What Did Bishop Bancroft Think?

I've been poking around other diaries. There have been some interesting ones and some that fall into the "distressingly stupid" category. I found one that offered advice and answered questions and I thought that it was pretty neat. Why doesn't anyone ask me for advice?

And then there are the religious diaries. I may be an atheist but I'm happy to let religious folk believe what they will. But I always find it funny when these people quote the scriptures and either find some meaning in it that only they can or interpret the words literally. Taking the Bible literally humors me because people who do so have no idea whose words they are taking. I mean, the Bible wasn't written with thee's and thou's - it was written in Hebrew and Aramaic. So, if a Xtian quotes, say, the King James flavor, then he is quoting words written in the early 17th century. (I think the King James version was completed in 1611.) And these words were taken from Latin which were taken from the Septuagint which was in Greek. So a reader of the King James version is reading a translation of a translation of a translation and can one expect everything to have been transcribed verbatim? Of course not. You've got these shady tonsured characters sitting in scriptoriums throughout the Middle Ages copying everything by hand. There were mistakes and, no doubt, liberties taken by the transcribers. The Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible are not completely the same in that the OT has more books to it. And don't Presbyterians hold the Apocrypha to be legit?

Quoting the Bible is tricky business. Whose translation of whose Bible?

Words get written.
Words get twisted.
Old meanings move in the drift of time.

True disciples carrying that message
To colour just a little with their personal touch.