Featured How to Sound Like a Bibliology Scholar

While preparing a lecture for my church history class, I revisited www.cepher.net. This bizarre site advertises the Eth-Cepher Bible of a pigeon named Stephen Pidgeon. This "translation" is a ridiculous effort to "update" the Scriptures with, among other things, the Apocrypha, some of the pseudepigrapha, the "Acts 29" forgery, etc. Not only that the "Eth" part that he "translates" is actually the marker for the direct object in Hebrew, not a separate word. But hey, facts such as this didn't stop him.

Anyway, I was listening to a video of this bird and thought, "Wow, this guy might sound like a scholar to the ignorant pew dweller," even as I noted his many errors in various fields (such as that the Apocrypha was taken out of the KJV so more Bibles would sell--never mind that little, unimportant Protestant thingy).

So anyway, work with me here and let's share how to appear to be a scholar of Bibliology when you are not.

First of all, learn just enough of the Hebrew or Greek to be convincing. Don't actually try to master them--you don't need to do that to sound scholarly. Make sure you pronounce the words in a unique way so everyone thinks you actually know the language. And use the Strong's definitions, but don't actually say they are from Strong's, because a real scholar knows how out of date that source is.

I am reminded of the thread I did on the BB some years ago debunking the book on translation by H. D. Williams of the Dean Burgon Society. Williams pontificated mistakenly on the perfect tense of both Hebrew and Greek--all the while not knowing either language! For my troubles did Williams correct his many errors? Nope. I got my own page on the DBS website attacking me for telling the truth. Go there for laughs sometime.

 

Oh, heavens, I hope not!

 

Something else one can do to sound like a scholar is to read a book (just one is fine) on whichever branch of Bibliology you want to tackle: translation, hermeneutics, inspiration, preservation. This will give you some terminology. You have to have terminology that the average pew dweller does not know, and reading a book (just one is fine) on that particular subject will help you. You don't need to actually understand what the terms mean to use them. Simply plug them in when necessary.

"The doctrine of _______ is vital for our understanding of Bibliology. For this purpose, the Greek word _______ will help us. It means _______." (No need to actually open a lexicon here--just give it Strong's meaning.)

 

Neat!

 

I'm about to teach my 4th year of Greek here, and taught it some years in Japan. I'm becoming an expert--someone who knows more and more about less and less. Pretty soon I'll know everything about nothing.

 

I love idioms of all kinds! My son wants me to write an essay on translating idioms for a journal. Maybe I will. There is not much about the subject out there. I just got the biggie, Meaning-Based Translation, by Mildred Larson, and even she makes errors in this area (confusing "idiom" with "idiomatic," for example).

 

Heh, heh, heh. I'd better not say.

 

A friend of mine has been reminded by this thread of the famous BBC "spaghetti harvest" of 1955:

https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/...fd309f3482fe988f7d340d1fd6fcfe5d&action=click
or
.

 

Depending on how much you really long to be considered a Bibliology scholar, you should look into getting a mail order doctorate. This won't take much effort. Just write up a "dissertation," send in your moolah, and wait for the diploma to arrive by snail mail.

The above-mentioned Stephen Pidgeon gives no details about his Ph.D. on his www.cepher.net website. (For some reason, link in my OP doesn't work right, maybe because I put .org first, then corrected it to .net.) Now, most who have advanced degrees are entirely willing to put their school out there in the open. Tell us, Stephen, where did you get your Ph.D. and in what? Be proud of it. We might want to go there ourselves.

Oh, by the way, Pidgeon did actually use Strong's for his "translation," and the source documents for the "Eth-Cepher Bible" were English Bibles such as (I kid you not): Tyndale, the 1611 KJV, the Stephanus Textus Receptus, and the Masoretic Hebrew.

 

Like when we went to college and figured out that Dad wasn't near as ignorant as we thought he was when we were in high school.