In Which Michael Pearl Shows Himself to be Scripturally Illiterate

In this video, Michael Pearl attempts to dismantle the doctrine of pacifism, and in so doing he exposits Matthew 10, where Jesus sends out his disciples with no supplies. He reads the word "scrip" as if it were "script" and defines it as "Bible, books, notes, writing paper."
In fact, "scrip" is an old English word for the bag in which a traveler carried his supplies. Since Jesus was sending them out without supplies, he of course didn't expect them to tote around an empty rucksack. But in literally misreading this archaic word as something else, Michael totally misses out on its meaning. This didn't have to happen; had he just used a concordance to look up all seven uses of the word 'scrip' in the KJV, he would see it used six times in this same context, and once more--THE FIRST MENTION--for the shepherd's bag in which David stashed the stones that he took with him to take on Goliath.
David didn't wrap those five smooth stones in a book, or a bundle of writing paper; he put them in a BAG.
You can stop watching the video right there, because Michael Pearl does not have a sufficient understanding of the Bible to be trusted to explain the rest of what Jesus meant in those gospel passages.

Four hundred thousand litres of wheat: The NIV and Luke 16:7

Iver Larson writes in the Better Bibles Blog (apparently misquoting the actual figures):

I have seen an NIV that was obviously changed from imperial to metric with a quick search and replace, and any numeric references that didn’t have the unit afterwards were not converted. This turns the parable of the unjust steward in Luke 16 into something quite different:
“How much do you owe my master?” “3 kilolitres of wheat” “Well, take your bill and write 400″.

Consulting an imperial NIV showed that it was actually meant to go from 800 gallons to 400 gallons, which made some amount of sense.
I’d also add that we here at least would rarely use kilolitres in ordinary speech, and would probably say 3,000 litres of wheat (if we even measured wheat in litres). You may well use 3,000 and 1,500 in preference to 3 and 1.5 anyway.

How Jessup became Jesus in four simple steps

Well, I'm back at the keyboard again after a couple weeks off. I've had some things in mind to write about--primarily the latest advances toward universal identification--but for now I'll dash off a quick complaint about the poor editorial practices that pass for professional book publishing.

I was looking over the #3 NYT Best Seller (Fiction) and noticed a glaring *electrotypographical error. The name "Jessup" had been replaced with "Jesus." Now, given that the context was an ex-convict being pictured enjoying a surf in the ocean, it should have been obvious to any proofreader what happened. I'll reconstruct it here, using the power of Conjectural Emendation.

1. The author, typing his original draft, missed one letter, resulting in "Jesup." This is a common scribal error known as haplography, in which a textual feature, that should have been doubled, wasn't.

2. Spell Check, being familiar with the name "Jesus," but not with "Jesup," suggested the change.

3. Someone, probably a copy editor at the world famous publishing house, had left his or her brain at home that day and allowed Spell Check the privilege of doing the job for him or her.

4. All subsequent checkers imagined that in a story about a man named "Jessup" getting his picture taken and published, a picture of "Jesus" on a surfboard made perfect sense.

I don't have very high hopes that this will be changed in the paperback edition. If it does eventually get corrected, this will just go to show that by no means is the earliest copy necessarily the best one.

I remember writing earlier on how Spell Check changed 'grafitte' to 'graphite', but that post seems to have been lost in the mists of cyberspace.

*electrotypographical error (I term I just coined): An error in a text most likely to have been perpetuated when the text was composed and/or edited electronically; commonly a situation in which a computer program suggested an alternate spelling to an incorrectly spelled word, resulting in an even worse mistake, which was not subsequently corrected before publication.

Another sad case of biblical illiteracy

It's interesting how this blog has grown over the years that I've had it. I suppose I will never be in the top 100 as far as readership goes, and I certainly haven't managed to start any online discussions on my comment pages, but I consistently pull in several new viewers a day, mostly through search engines where The White Man is frequently in the top three to ten results--sometimes even the top result.

In addition I've developed a core of faithful readers, and it is for their sakes that I have decided, while maintaining the core purpose of this website as a pulpit for what interests me, to treat it more like a web log and post more often--every day or two, if I'm in the area. I can't guarantee the content will be interesting, but at least it will be new.

Today's post takes off on a recent article by George Friedman, founder of Stratfor, the premier civilian intelligence service. Subscription costs are close to a dollar a day, but all subscribers agree that it's worth it (that's somewhat of a tautology, I admit). Those who don't think it's worth that much might be able to sign up for the 'free version,' which is the level I'm at.

In today's Geopolitical Weekly, George talks about the US facing a warfare of the fourth generation, and the necessity of the military gearing itself for a threat that is localized, civilian, and capable of inflicting heavy casualties on the Military's political base.

I was following him just fine when I ran across this sentence:
"King David waged fourth-generation warfare in Galilee."

Now, I'm pretty well versed in the history of ancient Israel, and off the top of my head I can think of only one battle in Galilee that would have involved King David, and that was one that he managed to weasel his way out of without being charged with desertion (he was only a battalion commander at the time). It was the Philistine Invasion of Israel through the Jezreel Valley, and it was hardly fourth-generation warfare; the opposing armies were being led by their respective heads of state.

Now, I'm sure that George was actually referring to was an earlier period in David's life, when he led the life of a desert raider (I've referred to his no-survivor tactics in an earlier post). But this took place not in Galilee, but in the deserts of southern Judea.

A rather striking geohistorical error in a publication with "Geopolitical" in its name.