#unreliable source

Hit-or-miss shrimp

Our shrimp man, never a slave to schedules, has been especially elusive this year. 

We caught him once, a couple of weeks ago, at his customary pop-up market, a 15-minute walk from the condo we rent on Hilton Head. But I happened to be cashless that morning. He went AWOL until Friday.

His shrimp are jumbo, indeed - 9 or 10 to the pound. Sweet as can be. And, if you want, the shrimp man will pop their heads off for you, right on the spot.

However, he remains inflexible regarding his flexibility. “Please come back,” he says, but as soon as you ask,”When ... ?,” things turn murky.

When I was very young, I was handed an International Children's Bible and told that this was the inspired, inerrant ("that means without errors, no mistakes"), perfect word of God.

I understood that God himself had dictated the words I now held in my hands.

A few years later I realized that the inspired men who had written God's words had not written them in English. God had not spoken English to them because they didn't speak English: they spoke Hebrew and Greek and Aramaic. So these were not God's words. They were translations of God's words.

Now that I speak more than one language myself, I know exceedingly well that things are always lost in translation. Even the best translation is imperfect, at the very least. So no Bible we have today is perfect.

Some years later I discovered that "inspired to write by" is not the same as "took dictation from."

These were never God's words.

They were the words of men who phrased, in their own ways, in their own words, the things God made them feel and think—or encouraged them to feel and think. This meant human error was a possibility even in the original manuscripts.

I learned later that no one has the original manuscripts. We have copies of copies of copies.

And they don't agree.

They don't match each other. There are so many differences between them. How can we tell which copies match the originals when we don't have the originals?

Even if we could, what does it matter given that the originals themselves might have been flawed?

I told myself that the word of God may have been imperfectly written by the original writers, but in that case maybe God had used copyists "mistakes" to correct those errors—but which ones? Which errors were correction, and which merely error?

Decades later I discovered some books of the Bible that weren't in my Bible. The Catholics had a fuller, more complete Bible!

Catholics are evil child molesters, of course; but they don't get that from their extra books, and even Hitler was right about one plus one equalling two. You can't reject everything a person believes just because they're a bad person. Why didn't my Bible have Tobit and Judith and so on? The Codex Sinaiticus has them, and it's 4th century, much closer to the originals than my ESV.

Why did we Protestants reject parts of the Bible?

Come to that, why did we not have the books of the Bible that the Bible seemed to think we should have?

I read the Bible assiduously, and when John told me "as the scripture has said" and then I didn't find the quote anywhere I became quite upset! Turns out the scripture referenced repeatedly, in Jude and 2 Peter and John, is the book of Enoch.

Why don't we have that in our modern Bibles?

We have old manuscripts of it in Aramaic and Hebrew and Latin and Greek and Coptic and—was God not trying to preserve it? The apostles call it scripture!

On and on the questions and problems went, and all my father could ever say was, "You think too much."

I was troubled by that as a youth.

I tried to stop thinking. To blindly accept: to believe without evidence, in the face of contrary evidence. But I couldn't.

Dad was right.