Everything I learned from my rabbi I passed on to you…

I recently was going through a book entitled Velvet Elvis, with the intention to do as the author said I should: “Test it. Probe it….Don’t swallow it uncritically.”

And so I did.

I decided to focus my reading on Movement Five—Dust. In this section, Bell focuses on “Jesus, the Jewish rabbi. Bell gives some historical background on when Jewish children usually began their studies of the Torah and what they studied. The following is directly quoted from the text:

   “By the way, when Jesus’ parents found him in the temple area, how old was he? Twelve. Notice what the text says here: ‘They found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers.’

    Jesus later says to his disciples, ‘Remember, everything I learned I passed on to you.’

    Did Jesus go to school and learn like the other Jewish kids his age?”

    So Bell seems to indicate that these verses lead to the conclusion that perhaps Jesus had learned from other rabbis. After the quotes, there were footnote numbers, so I looked these up. The footnote for the last quoted verse says, “See John 15:15.” So I grabbed my Bible and looked up the verse. This is what my NIV said, “For everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.” I thought it was a little strange that the verses didn’t match up with what they were saying, so I looked in Velvet Elvis to see what translation the verses came from. It said the TNIV. So I looked up John 15:15 in this version. “For everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.”

It turns out that the verse in both translations emphasize: “everything I learned from my Father” and yet Bell forgot to put that phrase in his book. Maybe this is because the actual verse does not implicate that Jesus learned from the rabbis. What got me the most is that in Velvet Elvis, Bell has put this in his text as a quote—complete with quotation marks and everything. If I hadn’t taken the time to look up the footnote, and then the verse, I would have thought that John 15:15 said exactly what Bell quoted it to say.

But it doesn’t.

My very first post

I decided that my first post should be something pretty amazing. So I am going to write about this amazing story that I discovered earlier.

   Apparently, during this tsunami, a baby hippo got swept away and was all alone–until it met this tortoise. The tortoise apparently has adopted this hippo and now they are the best of friends. The hippo is named Owen and the tortoise is Mzee. (I totally think they should remake Milo and Otis using this story). Anyway, I think that this had to be one of the greatest stories ever. And its totally true.