Steve Lortz

George is right excathedra! Love, Steve

When I became an actual teacher in an actual school, I followed the same policy. There is no real learning in canned presentation. That comes in dialogue. Love, Steve

You said it, chockfull! When people are "in" and they think of leaving, they think they will lose everything. The truth is, they've ALREADY lost everything by being in. By leaving, there's everything to be gained: freedom, reason, confidence and genuine friendships! Love, Steve

There were a few people that I really became friends with in TWI. The longer I stayed in, and the higher up the ladder I climbed, the more conditional the friendships became... Love, Steve

There are a lot of good Christians in a lot of good churches out there, but it's like the parable of the wheat and the tares (weeds). There are good people and there are fakes in every faith community. There are also both truth and error in every faith community's doctrine. Just do your best to listen to God and do what He would want you to do. Don't trust anybody else more than you trust Him. Life is not perfect anywhere in what Paul calls "this present evil age" but just know that God loves you, and always has. I would wave a magic wand and make everything alright, but there ain't a magic wand, and we have to wait til Jesus comes back for the restoration of all things. Look forward to that, and don't get too hung up on ANYTHING else! Love, Steve

I've got one old friend who currently fellowships with an Anglican group. He calls me occasionally and we talk. There were a couple of other people who stayed in touch but subsequently died. I'm not in touch with any of the splinter-group people I used to fellowship with. I'm interested in what your theories might be. Love, Steve

I'm not sure what you mean by this. I also have been out of TWI for 27. I haven't found anything that has been as much fun as a good twig used to be, but I still fellowship with a wide variety of people who are good, practicing Christians. Are you scared that you WOULD feel "at home" in a properly functioning fellowship with correct teaching, or that you WOULD NOT feel "at home" in a properly functioning fellowship with correct teaching? Love, Steve

Sometime after the reading of the Passing of a Patriarch back in '86, I remember Martindale coming out and saying that the problem with TWI was that the people on the field were not being strict enough in how they were running PFAL. I knew then that the Trustees were shirking their responsibility. Early in '87 I heard about the adultery from two different reliable sources, and I publicly disassociated myself from TWI. I remember all the time we had spent at Emporia picking up every little scrap of litter from the grounds based on the idea that devil spirits can hide behind trash. I know the same kind of meticulous attention to detail was exercised at HQ for the same reason. The grounds did look very nice, but that didn't prevent spirits from exercising their demonic influence on Wierwille and the Trustees. What kind of evil resides at HQ? Every kind imaginable! Love, Steve

I have always had a weak abdomen. The fascia which hold the muscle fibers bundled together have always been genetically weak. When I was in my late 20s I developed a ventral hernia just above my navel. When I was on the WOW field in 1982, it strangulated, and a doc stitched it up. It sprang out again in the late '80s. I think it was from the high impact of running in the Corps. Another doc repaired it again, and this time he put a small patch of plastic mesh in, just above my navel. In the 2000s, it sprung out again, this time from the spasms of coughing and sneezing. This time, the second doc's son repaired the hernia by putting in a sheet of plastic mesh across my whole abdomen. I have abs of plastic! He had to take out a lot of skin that was too stretched to ever draw back up tight again, the part that had the first patch in it, so he took out my navel too. I asked him if I could keep it in a jar of formaldehyde to show my seventh grade students, but he wouldn't let me have it, and there wasn't anything I could do because I was unconscious at the time. I asked the doc if I could honestly say that I lost my navel in a freak sneezing accident, because it had spring out from sneezing spasms, and he felt so guilty that I couldn't keep my navel, he told me I could say that! Love, Steve

Hiya, Tzaia! Good to see you still around and kickin'! Love, Steve

So there all the surviving scribes were, sitting in Babylon copying and editing and redacting the material they carried with them from Jerusalem, and they were confronted with ONE HELL OF A CONTRADICTION! They read in II Samuel 7:16 that God promised David "And thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee: thy throne shall be established forever." And yet, there they all were, sitting in Babylon, with no descendant of David on the throne. How to deal with this? The conclusion of the Deuteronomist was that God had withdrawn His blessing because of Israel's waywardness, and He would not bless Israel again until Israel took the initiative, repented, and returned to the ways prescribed in Deuteronomy. A big, BIG chunk of the Old Testament was written with the paradigm of the Deuteronomist in mind. This led to a history of doom, a doomed humanity, a doomed nation and a doomed messiah. The old covenant was DOOM! And yet there was another thread woven into the Old Testament, the thread of the prophets. Through Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the "lesser" prophets, God promised that He was going to establish a new covenant with His people, not for the sake of His people's works, but for the sake of His own name. A covenant based on faith rather than works. These two threads seem contradictory because they ARE! But they are both in there because they were BOTH God-breathed! Both threads are necessary in order to understand the depth of meaning in the salvation God brought through the obedience of Jesus Christ! The contradiction is resolved on the cross of Christ, and in his resurrection, and in the outpouring of Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. If we try to resolve the contradiction in any other way, we cannot help but misunderstand what it means that salvation is by grace THROUGH faith. (Fortunately for us, we don't really have to understand it to receive it!) I always find it provocative to consider that there are four gospels, and Ephesian 3:17-19 say "That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God." Four gospels - four dimensions! Wierwille's efforts to harmonize the gospels destroyed the dimensionality necessary to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge! So, if you've been keeping one of your eyes at a time shut, and trying to resolve the contradictions you see that way, get BOTH your eyes open and see the depth! Love, Steve

I'm 64, working on a master's in theological studies, and I'm having a blast! I've got plenty of stories to tell the kids, including how I lost my navel in a freak sneezing accident, and they love it too! Love, Steve

I spent 45 minutes on Thursday in conference with my adviser, partly getting set up for this semester, and partly letting him know what I've been reading and thinking since August. I started out by saying "I've lost what few shreds of faith I had left..." and as he looked at me quizzically, I finished, "...in systematic theology!" He got a kick out of that, because it was in his theology classes that I got introduced to the idea that systematic theology, where the system becomes more important than the text, is counter-productive in understanding the Bible. Both E.W. Bullinger and Wierwille had set up theologies where the system was more important than the text. And to some degree, what I had been doing after leaving TWI was setting up an alternate system. CES took systematic theology to the point where I couldn't stand it anymore, and I left them too. It wasn't until I was teaching at the Christian interdenominational classical academy that I began to value texts over systems, not specifically in theology, but in humane letters. I had been primed for Dr. R's non-systematic approach. The notion that something CANNOT contain contradictions, if that thing is genuinely God-breathed, is not a self-evident truth, but rather a presupposition needed for constructing a system. This presupposition denies God the literary liberty of using irony, "the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect." Significant tracts of the Bible intentionally use irony to convey their meanings. That's one big reason why Fundamentalist/Evangelical interpretations so often seem to miss the point. I explained to my adviser how I was coming to the opinion that sanctification is not a separate thing from a one-shot salvation, but rather an essential element in the process of salvation. These are some of the things I discussed in my latest posts on the "Sanctification" thread here in Doctrinal. Not only did my adviser agree, he gave me some further titles to examine. There are ways in which these considerations effect how I view my task, re-interpreting Acts chapter 2. First, I cannot assume that "receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit", being "baptized in the Holy Spirit" and being "filled with the Holy Spirit" are categorically different things, but rather nuanced ways of referring to the same event... Second, I DARE NOT teach "what it is not". Wierwille would often introduce a topic by first teaching "what it is not". This did two things 1) it set us up to accept whatever Wierwille taught that is WAS, and 2) it cut us off from asking questions even in our own minds. All for now. Practice making you thumb appear to move, we;ll get back to it soon! Love, Steve

Well, that was a lot easier than I thought it would be. My wife is not a trained reference librarian, but her OCD and her tinge of autism spectrum disorder have certainly made her an excellent keeper of our personal library. I had bought a copy of the book, and it was there in one of our book cases. It is King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel by Jonathan Kirsch (New York: Ballantine Books, 2000). I kept the Waldenbooks receipt to use as a bookmark, so I know I bought it on February 26, 2002, at 2:14 pm. There was an employee sticker on the back dated March 1, so I know I was still reading it then, and had brought it in to read on my break. That was nearly twelve years ago. If I'm not mistaken, Raf, you started "Actual Errors in Pfal" not long after that. Kirsch's interpretation suffers from the 19th century presupposition that everything supernatural in the Bible is impossible, and therefore "mythic". But it is excellent historiography. More later... Love, Steve

There was a time in my life when I thought that the editors of the Bible must have been a bunch idiots, there seemed to be so many contradictions: J, P, E, D, etc. Then, for a while after I became involved with TWI, I didn't think the Bible HAD any editors. After all, if it was perfect in the original autographs, then why would there have been any need for editors. And yet, toward the end of my time with TWI, I began to question that. I was trying to put together a time-line for the reign of David. I was intrigued by the accounts of David's mighty men, who had been like Robin Hood's merry men while David was on the run from Saul, and also like King Arthur's knights of the Round Table when David was on the throne. But I couldn't pin down a date for the beginning of David's reign. There are two accounts of how David first came to Saul's attention, and they contradict each other. I couldn't "resolve this apparent contradiction" using any of the tools from PFAL, so I back-burner'd it. Then, years later, after I had disassociated from CES as well as TWI, I came across an account of David's reign written by a person who was an historian as well as a Bible scholar. I no longer remember the name of the book or its author, but the writer wasn't just interested in the account of David's life. She/he wrote historiography about how that account came to be composed. The author speculated, but with good supporting evidence from what we know of the nature of scribal culture, that Solomon was the first king of Israel with enough money to set up a fully operational scriptorium at Jerusalem. One of the first tasks he gave his scribes was to record how there had come to be a legitimate king in Jerusalem, and how he, Solomon, WAS that legitimate king. The result was the kernel of what we know as First and Second Samuel. Solomon's scribes did NOT have to glorify David the way they had to glorify Solomon, because David was already dead. And there were still too many people alive who remembered David's machinations that brought Solomon to the throne, so they couldn't do the kind of white wash that was common to ancient biographies. They had to justify David's machinations! Almost all the information Solomon's scribes had about David's early years was oral, and over forty years old. They had two different stories about how David had come to Saul's attention, and as they had no way to confirm or dis-confirm either one, they made the editorial decision to include them both. It made sense to me, and I began looking to see what I could find in various places about scribal culture, and how different parts of the Bible might have been written. Is this any kind of proof? No, it is not. Can I cite it? Yes, but probably not from the internet, and only after spending a few days applying my newly minted scholarly skills, and my relationships with reference librarians, to re-find the book I originally read. Which I will do for fans of citation. All for now. Continue practicing making your thumbs appear to move. More later! Love, Steve

Why do we think something that is God-breathed has to be without contradictions? I know... I know... because Wierwille said so! But WHY did Wierwille say so? Because the Dispensationalist/Evangelical background from which he came said so? Because it's a self-evident truth? Or because it's one of OUR cultural presuppositions? Before going any farther, let's conduct a little exercise: Hold your hand out at arm's length in front of your face, with the fingers closed and your thumb straight up, like an artist looking at a model using her or his thumb to gauge proportions. Close one eye, keeping the other eye open, and mark where your thumb appears to be, in relation to something in the background. Now, without moving your head or your hand, close that eye and open the other. Do you see how your thumb appears to move in relation to the background? If not, try it a few more times until you do. Why does your thumb appear to move when it actually has not? Because your left eyeball is sending information to your brain that contradicts the information you right eyeball is sending! If you look at your thumb with both eyes open, your thumb doesn't appear to move, but you can see a difference of distance between the location of your thumb and the location of the background. Your brain takes the contradictory information your two eyes are sending it, and resolves that information into a perception of depth. Contradictory information, if it's properly ordered to begin with, can reveal dimensions that are not otherwise perceptible. Death in Paradise is coming on, and after that, Lark Rise to Candleford. I'll continue this later. Till then, practice making you thumb appear to move. I did it so much when I was on the submarine, I got to a point where I could make my thumb appear to move without closing either eye! Love, Steve

I am thankful that I was able to write well enough to make myself clear to you, Raf! My Pop was a newspaperman, and my earliest exposures were to news writing. I am presently in the process of leaning how to write acceptably in a scholarly manner, and the process is still far from complete. I would like to preserve some elements of news writing in my scholarly work. I respect your expertise! The miscellaneous questions you have brought up are things I've been thinking about for some time, also, but not necessarily able to discuss with just anybody. I never "found my voice" until I was writing a paper I entitled "Dispensing with Darby" as a reaction against CES' exaggerated furtherance of Wierwille's dispensationalism. I am still working on developing my voice! Thank you for engaging in dialogue with me! Love, Steve

You're right, WordWolf, a much longer route. Some parts of which are not as well marked out as others! First, when was "the Bible" written? Quick answer: it wasn't. Up to the time that the use of codices replaced the use of scrolls, sometime early in the Christian era, books as we know them (the Bible = "the Book") didn't exist. Various groups kept collections of scrolls, and which particular scrolls were in the collection varied from group to group. Not that they were HUGE variations, but the collections were not identical, and the contents of the scroll of a "book" in one community would most likely differ in some degree from the contents of the same "book" in a different community, due to the exigencies of publication in a scribal, pre-printing press culture. If you want to find references, go to the catalog of any decent university library and search their holdings under the key word "scribal". The material included in the Pentateuch existed as a MASS of oral tradition long before any of it was written down. When did people start writing it? Nobody knows for sure, but I'm inclined to think that Solomon was the first king of Israel who had the money and the peace to institute a court scriptorium. I think the accounts of the life and reign of David (I & II Kings) were some of the first things to be written down as justification for the succession of Solomon, but the memories of the reality were still too fresh (within the living memory of many) for the writers to whitewash David, the way nearly every other biography of a ruler did in antiquity. After doing their political propaganda, Solomon's scribes had to do something more to justify their pay, so they started writing down a lot of the material that had been oral up to that point. You will notice in this paragraph I have said "I think." That's a cue to you that I am thinking out loud and can't cite specific sources. If you remember PFAL, Wierwille never said "I think". In fact, he said "We dare not say 'I think it means...'" So I am as keenly aware, Raf and WordWolf, of your suspicion of uncited references, and share it. I am going to spend the next year (fall '14 - spring '15) writing at least four major exegetical papers as PRACTICE for writing my thesis afterward, and when I'm done with that, I'm sure I will have citations the volume of which I cannot yet even imagine flowing out of my posterior. However, here are a few tidbits on historical imagination... Historiography I think the kings of Judah, at least, maintained a scriptorium. Possibly the kings of Israel also, but I don't think the material produced by the northern court would have made it into the canon. The northerners were the proto-Samaritans, after all. So, what's the next nugget of citable information we find? During the reign of Josiah, one of the last kings of Judah (640-609), he had some repairs made to the Temple. II Kings 22:8 says, "And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord. And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, and he read it." If we read the following verses, we find that the book sounds remarkably like Deuteronomy. Had the book really been lost in the Temple since the time of Solomon? Or had Shaphan, possibly with the help of other scribes, composed the book themselves? Was Shaphan the original "Deuteronomist"? I learned a lot about "the Deuteronomist" in Encountering Ancient Voices by Corrine L. Carvalho (Winona MN: Anselm Academic, 2010). I am not making claims that Carvalho would agree with my interpretations, but it was through her book that I became exposed to the possible existence of "the Deuteronomist" and putative signs of his work. What's the next citable instance? After Cyrus had sent many of the captives back to Jerusalem, Nehemiah 8 records that Ezra had the book of the law read to the people, and a number of scribes help him make the people to understand what was being read. What WAS being read? Deutronomy? It says those who heard it were sorry when they heard what it said. That could be a fair characterization of hearing Deuteronomy. In Nehemiah 8:14, it records that the chief of the fathers of all the people read instructions that are found in Leviticus. It may well be that the people heard the whole Pentateuch in roughly the same form as we have it today (though probably abbreviated). Who was Ezra? Where had he come from? Ezra 7:1 says, "Now after these things (the return of many Jews to Jerusalem and the reconstruction of the Temple)"... verse 6a, "This Ezra went up from Babylon; and he was a ready scribe in the law of Moses..." What had the scribes who had been carried off from Jerusalem been doing during the 70 years of the captivity? They had been scribing... writing! What, for 70 years? I think they had been redacting and editing the material they had carried with them to Babylon from the royal scriptorium in Jerusalem. And one of the foremost of those scribes was Ezra. So here we have Ezra, in Nehemiah 8, standing up and beginning to read Genesis. Remember, these same people who had returned from Babylon had heard the story of Marduk, and how this mighty and resplendent god had founded the first city, the city in which they were held captive, read out loud to them at least once a year on the fourth day of the new year for as long as most of them could remember. Can you picture Ezra standing up to read the Genesis version of creation and after reading chapter 4, verse 17, commenting, "And who built the first city? Was it the great and powerful Marduk? NO! It was CAIN, the first murderer!" Can you hear the people laughing, with relief to be out of that place? Is this proof with a "mathematical exactness and a scientific precision"? No. Could I present it in an historiography class (dressed up of course with more citations and more scholarly language) and make an A? I guarantee it, because I have done as much before! Is this a reasonable view of how Genesis got written? Does it make more sense than Moses, sitting off in the desert somewhere, chewing on the end of his stylus as he receives revelation, writing about kings centuries before there was even a kingdom? Love, Steve P.S. - This has been a lot of fun! Thank you for provoking me!

In response to the title of this thread: the WORST kind! Love, Steve

I had a lot of fun in the undergrad Old Testament class I took a few years back. The university I go to is the denominational school of a faith community that does not believe in creeds. Creeds were originally regarded as man-made and divisive. The denomination was never Fundamentalist, so there is a large degree of freedom in the thought life of the faculty and the students. But many of the freshmen coming into the OT class were coming straight out of what they had been taught in Sunday school, from more Fundamentalist faith communities. The prof had to be VERY careful how he presented the material, and I think he did a remarkably good job. He used some of the Socratic techniques we used when I taught at a classical academy. But I was NOT a prof! I was a fellow student, so I could say whatever I pleased. One time, I wanted to articulate in class the difference between my attitude toward the Bible, and the attitude many of the students had been taught in Sunday school. The statement I came up with was this, "I don't believe Jesus loves me because the Bible tells me so, I believe the Bible because the Lord who loves me led me to it." And that is a true statement. Love, Steve

Attribution of authorship was not regarded in antiquity the same way we regard it today. The difference? The invention of the printing press and the ability to sell multiple copies for a profit. There were no copyright laws in antiquity because the production of copies, ANY copies of anything, was not particularly profitable. Today, there is a monetary incentive to claim monopoly on written material. That was not necessarily the case in antiquity. Writing books and attributing them to well known personalities from previous times, known as pseudepigraphy, was a common and acceptable practice in antiquity. Moses may well have written some of the things that became part of Genesis-Deuteronomy. If, as indeed seems probable to me, the "Books of Moses" were edited/redacted during or after the Babylonian captivity, then Genesis 36:31 may well have been inserted not just after any king reigned in Israel, but after those kings had CEASED to reign in Israel, as well! Your questions, Raf, DO properly call into question the reliability of Fundamentalist/Evangelical interpretation. They do not, in my opinion, detract from the remarkable, miraculous if I may say so, wonder of the the Bible! Love, Steve

I hope nobody is taking my attitude as hostile. It is NOT, at least toward any of the posters at Greasespot. Perhaps to some other interpreters of the Bible. My contention is this: If we interpret the Bible in accordance with our own cultural presuppositions, we cannot help but find it hopelessly confusing and deficient. If we interpret it in accordance with the cultural presuppositions of its writers, to the extent that we can recover those presuppositions, we find it to be an elegant and in many places intentionally funny document. The scholars of the Higher Criticism interpreted (and many still do interpret) the Bible in light of their cultural presuppositions, particularly that Newtonian mechanics renders the miraculous to be impossible. Therefore, everything attributed to the miraculous is "myth". In reaction against the Higher Criticism, the Fundamentalist/Evangelical scholars interpret everything in the Bible as being literally "true", or non-mythic, and science to be in error, without examining their own cultural presuppositions. Wierwille's interpretation was an idiosyncratic variation of the Fundamentalist/Evangelical position. As an example of interpreting something from the Bible in terms of its own cultural presuppositions, let's take the fact that the Bible attributes construction of the first city to Cain. The "Books of Moses" were probably edited during or after the Babylonian captivity. Notice, the BABYLONIAN captivity. There are mythic (in the genuine sense of the word) elements in Genesis which are counter-myths to the Babylonian creation myth. This is the text of that myth: My link If you read Tablet V, lines 121 through 130, and Tablet VI, lines 51 through 80, you will see that the founding of the first city, BABYLON, is attributed to the god Marduk as a residence for the gods. How do the writers of Genesis account for the founding of the first city? They assign it to the first murderer! The writers of Genesis are poking their fingers in the eyes of Marduk, as if he were one of the Three Stooges! They didn't give a rat's behind what the difference was between a town and a city, or where the inhabitants of Cain's city could have come from. They were battling for the hearts and minds of the Jewish people in the face of attraction to a resplendent and seemingly more powerful god than Yhwh Elohim. Remember, Bracher holds that the Babylonian myth was read out on the fourth day of the new year every year! The Jewish people in Babylon heard it every year! And the writers of Genesis attacked the Babylonian myth with HUMOR! The account of the tower of Babel in Genesis chapter 11 is ANOTHER poke in the eyes of Marduk! More shortly! Love, Steve P.S. - You don't find the story of Tiamat like THAT in AD&D! (Monster Manual, 4th ed. TSR, 1978, pg. 32)

How's this: My link Gosh! It's wikipedia! that's unacceptable in a scholarly citation! But it IS the internet! Here's an over view of The First Fossil Hunters that came up pretty quick on google: My link It is NOT some "old Hebrew text" that nobody can find! I recommend spending some time looking over this in detail, if not reading it entirely. Here's another entry that didn't take much rooting around to find! My link You don't have to read much more than the abstract on that one. I entered "fossils in antiquity" into the search field. I didn't want to bias the search by using the word "giants". But I think I'll go back and see what that brings up! ... I googled "giants in antiquity" but was disappointed to find how much dreck there is out there about the subject. It wasn't until the third page of results that I came across a reference to The First Fossil Hunters. Everything else up to that point was the "space aliens aliens stole Elvis' brain" level stuff. And Raf is right! We ARE quibbling over semantics. But I contend that this whole thread is a quibble over semantics, which I will expand upon in my next post! Love, Steve

In the very first sentence of my post on this thread of January 13, 8:47 pm, I cited The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor (Princeton University Press, 2000). It may not have been a citation in the Turabian style, but it was a real citation to a whole, real, SCHOLARLY book, expressing the things I wrote about "common knowledge" in antiquity regarding the provenance of fossils being eroded or dug out of the ground. Mayor included a 21 page appendix QUOTING ancient literary references to the bones of giants. In chapter 5, "Mythology, Natural Philosophy and Fossils" Mayor discusses the curious anomaly that the Greek philosophers, even Aristotle, failed to address the finds of fossil giant bones, even though other forms of literature were rife with such references. Chapter 6 of The First Fossil Hunters is "Centaur Bones: Paleontological Fictions" in which Mayor presents information about hoaxes, ancient and modern. On page 240, she wrote, "Taking for example Lucian's account of the phony human headed snake exhibit..." which I found particularly telling, since that passage from Lucian was one of the things our advanced Greek professor assigned us to translate without giving us any kind of hint what the subject matter was. I have to admit that my translation was VERY far from the mark. The fact that the bones of giants was common knowledge in antiquity was NOT common knowledge in our current era before the publication of Mayor's book in 2000. It is rapidly becoming so. If you want a "space aliens stole Elvis brain" level of scholarship, then I suggest you read "Genesis Six Giants" by Stephen Quayle. It's quite amusing. He takes the lying chicken spies account as true, and extrapolates from it that the walls of cities in the promised land had to be 120 feet tall! A "fact" that has NO archaeological foundation, but which contradicts ALL the bona fide archaeological evidence. Give me a little time, and I'll find some internet references, if that's what it takes. Quayle's website is very convincing! Love, Steve P.S. - I completely understand why you are suspicious of uncited references to "common knowledge", but my reference was NOT uncited.

What an interesting and entertaining thread this is turning out to be! I have stayed away from it for a brief time, mainly because classes started again today. I had to drop out in August due to a potassium overdose, but I'm strong enough now to start taking classes again. (I'm signed up for "The Christian and Old Testament Theology" and "The Doctrine of the Trinity". It's only six hours, but that's all I'm strong enough to do anymore.) Another reason I left this thread alone for a few days was to see where it would go, and I'm glad I did! It's fun! First, what does and does not constitute "common knowledge"? "Common knowledge" does not depend on whether or not the knowledge conforms to an anachronistic, alien definition of knowledge. Common knowledge is what it is because it is knowledge that is COMMON! The ancients' observations of the fossils that turned up around the Mediterranean were scientifically accurate to the extent that they had developed a system of classification. They knew that the bones that were turning up belonged to extinct mammals. They interpreted the fossils by light of the cultural presuppositions of their time. They had no other choice. Neither do we, than to interpret those finds by the light of OUR cultural presuppositions! It was common knowledge all around the Mediterranean in antiquity that the bones being found were the remains of heroes and giants who had lived in the Golden Age, before the Gigantomachy and Deucalion's flood. Deucalion's flood accounted for how fossil sea life could be found on the tops of mountains. The writers' of Genesis simply placed the existence of giants before the flood of Noah, rather than the flood of Deucalion. It was also common knowledge that griffins were quadrupedal creatures with beaks and skeletal features in common with birds, and that they laid eggs and cared for their young in nests. All things discovered to be true by Roy Chapman Andrews on his expeditions to the Gobi Desert. Around the Mediterranean, where Protoceratops remains are NOT found, people assumed they were still alive in the far east, where prospectors still had to fight them occasionally to harvest gold from their nests. Europeans also added wings to griffins. Griffins featured predominantly in the decor of the throne room at the palace of Minos at Knossos several centuries before David's kingdom or the beginnings of classical Greece. Its interesting to note that Sir Arthur Evans discovered the griffins at Knossos at about the same time (geologically speaking :)) that Roy Chapman Andrews discovered the remains of Protoceratops in the Gobi Desert! Next up... nephilim and the King James translators! Nephilim occurs only three times in the Old Testament, once in Genesis 6:4, which we've already looked at, and twice in Numbers 13:33. It's instructive to look at Numbers 13:32 and 33, the account of the chicken spies that were sent into the promised land, "32 And they brought up an evil report of the land which they searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, it is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people we saw in it are men of a great stature. "And there we saw the giants (nephilim), the sons of Anak, which come of the giants (nephilim): and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so were we in their sight." That's it, folks... ALL the uses of nephilim in the OT... There are other Hebrew words translated "giant" in the King James version, such as gibbor, rapha and raphah, which do not necessarily mean the same thing in Hebrew as we mean by "giant" in English. But those aren't the word that occurs in Genesis 6:4. Interestingly enough, the definition of nephilim given in Young's is "fallen ones", which could be usefully applied to the fossil remains found in Bible lands, because the giants were believed to be extinct, or "fallen", except by the lying chicken spies. I'd like to find out if nephilim is related to nephel, which means "untimely birth". I'll check with the Hebrew prof next time I'm up on campus. It wasn't the King James translators who came up with "giants" as a translation for nepilim. In the Septuagint, the word occurs only twice. The phrases "the sons of Anak, which come of the giants" do not appear in the Greek version. In both Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33 the Septuagint translators used the Greek word gigantes, "giants" to translate nephilim. That was about 19 centuries BEFORE the King James translation! And gigantes was the same word used to talk about the fossil finds. The word gigantomachy means "war of the giants", and was used as one of the reasons to explain why the giants went extinct. Occam may have been the finest tonsorial artiste since the Barber of Seville, but there's no reason to use his razor to come up with OVERsimplified explanations when real explanations are available! Love, Steve