Conservative Bible Project – Intellectuals killed Jesus!

(h/t to Toast for tipping me off about this. You gorgeous chick, you!)

Well, the Conservatisation of the Bible is underway. Young Andrew Sclafly started his day by “translating” six verses of Mark 3. (Here’s the tidy version) I say “translating”, because writing something in your own words isn’t translating. It might paraphrasing, or even plagiarising, but not translating… even if you are going from English to Andyspeak.

Admittedly, at first glance it doesn’t look too bad. After all, he is getting rid of all those nasty “thee’s” and “thou’s” which really have gone the way of the Dodo. (I’m always reminded of reading Taylor Calwell’s epic ‘The Earth is the Lord’s’ which has Genghis Khan spouting “thee’s” and “thou’s” and “shalt’s” all over the place, when he was more likely to say the Mongolian equivalent of “One owt treadles gone askew on’t spindle.”) However, we soon see problems. In the opening sentence, Andy has “…and noticed man with a crippled hand.” Yes, Andy’s notoriously bad writing habits are coming to the fore. Maybe we’ll have another Wicked Bible on our hands… you know, the one that says ‘Thou shalt commit adultery”… although God knows what it’ll say once Andy’s finished with it.

However, things start going wrong in verse 2. For some reason Andy sees fit to replace “Pharisees” with “Intellectuals.” Not “Elders” or maybe “Deacons” or hell even keep “Pharisees”, seeing as it’s a valid term(and is even in the Merriam Webster). I have a horrible feeling that Andy’s new “Bible” is going to pin the blame for Jesus’s death on the intellectuals, which means that when Andy takes over the world, he can kill all the clever people on a trumped up charge of deicide.

I thought I’d have a look at what a Pharisee was, so turned to the Jewish Virtual Library, which told me:

The most important of the three were the Pharisees because they are the spiritual fathers of modern Judaism. Their main distinguishing characteristic was a belief in an Oral Law that God gave to Moses at Sinai along with the Torah. The Torah or Written Law was akin to the U.S. Constitution in the sense that it set down a series of laws that were open to interpretation. The Pharisees believed that God also gave Moses the knowledge of what these laws meant and how they should be applied. This oral tradition was codified and written down roughly three centuries later in what is known as the Talmud.

The Pharisees also maintained that an afterlife existed and that God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous in the world to come. They also believed in a messiah who would herald an era of world peace.Pharisees were in a sense blue-collar Jews who adhered to the tenets developed after the destruction of the Temple; that is, such things as individual prayer and assembly in synagogues.

Now there isn’t really much that I can read into that, that tells me they were intellectuals. They were possibly clever, and knew the Torah inside out, but I doubt they were intellectuals in the way I fear Andy means it. In fact, now that I think about it, the Pharisees were a specific faction within the Jewish community of the time, along with the Sadducees and Essenes. For Andy to suddenly replace Pharisees with Intellectuals  (are they a faction of modern day life?) shows a complete lack of understanding about the actual politics of the time (no surprise there, coming from the man who made a complete abortion of teaching world history), but also a curious insight into what he thinks about intellectuals. Then again, we already know he has a beef with professors and probably everybody else that’s smarter than him… i.e. 99.9% of the planet and most small marsupials.

You see, Andy isn’t the brightest spark out there and he does get very jealous when people have things he doesn’t (just look at how he treats Obama and scientists in general). This appears to be his way of getting back at clever people… “You killed Jesus!” Fortunately, he’s managed to surround himself with slavish minions who are, to a man (seeing as how they’ve kicked all the girls off Conservapedia) far thicker than Andy. Then again, given Andy’s quote “I’m sure we all know people of low IQs, and they don’t think and act like Forrest Gump. For starters, often they have strong religious faith” being dumb and religious is a-ok in his book… which probably explains why he wants conservative kiddies to use his encyclopaedia blog… keep ’em young, dumb and full of… er… myths? condron.us

We wait in anticipation to see how the Sermon on the Mount gets “translated” (I’m sure “blessed are the meek” will be dropped as a liberal invention) and the Good Samaritan will probably become “that gullible black baby-killer from Chicago.”

Update: By the time we get to verse 7, Andy’s ignoring geography, preferring to call the Sea of Galilee a “lake”, because the latter is a “better word.’