Justice or the pursuit of an agenda?

Several times in recent years I have watched the media circus attack some high profile "offender" in the run-up to their trial. The Press is, of course, only interested in a story which will attract sales, not in justice, but their pursuit of "truth" and "public interest" often compromises the first principle of "justice" which is that the accused must be presumed innocent until the prosecution has proved beyond reasonable doubt that the person is guilty. This legal "nicety" is invariably ignored by the media circus and one is left with the impression that merely to be accused is to be guilty.

This flows through into a number of "crimes" in our modern PC society. Teachers accused of misconduct or "abuse" are suspended, tried by often furiously biased bureaucrats more interested in making sure they are seen to 'act to protect the child' than in justice, and their lives and careers destroyed by the misreporting and misrepresentation of the media. It certainly doesn't help that every two bit politician immediately jumps on the band wagon and starts giving "briefings" and making political statements about the case. Small wonder then that most people no longer believe that courts can deliver either justice or be unbiased.

In fact, one very successful legal professional I know tells me bluntly that if I am looking for "justice" I will not find it in a court of law. As he puts it, the courtroom is the scene for a complex 'game' played by two legal teamswith a Judge as referee and a jury as an audience. The best theatrical performer wins.

As the Americans have probably noticed, the State of New York is having difficulty finding a jury for a certain high profile case at present. Why? The "rules" require that potential jurors should not have been unduly exposed to the facts of the case before the trial. With the media circus in full cry, I suspect they'll have to go to Afghanistan to find anyone that fits that bill!

Garten Arbeit ...

Mausi and I are busy rebuilding the garden. The Herb Spiral now awaits its plants which have been ordered but won't arrive for a week or two yet. The surround has been cleared, levelled and decorated with small stones in which we have set a range of different size pots and these are gradually being filled with interesting and colourful plants.

The lack of rain is a bit worrying as the ground is now dry and the little showers we had a few days ago, soaked in and then evaporated. Our hopes are now pinned on the promise of rain tomorrow and Friday, though some of this is probably going to be thunderstorms.

This evening we dug out another flowerbed and planted some interesting flowering plants. All in all, within a few more weeks we should have a good show - as long as we get some rain.

Reality unreal?

An article sent me by The Postulant from the New Scientist makes interesting reading. Under the title "The Grand Delusion" it discusses how we see things, what we don't, what distracts us and ends up with the conclusion that we don't actually exercise any "free-will" over our actions, reactions and behaviour.

It is a fascinating article because it also looks at the divides between 'Green' and 'Skeptic' when it comes to "Climate Science" and at the biases at work on both sides of that debate. Though it uses that as a current example, by extension one can find a lot of other examples where people holding a "view" on something will simply refuse to see any other point of view no matter how compelling the evidence given for a different view point. At the same time both sides in the argument will consider everyone but themselves to be exercising some form of bias...

So, there you have it. You're all biased. Not me, of course ...

Making choices ...

While walking down the street one day a "Member of Parliament" is tragically hit by a truck and dies.

His soul arrives in heaven and is met by St. Peter at the entrance.

'Welcome to heaven,' says St. Peter. 'Before you settle in, it seems there is a problem. We seldom see a high official around these parts, you see, so we're not sure what to do with you.'

'No problem, just let me in, 'says the man.

'Well, I'd like to, but I have orders from higher up. What we'll do is have you spend one day in hell and one in heaven.  Then you can choose where to spend eternity'.


'Really, I've made up my mind. I want to be in heaven,' says the MP.

'I'm sorry, but we have our rules.'

And with that, St. Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down to hell.  The doors open and he finds himself in the middle of a green golf course. In the distance is a clubhouse and standing in front of it are all his friends and other politicians who had worked with him.

Everyone is very happy and in evening dress. They run to greet him, shake his hand, and reminisce about the good times they had while getting rich at the expense of the people.

They play a friendly game of golf and then dine on lobster, caviar and champagne.

Also present is the devil, who really is a very friendly & nice guy who has a good time dancing and telling jokes. They are having such a good time that before he realizes it, it is time to go.



Everyone gives him a hearty farewell and waves while the elevator  rises …

The elevator goes up, up, up and the  door reopens on heaven where St. Peter is waiting for  him.

'Now it's time to visit heaven.'



So, 24 hours pass with the MP joining a group of contented souls moving from cloud to cloud, playing the harp and singing.  

They have a good time and, before he realises it, the 24 hours have gone by and St. Peter returns.

'Well, then, you've spent a day in hell and another in heaven. Now choose your eternity'.

The MP reflects for a minute, then he answers: 'Well, I would never have said it before, I mean heaven has been delightful, but I think I would be better off in hell. '

So St. Peter escorts him to the lift and he goes down, down, down to hell.



Now the doors of the lift open and he's in the middle of a barren land covered with waste and rubbish.

He sees all his friends, dressed in rags, picking up the trash and putting it in black bags as more rubbish falls from above.

The devil comes over to him and puts his arm around his shoulder. 'I don't understand,’ stammers the MP.  ‘Yesterday I was here and there was a golf course and clubhouse, and we ate lobster and caviar, drank champagne, and danced and had a great time. Now there's just a wasteland full of rubbish and my friends look miserable.  What happened?

'

The devil looks at him, smiles and says, ' Yesterday we were campaigning ... Today you voted.'

1611 and all that ...

This year many in Western Christian Churches will be celebrating the publication of what many recognise as the single most influential book in our history. It is four hundred years since the first edition of the “Authorised Version” also known as the “King James Bible” was published in London by the King’s chosen publisher, Robert Barker. When King James ascended the throne of England (He was already King James the Sixth of Scotland) in 1603 there were a number of English Translations of the Bible in circulation and use. Many of these were of decidedly dubious provenance and scholarship, some containing texts found in no other copies or in any of the original source documents. Some of the 'better' versions in use included copies of Wycliffe’s Bible and one published in the reign of Edward VI, which is popularly known as the “Breeches Bible” because it states that, on realising they were naked, Adam and Eve made for themselves ‘breeches’ of leaves. To add to the confusion the theologians and preachers using them could not agree among themselves what was an authentic text and what was not!

The King, himself a keen theology scholar and student of the Bible, decided that this state of affairs was not acceptable and so ordered a new translation which would replace all others in use. The result was the Authorised or King James Version which forms the foundation of all subsequent English Protestant and Anglican translations.

I suspect that the vast majority of those brought up in the English Speaking world in the Anglican or Protestant churches have, as I did for many years, assumed that the King James, or Authorised, Version of the Bible was a universally used canon of scripture. In fact I am pretty sure that somewhere along the line I was taught that it contained “all the books considered valid as ‘inspired by God’ by one or other of the Reformation Councils of the 16th and 17th Centuries. It came as something of a surprise therefore, to discover that the non-English speaking “Protestant” Churches, such as the German Lutherans and their ‘Family’ of churches, the Dutch Reformed Churches and others, use Luther’s translation of the Vulgate Canon as their Bible.

That got me thinking. How did the English speaking world arrive at the canon that makes up the KJV? Who decided what was ‘valid’ and what not? More importantly, how did they decide it? Believe it or not, this has taken some digging out!

Let us start with the question of the difference between the two canons of scripture.

The KJV or AV as it is more properly known, contains 66 books while the Vulgate version used by almost everyone else has 73. The reason is that the AV excludes the books known as the “Apocrypha” and which are now often included as a sort of “sandwich filler” between the Old and New Testaments in some versions. There is a problem there as well, since the Apocrypha contains 14 additional books, making a total of 80 books - 7 more than the Vulgate. In part this can be accounted for by the fact that the compilers of the AV and the Apocrypha have actually split books that appear in the Vulgate version into ‘Parts‘ to form new ‘Books.‘ The Anglican 39 Articles of Faith state that these books, which cover a historical period from 200 BC to about 100 AD, are of value ‘for the example of life and the instruction of manners.‘ The books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus (Sirach in the Vulgate) are particularly commended as providing high levels of religious and ethical teaching. Personally I have always regarded the Books of the Apocrypha as being an essential part of the whole canon of scripture, as valid as the rest.

Where does the Bible come from anyway? I’m sure most readers will be able to say instantly that it is the collection of Hebrew texts that are accepted by the Jewish people as their Torah, plus the four Gospels, the Acts, the Letters of the Apostle Paul and others and the Revelation of John... The original collection of Christian ‘Books’ actually differed widely from community to community and region to region and therein lay a large part of the problems. By about 314 there were so many ‘gospels’ and letters that heresies were two a penny. In 325 AD the Emperor ordered the First Council of Nicea to get together and sort it out, not an easy task at all. St Jerome, originally from the Province of Gaul, settled in Jerusalem and began to collect all the texts, examining the provenance of each and cataloguing those that could be assigned with confidence to the writer and setting apart those that could not.

For the Old Testament canon he adopted, with excellent reasoning, the Jewish Septuagint Canon, then in use throughout the Jewish synagogues in the Empire, though not in the East and in parts of the Holy Land itself. The Talmudic Canon of Jewish scripture does not include the ‘Hellenic’ books, such as Maccabbees, Tobit and Baruch. This collection was in use among the Jewish communities in Arabia, Persia and parts of North Africa. jerome and his team laboured long and hard to produce an authentic canon of post Crucifixion books, all of which could be proved to have been written in the first century by either the Apostles or their disciples.

All others were rejected as not being close enough to the events to have anything to add not already more authoritatively covered by those books included. The Council of Nicea accepted this collection (admittedly with some heated debate at times) and the Vulgate Bible was born. Interestingly, the single book which caused the greatest controversy was Revelations. It was finally only included when the very ancient St Bonifice was carried into the Council and confirmed that his teacher had been a disciple of John and that, as a young scholar, that teacher had in fact written down the book to John’s dictation.

Jerome’s next task was to produce a Latin ‘standard version’ of all the texts in a single book. This took, according to some authorities, twenty-five years, but it was received by the Council and approved. You can imagine how many copyists there must have been needed to copy it by hand for every Christian community, and therein lies another problem.

So how did the compilers of the AV canon decide what books to include and what should not be included?

The problem in England in 1603 was that there were a number of ‘English’ translations in use. All of them copies of copies of the Vulgate, by then some 1300 years old. Even in Rome there was, at this time, considerable concern that the copyists had, over the centuries changed the text, added bits and discarded bits. As early as 700 AD this problem was being identified and written about, one bishop railing against copyists who modified texts of the Bible to suit their own style and ideas, and at others who omitted texts and added others from their own sources. In 1512 the Pope had ordered a complete revision of the text and a group had been set up to agree a single ‘true’ text and ensure that this alone was copied and distributed. At the suggestion of the President of Corpus Christi College in Oxford, it was decided that for the new English version for use in the Anglican Church, a new translation should be made from original Hebrew and Greek documents rather than the corrupted and inaccurate copies of the Vulgate then available in England. Fifty-four scholars were invited by the King to work on the project, only forty-seven actually took part and the King, himself, took an active interest and part in the work.

The obvious first task was to determine which texts were authentic and which not. That proved quite a task, but the scholars drew deep on resources and traced copies in Arabic libraries of original documents in Greek and others from Jewish sources for the Old Testament Books. Faced with two canons of Hebrew Scripture they combed the text of the New Testament to see what was quoted and from which books, determining in the end to include all of the Talmudic canon and to exclude the Apocryphal books as they did not think Christ would have known them. In this choice there may have been a small element of political influence, since certain Roman Doctrines and Dogmas draw upon, among others, Maccabbees, for their source authority.

The scholars laboured in six ‘companies’ divided between Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster, beginning work in 1605 and each ‘company’ dealing with a separate part of the whole. That they achieved the outcome they did in six years is a remarkable feat in itself.

As the text of Chapter 44, verse 1 of Ecclesiasticus says; “Let us now praise famous men, and their fathers that begat them.” Ironically, it is one of the books they excluded from the AV, yet there are hints in places of the Gospels that Christ did, in fact, know this book and quoted it. Their names may now be unfamiliar to all except serious scholars of the Bible, but their living memorial is surely the wonderful prose they created in this translation.

Those who set out to produce a single authoritative text in 1605 have created a truly remarkable document. Their memorial is the lasting mark this single book has left upon our world and our society. There are some interesting variations in the text, when read in English, between the AV and the Vulgate Douay-Rheims Version (1534) which do give some subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, differences in interpretation. There are also, in places, some marked differences in the content, but this could be down to the fact that the Douay-Rheims scholars worked from an existing Latin text which was a copy of many copies.

Few books have been subjected, down the years, to as much criticism, abuse, misuse, misinterpretation and misrepresentation as the AV. It must also be said that few books have inspired so many to make changes to themselves and to the world around them in search of a better life for all than this book, in reality a ‘library’ between a single set of covers. Interpreting scripture is always going to be difficult and should never be attempted without understanding the context of the particular section or the society in which it was first produced. There is a great deal of ‘background’ information which the original writers did not include because their audience would ‘know’ it. Two and three thousand years later, we do not always ‘know’ what has been omitted and we also suffer from the fact that we are reading a translation.

Whichever version you read, you cannot help but be moved by the incredible effort that the preservation, correction and translation of these texts represents. Is one version more valid or more accurate than the other? I do not believe so. God has guided the men and more recently the women who have worked to bring it to us, guiding the hands of copyists down the ages and eventually those who brought us the printed versions.

Who can fail to notice when reading the Old Testament, that whenever the leadership of the Jewish nations turned away from faith and God, their people suffered? Who can fail to notice that whenever the greed of the upper classes led them to adopt the practices and ‘gods’ of their neighbours, Israel and Judah were torn apart by those neighbours? For me, as a forensic investigator, there are endless parallels between these ancient societies and the behaviour of our own leaders and nations. Prosperity seems inevitably to lead to greed, in a few, deprivation and hardship for others. This is, perhaps, one of the greatest achievements of those who translated the Bible so carefully; it provides a mirror to each and everyone of us and our society.

To those who argue that “the Church” has altered the text, changed the meaning or inserted passages, I say this: Where is your evidence, where your proof? If you refer me to the Nag Hamadi ‘library‘ or the Dead Sea Scrolls, I can respond by saying that the Nag Hamadi texts are all at least 200 years younger than the youngest of the books in the Bible (Revelations) and written by the followers of Docetism and Arianism, against whom John rails in the Revelations. If you say the Dead Sea Scrolls, nothing in them is Christian, they are the work of a Jewish Messianic Sect who chose the wrong side in the rebellion against Rome in 70 AD.

Whether you use the AV or the Vulgate is immaterial. Unlike the Quran which Muslims hold is the Word of God, Christians believe the Bible contains words inspired by God. For the Christian, God’s "Word" is the Living Christ, the Bible is His gift to us for our enlightenment and guidance. In the magnificent opening phrases of the AV translation of St John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

I found the research for this fascinating. I hope you will join me in celebrating what must surely be one of the most remarkable exercises in scholarship for all time, both St Jerome’s heroic effort and that of the 47 scholars assembled by King James.

Publishers Block?

There is a lot of debate at present about publishing and publishers, and not unnaturally, the relationships between authors, publishers and agents. A relatively new author on the block, Michael Kingswood, has quite a bit to say about it in a recent post to his blog "Michael Kingswoods Writing Blog."

He contends, and I confess that I tend to agree, that the idea that authors are "artists" who haven't got the business savvy to handle dealing with publishers, is wrong. Certainly the example he presents is a powerful one. Another writer who comments on the state of the publishing industry and some of its shibboleths and myths is Dean Wesley Smith and K K Rusch is also quite vocal on the issue as well.

There are a lot of frustrated and angry writers out there. The problem is that the publishing industry has changed a lot in recent years. No longer do editors look for good writing so much as for "current topic" and "fashionable ideas." Nor do they provide an author with editing assistance, now they don't have time and want the book delivered, fully edited and ready to go. This is why so many 'Best Sellers' are riddled with typos in inconsistencies.

I've been writing stuff for years and I'd be the first to admit that I'm not good at editing my own work. But that is precisely what is now expected of a writer. He or she is also expected to market and sell their own work, something that was previously tackled by the publisher. The truth is that these days to get into a traditional publisher your work has to be passed by the accountants first as marketable and they are looking for an angle. If you're an ex-politician spilling the beans on your years in office, or an ex-con you're marketable, everyone else needs a second angle to get in...

That said, I get a lot of offers to publish through "Joint Venture" schemes. In short, I put up the money and a traditional publisher publishes the book and hopefully sells it. Having burned my fingers on one such effort, I am now extremely cautious about these. In the meantime I should soon be able to wall paper the staircase with rejection slips as I continue to explore the traditional route. And herein lies another part of the problem - almost all the imprints are now owned by the same five or six Holding Companies, all of them run by accountants ...

Going through the motions

I note with interest that opinion in the UK seems to be divided between those who want out of Europe at any price and who blame Brussels for every ill that has befallen the UK and those who think the current coalition is a disaster. I have to say I have no sympathy with either view. Labour did terminal damage to the UK economy, not Brussels, and not the EU. They have left a legacy of incredibly damaging legislation as well, so no matter what the current government do to try and stimulate the economy, the Liebor legacy will torpedo it.

The Coalition faces an almost impossible task, one which will, inevitably, be unpopular with the socialist press/media and the ignoramuses who vote Liebor or failed to vote or exercised what they consider a 'protest' vote. Labour bankrupted Britain and left some ticking time bombs to make sure it was terminal. The Equalities Act, the Climate Change Act and one or two more will eventually destroy what is left of Britain's independence and her commercial and industrial viability.

Brussels may not be popular in the UK and the EU certainly isn't, but the current situation is not the fault of the EU, nor of Brussels, the finger of blame has to be pointed squarely at Whitehall and the hordes of gold plating parasites in the Civil Service and those now occupying the Opposition Benches in that House of Cards in the Palace of Westminster.