiquities. Being kept below 45 degrees, the gluten settled to the bottom, and thus fermentation was prevented.

Columella gives a recipe: “That your must may always be as sweet as when it is new, proceed in this way: Before you apply the press to the fruit, take the must that has already flowed from the grapes, put into a new amphora [jar], bung it up, and cover it very carefully with pitch, lest any water should enter; then immerse it in a cistern or pond of pure cold water, and allow no part of the amphora to remain above the surface. After 40 days, take it out, and it will remain sweet for a year.” He no doubt inferred that the pure wine was to be poured off from the gluten that had settled to the bottom. This wine would again be sealed airtight and kept cool in the ground or water until used. These ancients had underground cellars where their wines and other foods were preserved.

Fumigation

Dr. Ure states that fermentation may be stopped by the application or admixture of substances containing sulphur. Adams, in his Roman Antiquities, on the authority of Pliny and others, says, “The Romans fumigated their wines with the fumes of sulphur; they also mixed with the mustum (the newly pressed juice) yokes of eggs and other articles containing sulphur.”

In all these extracts, the writers call the grape juice wine, whether boiled, filtered, subsided or fumigated.

Wine With Water

There is abundance of evidence that the ancients mixed their wines with water. Not because they were so strong with alcohol as to require dilution, but because, being rich syrups, they needed water to prepare them for drinking.

According to Lightfoot, the Passover was celebrated with nonalcoholic wine mixed with water. Each person, man, woman and child drank four cups. After celebrating the Passover with His disciples, Christ took the bread and wine that remained and instituted the Lord’s supper. The wine was, we believe, the rich syrup diluted with water. This kind of wine met all the requirements of the law concerning leaven. The true rendering of matsah, according to Dr. F.R. Lees, means unfermented things. It therefore refers not only to bread.

Classification Of Wines

The careful reader of the Bible will notice that in a number of cases wine is simply mentioned without anything in the context to determine its character. He will notice another class, which unmistakably denotes the bad character of the beverage. There is also a third class, whose character is clearly designated as good.

Bad Wine

This class of texts refers to wine:

1. As the cause of intoxication. This is not disputed.

2. As the cause of violence and woe. Prov. 4:17; 23:29-30.

3. As the cause of self-security and irreligion. Isa. 28:7; 56:12; Hab. 2:5.

4. As poisonous and destructive. Prov. 23:31.

5. As condemning those who are devoted to drink. Isa. 5:22; 1 Cor. 6:10.

6. As the emblem of punishment and of eternal ruin. Psa. 60:3; 75:8; Is 51:17; Jer. 25:15; Rev. 14:10; 16:19.

Good Wine

I turn now to another class of texts which speak with approval of a wine whose character is good, and which is commended as a blessing.

1. To be presented at the altar as an offering to God. Num. 18:12; Neh. 10:37, 39; 13:5, 12.

2. Is classed among the blessings, the comforts, the necessities of life. Gen. 27:28; Deut. 7:13; 11:14; Isa. 65:8; Joel 3:18.

3. Is the emblem of spiritual blessings. Isa. 55:1; Psa. 104:15.

4. Is the emblem of the blood of the atonement, by which we receive forgiveness of sins and eternal blessedness. Matt. 26:26-28; 1 Cor. 10:16.

In all the passages where good wine is named, there is no indication of warning, nor intimation of danger, no hint of disapproval, but always of decided approval.

How bold and strong is the contrast: The one the cause of intoxication, of violence, and of woes. The other the occasion of comfort and peace. The one the cause of irreligion and of self-destruction. The other the devout offering of piety on the altar of God. The one the symbol of the divine wrath. The other the symbol of spiritual blessings. The one the emblem of eternal damnation. The other the emblem of eternal salvation.

“The distinction in quality between the good and the bad wine is as clear as between good and bad men, or good and bad spirits; for one is the constant subject of warning, designated poison, both literally and figuratively, while the other is commended as refreshing and innocent, which no alcoholic wine is.” Lees’ Appendix, p. 232.

Can it be that these blessings and curses refer to the same beverage, and that an intoxicating liquor? Dr. Nott says: “Can the same thing, in the same state, be both good and bad; a symbol of wrath, and a symbol of mercy; a thing to be sought after, and a thing to be avoided? Certainly not. And is the Bible, then, inconsistent with itself? Again, certainly not!”

Professor M. Stuart says: “My final conclusion is this: Whenever the scriptures speak of wine as a comfort, a blessing, or a libation to God, and rank it with such articles as grain and oil, they mean, and they can only mean the wines that contained no alcohol that could have a harmful effect; that wherever they denounce it, and connect it with drunkenness and revelling, they can mean only alcoholic or intoxicating wine.”

What can we say? Peer reviewed journals, supervised PhD's--junk?

Found online:

In one of the biggest cases of scientific fraud on record, a prominent psychologist has admitted fabricating data in dozens of studies.

Diederik Stapel, who was suspended from his post at Tilburg University in the Netherlands in September, was exceptionally productive. He was responsible for a succession of eye-catching studies on topics including stereotyping and discrimination, the effectiveness of advertising, and the circumstances in which people may perversely prefer negative feedback to praise.

Stapel was suspended after three junior researchers alleged scientific misconduct. But the extent of the problems became known only on Monday, when the university released an interim report concluding that dozens of papers, as well as 14 out of the 21 PhD theses Stapel had supervised, contain fabricated data.

"This is absolutely horrifying," says Laura King, a social psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia. "We are talking about research that has major impact in the field of social cognition." Social cognition is the field of psychology that investigates how our mental processes affect the way we relate to one another.

In terms of the sheer volume of research implicated, Stapel's is one of the worst cases of scientific misconduct on record. The chair of the committee that has examined Stapel's work at Tilburg University told Nature that some 30 papers have so far been found to contain fabricated data. If these are all withdrawn, they will exceed the toll of retractions of papers by Jan Hendrik Schön, whose groundbreaking work at Bell Labs, New Jersey, on electronic devices made from organic molecules was found in 2002 to contain widespread fabrication and manipulation of data.

The case leaves red-faced collaborators cursing themselves for being so trusting. "I was duped," admits Hart Blanton of the University of Connecticut in Storrs, who expects to have to retract two papers he published with Stapel examining how "priming" people by showing them a picture of Albert Einstein can make them feel less intelligent.

Some of Stapel's recent work was certainly provocative. A paper published in April in the journal Science claimed that disordered environments such as littered streets make people more prone to stereotyping and discrimination. Although the Tilburg inquiry has not yet identified the studies that contain fabricated data, Science has already published an expression of concern about this paper.

In a statement released to the Dutch media this week, Stapel admitted fabricating data and apologised for the damage done to his colleagues and the field of social psychology. "I have failed as a scientist," he said.

Sarah Palin's Views on Abstinence Lead to Second Grandchild?

I just have to comment on this. Saying that abstinence education leads to pregnancy is like saying nutrition education leads to obesity; they're leaving out the actual cause, which is premarital sex and overeating, respectively.

In September 2008, Sarah's 17-year-old daughter Bristol announced that she was five months pregnant while her mother continued to support beliefs that obviously do not work within her own family. That year she also voted to cut funding to a program that helped support teen mothers, according to the Washington Post.
In the ultimate hypocrisy, Bristol went on to earn more than $260,000 in 2009 as an advocate against teen pregnancy while at the same time admitting that abstinence was not realistic.

More when I get to it . . .

The myth of respectability

About one hundred years ago, Bible Institutes began to crop up in the United States of America. The impetus for starting them was to provide pastors with a biblical foundation for ministry, now that the mainline universities had more or less all switched to teaching modernism in their seminaries. There was no thought of accrediting the institutes, their founders having seen all to well what happened when religion became respectable.

Fifty or more years passed, and the federal government began getting involved in education. As more and more federal money flowed into the coffers of Bible Institutes, they came under more and more pressure to obtain certification as bona fide institutions of higher learning. Bigger schools had already long since started on the route of Bible Institute -> Denominational Bible College -> Nondenominational Liberal Arts College -> University. The smaller schools had all folded or been forced to forgo federal funding by 1995.

So here were are, with ministry students once again being forced to choose between a formerly Christian University that teaches evolution and social Darwinism, or a small struggling unaccredited institute run out of a local church. So short has been the turnaround, that most students at the Universities are unaware that their own school may have fit the latter description during the very lifetime of some of their professors.

But there is a lesson to be learned in all of this, and we need look no further than Sweden, where the government has been involved in education as long as there has been a State Church. The Örebro Theological Seminary never aspired to be a University, but did seek accreditation as soon as it became available. So respectable was their curriculum that the public schools sought for teachers of religion from among their graduates.

But all that started to change in 2009.

According to Christianity Today, “The Swedish National Agency for Higher Education reported in June that state-supported schools must favor religious studies over theological education.” The government agency is in charge of inspecting and promoting higher education in the Scandinavian country, evaluates universities and colleges, conducts quality assessments, and takes initiatives in updating teaching methods.

Higher education in Sweden is free of charge as the school system is largely financed by taxes. A result of the policy change is that “students could ultimately lose government allowances, a necessity in the Swedish system of higher education,” according to Christianity Today.

So, the power of the purse always comes in to play. The National Board of Higher Education in Sweden decided that the course of education at the Seminary was--of all things--too religious. No matter how we cut it, true religion just doesn't get respect. In order to keep the kroner coming, the Seminary had to bring in more classes on religious criticism and de-certify practical courses like Homiletics. So we are back full circle: the aspiring preacher must now take an unaccredited class in order to learn his trade. He may as well go to school in a Log Cabin. But he'd better hope it doesn't become the next Princeton University and Theological Seminary.

Example #3, Judges 18:30 and 2 Kings 9:4 (Part III, Case Studies in Interpolation in the series: Is 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 an interpolation?

It really strikes me as incredible how Bible translators can be so confident that the Majority Text of the New Testament is riddled with interpolations, yet seem totally incapable of identifying any in the Majority Text of the Old Testament. This despite the fact that the Masoretic Text of the Old Testament is clearly a recension, its oldest manuscripts being up to a thousand years less ancient than the manuscripts that don't support its alleged interpolations.

Just to give one example of an interpolation that Bible translators have been slow to expunge from their texts, look at Judges 18:30, where the identity of the Levite who led the tribe of Dan into idolatry is disclosed. What's his grandfather's name in your Bible? If it's "Manasseh," you're looking at an interpolation which consists of but a single letter, the Hebrew letter nun. That it was not in the original text is obvious by the fact that the Masoretes faithfully copied it down through the centuries suspended above the line of text, as if to say:

We recognize that the text here originally read משה, but that would spell "Moses," and we can't bring ourselves to admit that a grandson of our Great Legislator could have so easily fallen into idolatry, so we'll go ahead and call him מנשה instead.

Had the Masoretes not been so scrupulously honest, we may have never identified the interpolation here, and thought the many manuscripts that read משה to be victims of scribal parablepsis. But it was the translators of the KJV who fell victim instead to the most blatant Orthodox Corruption in the entire Bible. The tendency over the past century and a half, however, is to fix "Moses" firmly in the text, though all but the most paraphrastic of versions, The Message, at least dignify the obvious interpolation with a footnote admitting that the Masoretic Text reads "Manasseh." This despite the fact that at the other end of Codex Alexandrinus, which reads "Moses" here--as do many manuscripts in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin--they bow to its sole authority in the deletion of a key pronoun from Revelation 5:9--a deletion that causes them to forge a conjecture in its place--without ever so much as grudgingly admitting that "some mss read 'us'."

Now, on to the point of today's post. I mentioned in the previous post the likelihood that a scribe could add a note in the margin, never intending to interpolate the text itself. As the process goes on, a later scribe then copies the manuscript, marginal note and all. A still later scribe, seeing the marginal text in the manuscript before him, assumes that it had earlier been inadvertently omitted from his copy, and--as he thinks--inserts it back into the text. Numerous examples of this process have been alleged, but who is to say in which cases Step #1 did in fact occur, or in what cases the process actually began with Step #3? I will give the reader two cases of alleged interpolation, and allow him to sort out the likelihood of which was which.

Case #1: 2 Kings 9:4

Hyperliteral
And goes the lad the lad the prophet Ramoth Gilead.

Literal
So the young man the young man the prophet went to Ramoth Gilead.

Can you spot the interpolation? It's easy to see how it came about. Here is how the original text would have read:

and goes the lad Ramoth Gilead.
or
So the young man went to Ramoth Gilead.

A scribe with an editorial bent wanted the reader to know that the young man in question was one of the prophets ('disciples of the prophets' in v. 1). So he made a marginal note, similar to those in any Bible today, giving a marginal explanation of a word in the text. But since they had no superscripted letters or numerals in those days, nor chapter and verse references, the way to call attention to a particular word in the text was to write it again in the margin--as, of course, is still done today. For example:

Text: So the young man^[a] went to Ramoth Gilead.
Margin: ^[a]v.4 the young man: that is, the prophet

Take away the superscript letter, the reference, and "that is," and you have the reconstructed reading of a hypothesized exemplar. All it took to get from that, to the reading before us today, was for a subsequent scribe to--rather stupidly, we can all clearly see--bring the entire marginal reading, reference and all, "back into" the text--where it made what would have been an understandable text into a puzzle of redundancy--a redundancy passed on down through the ages by the ever-faithful Masoretes. Stupid as that scribe may have seemed, he was no doubt slavishly obeying his instructions to restore all marginal readings that had been deleted from the text. Applied to most modern translations, this approach would result in a much improved text in the New Testament, but we find it still perpetuating ancient corruptions in the Old Testament, such as the doubly redundant text we end up with here:

So the young man^[a] the young man: the prophet went to Ramoth Gilead.

We couldn't ask for a much clearer example of inadvertent interpolation than this. But how do the Bible translators handle it? Well, one would think from reading the fruit of their efforts that either they do not believe it possible for a biblical manuscript to contain an interpolation, or that they are unaware that the science of textual criticism even exists. So what if no Hebrew Manuscript can be found with the conjectured original reading? It is obvious on its face that the present reading is corrupted, and just as obvious exactly what it would take to fix it. We all do this sort of thing all the time when reading the daily paper: spot a scribal error so obvious that there is no doubt in anyone's mind what the original would have read.

But here's how a sampling of how Bible translators handle the awkwardness of the original reading (all spellings standardised):

Targum (Gill): the young man, a disciple of the prophets
Septuagint (Brenton): the young man the prophet
Vulgate (White Man): young man, boy of prophet
Wycliffe: the young waxing man, the child of the prophet
Douay (as Clarke): the young man, the servant of the prophet
King James: the young man, even the young man the Prophet
ERV/ASV: the young man, even the young man the prophet
Darby: the young man, the young prophet

Thus the translators of centuries previous to the last. No one recognized the interpolation for what it was, but took it to be some sort of appositive. To the checklist!

1. - abrupt changes in the subject matter or interruptions in an otherwise continuous train of thought;
2. - seeming inconsistencies or contradictions that conflict with other material in the document;
3. - the presence of certain formulae in supposedly inappropriate or uncustomary contexts;
4. - repetition of redundant elements or perceived changes in tone or style;
5. - the supposed assumption by the writer of different circumstances on the part of the intended audience;
6 - the perceived character of the manuscripts that don't contain the alleged interpolation;
7 - the variety of readings in the manuscripts that do contain the alleged interpolation.

1) Yes. The second 'young man' is one that all the translators try to make fit, in a variety of ways, but it just doesn't.
2) Yes. The idea in some of the early translations that this was a servant of some specific prophet is inconsistent with the context.
3) Yes. The Targums' repeat of the "disciple(s) of the prophets" doesn't fit here like it did in verse one. He is subsequently always just referred to as "he" in the text.
4) Yes. A Hebrew word is repeated, which the Septuagint and subsequent translators took to be a dittography and just didn't translate it.
5) No. This is one of the rare interpolations with universal manuscript support of some level--even in the versions.
6) Yes. There is a lot of variety among the translators who grapple to make sense of the interpolation.

This case study should conclusively show that it isn't necessary to have manuscript support to allege an interpolation. Combining a knowledge of scribal tendencies with observation of a variety of readings is enough internal evidence to prove interpolation. It can safely be assumed that the only reason manuscript evidence is lacking is that the interpolation predates the earliest extant manuscripts.

Now we come to the translators of the last hundred years. Were they, with all their vast knowledge of interpolations that supposedly litter the landscape of the New Testament manuscripts, able to spot this one? Alas, they did no more than duplicate the diversity of ancient readings:

NASB, NKJV: the young man, the servant of the prophet (=Douay)
NRSV: the young man, the young prophet (=Darby)
NIV: the young man, the prophet (=LXX)
NLT, The Message, TNIV: the young prophet

This last reading is an interesting one. Faced with a double redundancy, the translators only threw out half of it--just as the LXX had done two thousand years before. But they still didn't catch that the man was only a disciple of the prophets. His authority was not directly from God, but mediate through, in this case, Elisha. He was a young man, but not a prophet! Every last translator fell hook, line, and sinker for the misguided marginal notation of a scribe whose work has been totally lost in the mists of antiquity. So here, for the first time*, I offer a translation of a reconstructed 2 Kings 9:4--

So the young man went to Ramoth-Gilead.

For the best documented case of this sort of interpolation happening in the New Testament, see here.

We'll get to the other case of alleged interpolation in the next post.

*UPDATE: I apologise for failing to note that the Catholic editors of The Jerusalem Bible preceded me by several decades, in  their English edition of 1968 (and perhaps as early as the French Edition of 1966):
"The young man left for Ramoth-gilead"
I now believe that these editors, who had a low view of inspiration, were the first to be able to break free from the foibles of the Masoretic Text, even where it was supported by all the versions. This, however, in contrast to their introductory claim to have "made full use of the ancient Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew texts."
At any rate, there truly is nothing new under the sun, despite our tendency to think ourselves first until an earlier claim emerges.

A Plea for Gender-Specific Translation

Those who have followed this blog know that it has been unrelenting at times in its criticism of perceived inconsistencies in the TNIV; perhaps to a slightly lesser degree of those in the NIV. Inasmuch as both of these translations are on the verge of obsolescence, I've expressed my hopes that whatever replaces them will be a truly gender-specific translation. To illustrate what I mean, let me give an example:
1 Corinthians 11:28.

KJV
But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup.

NASB
But a man must examine himself, and in so doing he is to eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

NIV
A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup.

NLT
That is why you should examine yourself before eating the bread and drinking the cup.

Notice that the first three versions use 'a man' and 'himself'. This despite there is absolutely no indication of gender in the original Greek, which reads anqrwpos eauton. anqrwpos is the word for human being (homo in Latin) and eauton is the singular reflexive pronoun, matching the masculine grammatical gender of anqrwpos.

The problem, of course, is that we don't really have a genderless way of saying this in English. We either have to go with the awkward, 'a person ought to examine himself or herself before he or she eats' or we have to change the translation. The NLT goes with the latter in neutering the construction, and in so doing changes it from third person to second. Actually, I can't say this isn't an acceptable translation, as it basically reflects colloquial speech. But what does the TNIV say?

TNIV
We ought to examine ourselves before we eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

Ah, now the subject of the sentence has changed with the interjection of the first person. There is a clear difference in meaning between 'you ought to examine yourself' and 'we ought to examine ourselves'. This is no longer translation, nor even interpretation, but PC foolishness. The CBT has ghostwritten Paul into someone afraid of the word 'his'.

May I make a suggestion? Since the Greek does use the masculine gender, the reason being that the generic word for 'human' in Greek is masculine, would it not be most accurate to translate using an English generic word that also takes the masculine gender? I speak of the pronoun 'one'.

WMV
One ought to examine himself--and, in so doing, eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

This is a formally equivalent translation of the Greek, and equally as gender-specific. It makes perfect sense in English, and no one fluent in English is going to be fooled into thinking that there is a gender-specific reference only to men in this verse.

Another Vatican abuse case

Got your attention, didn't I? Well, this probably isn't what you were expecting, so calm down.

The Vatican library is about to enter the digital age, apparently--for once--with no help from Google. This is an excerpt from their March 24, 2010 Newsletter:

The digitization of 80,000 manuscripts of the Vatican Library, it should be realized, is not a light-hearted project. Even with only a rough calculation one can foresee the need to reproduce 40 million pages with a mountain of computer data, to the order of 45 petabytes (that is, 45 million billion bytes). This obviously means pages variously written and illustrated or annotated, to be photographed with the highest definition, to include the greatest amount of data and avoid having to repeat the immense undertaking in the future.

And these are delicate manuscripts, to be treated with care, without causing them damage of any kind. A great undertaking for the benefit of culture and in particular for the preservation and conservation of the patrimony entrusted to the Apostolic Library, in the tradition of a cultural service that the Holy See continues to express and develop through the centuries, adapting its commitment and energy to the possibilities offered by new technologies.

Now, what I wish to focus on, and pick apart, is the following phrase: "without causing them damage of any kind." Simply put, this is fallacious thinking, but of a sort that is all to common to mankind, no matter the level of expertise behind such a statement.

Damage is an inevitable part of human existence, extending even to pride, which can be wounded, and feelings, which can be hurt. Nothing in human experience is immune to damage, and damage is so universal that its occurrence can only be limited to various extents; it can never be avoided altogether.

Now granted, leaving a book on the shelf in the darkened room of a climate-controlled library is the best way to minimize damage. Under such conditions, a book can be expected to remain in good condition for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But that is not why books were written, nor why they are retained. Books are made to be read.

What the Vatican curators hope to accomplish by this digitization project--indeed, what they can hardly fail to accomplish--is to both slightly prolong the life of the books by ensuring that they will hardly ever need to be taken from the shelf again, and to greatly expand the usefulness of the books by making them available to be read virtually, anywhere in the world, and by as many people as have access to the digital files in which their images will be stored.

This is a very noble goal, well worth the time and expense that need only be applied once in order to be effective for a long time to come. But meeting this goal comes at a cost--that of taking the books off the shelf, opening their pages to the light, laying them flat, and then turning each and every page for exposure to a bright flash. This act alone will probably age some of these books more in one day than they have aged in the past one hundred years of occasional but careful use.

This is damage, and it is unavoidable. The only question to be asked is whether this one-time dose of damage is worth it in the long run, and the answer to that question is undoubtedly, "Yes." One last dose of damage now, and the book can go back on the shelf, perhaps never to be opened again. For that matter, the book can be used to kindle the woodfire for the next Papal Conclave, with relatively little loss to the global knowledge of which it has heretofore only been a physical, rather than a virtual, part.

But "without causing them damage of any kind?" It's an unnecessarily lofty ideal, and one that simply cannot be realized. Yet we meet with this sort of thinking again and again. Take for example, the adage that having borrowed or rented an item, you should "return it in better condition than you got it." Inasmuch as any use of an item causes damage, even returning it in identical condition is impossible. To return it in better condition would require that you do something to improve the item while it is in your possession, thus making up for and even reversing some of the inevitable damage. You could, for example, shine a pair of shoes that you borrowed. This would certainly make up for the polish worn away from the tops of the shoes while they were on your feet, but would do nothing for the leather worn away from the soles. And if the shoes were already polished when you received them, all your noble efforts would still result in you returning the shoes somewhat the worse for wear overall.

To take this line of thinking in a slightly different direction, most people assume (or did until a couple of years ago) that their house, as a result of them living in it for a few years, will become worth more than they paid for it--at least if they do a good job of keeping it up. This fallacy is actually based on two different assumptions, in addition the the assumption that it is possible, by taking great pains, to "avoid causing damage of any kind" to an item being used.

The first of these assumptions is that nominal cost is equal to real cost. In this way of thinking, if you bought a house for $7500 in 1940, and could sell it for $100,000 now, your house is worth over $92,000 more than you paid for it. On the contrary, it's worth close to $10,000 less. Had the value of your house kept pace with inflation, you should be able to get $109,425 for it today. Only when all figures are adjusted for inflation do you see the change in an item's real value.

The other assumption is that the only cost of a house is its purchase price. While that may be true for the first few months, a period in which no one expects the value of a house to have had enough time to go up, the fact is that to continue holding on to a house has unavoidable ongoing costs. Many experts recommend an annual spending of 4% of the house's value on keeping it up. Under such a plan, even if your house is still worth $7500 in 1940 dollars, you already spent more than twice what you paid for the house just keeping it looking nice from 1940 up until 1990, and you're now closing in on paying for it the fourth time in annualized nickels and dimes. All this, even if you paid for it in hard-to-come by cash, and had no mortgage expenses during all those years. And don't forget property taxes! To truly turn a profit on your $7500 investment held for 70 years, you'd have to get well over three--quarters of a million dollars for it today: a one-hundred fold nominal increase would still leave you under water in the kind of terms that real investors use.

So, to get back to the original title: What is the Vatican abusing now? Well, if not the English language, at least the science of Economics. While it is less abusive to the delicate manuscripts in the long run to subject them to the indignities of being photographed for all the world to see, it is simply impossible to maintain that it can be done without causing them any damage at all.

Why The White Man is not an Expert on Anything

I wrote recently on the subject of Old Pilots and Bold Pilots, in which I appeared to find some exceptions to the rule that there are no old, bold pilots. But as I consider the question, I think that my exceptions actually proved the rule. The pilots who lived to an advanced age may or may not have started out bold; but, having survived any risks they undertook in their youth, later flew as carefully as their old age required.

There is a corollary, I think, to the question of learning. "A little learning is a dangerous thing," wrote Alexander Pope at the age of twenty-one, in his first published work. Here is the quote in context:

"A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts,
While from the bounded level of our mind,
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind;
But more advanced, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise!
Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744), An Essay on Criticism L. 215, 1711.

But look what Pope wrote the year he died:

"Ask of the Learned the way? The Learned are blind;
This bids to serve, and that to shun mankind;
Some place the bliss in action, some in ease,
Those call it Pleasure, and Contentment these."
Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Ep. IV. L. 19.

Another thirty-five years had dimmed in Pope's mind the value of much learning. Indeed, much learning was ridiculed by the ancients:

"Your much learning is driving you insane."
Porcius Festus, quoted in Luke, Acts, XXVI.24, c. 50

Especially was much learning of useless facts ridiculed:

"The languages, especially the dead,
The sciences, and most of all the abstruse,
The arts, at least all such as could be said
To be the most remote from common use,
In all these he was much and deeply read."
Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto I. St. 40, published anonymously in 1819

The ancients valued learning, but never for learning's sake:

"Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous."
Confucius, Analects Bk. II. Ch. XV.

Even much learning could end up being of no benefit:

"I’ve studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine
And even, alas, Theology
From end to end with labor keen;
And here, poor fool; with all my lore
I stand no wiser than before."
Goethe, Faust, I. Night, 1808.

Learning was only of use if it resulted in wisdom:

"The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction." Solomon, Proverbs, I. 7, c. 1000 BCE

"Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes
And pause awhile from Learning to be wise;
Yet think what ills the scholar’s life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the garret, and the goal.
See nations, slowly wise and meanly just,
To buried merit raise the tardy bust."
Samuel Johnson, Vanity of Human Wishes, L. 157, 1754.

So, is much learning--the kind of learning that requires one to become an expert on anything--really worth it?

"Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. " James, James III.1, c. 45

"Few men make themselves Masters of the things they write or speak."
John Selden (1584 – 1654), Table Talk, "Learning."

Perhaps, taking our cue from the Bold Pilots, we who aspire to teach should begin in our youth to acquire much learning, realising that it will be some time before we will actually have the wisdom required to profitably impart that learning to others. But we must always realise that we are ever learning, even as we are teaching:

Homines, dum docent, discunt [Men learn while they teach].
Seneca, Epistolæ Ad Lucilium VII, 64

So, The White Man is not an expert on anything--yet; and may never be. But in the mean time, I intend to stick out my neck and at least question the learning--yea, even the wisdom--of those who claim that they are. And, in so doing, I expect to learn more myself.