Robert Ariail for February 23, 2013

It’s okay if a Republican does it.

Jesus was not around when Stephen was stoned. He quoted that line when a woman caught in the act of adultery was brought to him. But, I do understand the joke. Catholics believe Mary was without sin for those of you who don’t understand.

I hope Stephen Colbert’s sister wins.Elizabeth Colbert-Busch

It should be “let him who is without sin cast the first stone”. If you take out the relative clause the grammar becomes clear: “Let him…cast the first stone.” You wouldn’t say “Let he cast the first stone.”

There is a book out called “Misquoting Jesus”. I forget the name of its author. I saw a number of interviews with him as he was on his plug-my-book tour of TV shows. He was a born-again christian who was so enthusiastic about his faith that he decided to find the oldest known versions of the bible to be able to read them and know for himself what they said. He even learned ancient Greek so that he could read them himself, rather than rely on a translation from someone else.

He found that many things that we take for granted in the bible were not in those older copies. Many of these parables were hand-written into margins obviously later than the manuscripts were originally written. One of those had to do with casting the first stone.

So, although the story is a really good one, it was not recorded in the earliest versions of the bible. Did it really happen? Does it matter? We report; you decide.

Let him who is without grammatical error make the first correction.

But once again, even Michelangelo, going back to the source texts of all the translations, still is operating from a flawed perspective and interpretation, especially since he was trying to interpret an event that happened 2000 years in his past, and 2500 years ago in ours.…One of the failings of every interpretation out there of any work, doesn’t matter if it’s The Bible or even Im Westin Nichts Neues by Erich Maria Remarque is that all interpretations are written with the paradigms and perspectives of the interpreter, much like the original work was composed with the paradigms and perspectives of their author.…And unfortunately, it may not even matter what the interpreter translated or wrote, especially when the original work’s author is not around to answer questions about what they actually meant when they wrote their original.…It may be great and wonderful that Michelangelo was able to read Aramaic, but then again, how was he actually interpreting it?…Because one of the failings of any interpreter out there is their own limitations.…For one limitation, did Michelangelo think in Italian?…Because that would also affect any translation or interpretation he made in expressing his depiction of Moses in his artwork.…One of the other limitations out there will always be that we as people are the products of the times that we live in and that we tend to see everything around us, and even everything that happened in the past, through our own paradigm and that this was no different in the times those Aramaic folks wrote their texts or from the Renaissance times in which Michelangelo was flourishing, creating his artwork and reading his Aramaic texts.…What this means for us out there is that there is no interpretation or translation out there that is going to hold the original meaning (and interpretation) of the writer who penned the original work in their original language using their paradigm.…And one constantly wonders why the Historian Herodotus was also known as “the father of lies”.…And that Leopold von Ranke’s version of Historiography capturing events as “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” will always be a challenge because historians, much like the history they write about, will always be written and interpreted first with their paradigm, and then re-written and re-translated later on with somebody else’s and that this applies to all work created when you get right down to it, even The Bible as well as Il Principe, by Niccolo Machiavelli or even Die Zauberberg, by Thomas Mann.

It’s not that we know the truth, but there are reasonable grounds for saying that Jesus had siblings.

“A translation can be beautiful or it can be accurate, but it cannot be both.” — Vladimir Nabokov

By the way, I heard the punchline to the Mary-throws-the-stone joke as “Mom! I told you not to bother me when I’m working!”

Right. That’s why congressman Weiner is still in congress. Sheesh. The blind leading the blind…

The academic field called hermeneutics is concerned precisely with these sorts of questions about the interpretation of texts; although questions of interpretation in some form go back at least to the classical Greeks, the field was put on a serious foundation by Schleiermacher back in the early 1800s, who worked on the interpretation of the Bible but also had a good knowledge of classical philology. In the mid twentieth century the field had moved into general questions of interpretation, no longer primarily Biblical interpretation, and perhaps the most prominent modern writer in the field is the German philosopher Gadamer, whose book “Truth and Method” is essential reading. My point is that these questions people are raising are great questions, but it’s worthwhile checking out the scholarship in the area so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel — or invent a square wheel by mistake.

Yeah, I got the joke, but the question remains — if Jesus had siblings, were they the children of the Virgin Mary or did Joseph have kids with another woman.

Gosh, I thought I had imagined asking that, and the repeated requests on subsequent days (eg. 2013/01/31), even a week or two ago. But I remain disappointed with Ansonia’s silence. Is it because I smells?

Say no more!

I’ve passed on the syndrome’s explanation onto a work colleague tonight. He and I came across one such individual today and I told him that there was a syndrome definition that fit the bill. He was quite pleased to read up on it. ;-)