Worth repeating 2004

It is as I suspected: I’m dealing with a slight case of pneumonia, something I’ve always called “walking pneumonia”. yesterday’s xrays revealed the condition, but I believe the medication I’m taking, will have it under control in short order. But just think of this: In my entire life, I can’t recall ever having the flu—even when the entire household, six children at the time, a husband and a brother-in-law, all living in the same house and, one after another, smitten with the bug, apparently, I was immune. It was no picnic for anyone. Because I haven”t been up to writing lately, I’m going to rerun a much earlier blog.

AND ALL BECAUSE OF AN IDIOM
April, 2004

Once again, because the King James Bible, used by most fundamentalist churches, contains a mistranslation of an Aramaic idiom, another believer in the inspiration of the Bible, is dead.
Mark, Chapter 16, verse 18. They shall take up serpents … it shall not hurt them. Somewhere in the hills of either Virginia or West Virginia, another person, this time a preacher, believed he could safely handle a deadly rattlesnake and paid the price for his ignorance. He believed he could defy a rattlesnake’s affinity for safety and freedom, and learned otherwise. Because the event did not appear in the morning paper, or perhaps I overlooked it, I have only what I heard via the television for the theme of this small essay. Had I seen and clipped out the item from a newspaper, it would have been but one of many such stories I’ve collected over the years and stored away for future essay material. If only readers of the Bible understood this one fact: the Aramaic language, the language Jesus spoke, the common tongue of the area in which he lived and preached, was as replete with idioms as is the English language and just as easily mistranslated into other languages.
An English-speaking person has no problem understanding the meaning behind such phrases: born with a silver spoon in the mouth, he’s as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, she’s a mite long in the tooth, he carries a chip on his shoulder, she’s been around the block a few times, and on and on and on. In simple, easy to understand terms, Mark’s words should have been rendered: You shall handle your enemies. You shall overcome opposition.
How sad and how pathetic. Absolutely anybody who trusts in their ability to handle a deadly reptile for any reason whatsoever, has to be as naive as they come, or, willing to commit as idiotic an act as can be inacted … and all because of the belief that God inspired the writing of the Bible, including all the translations that have taken place over the centuries, and therefore, every word is “God’s Word”.
I sure hope they freed the snake.