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What are you reading right now?

The subject of the Apocrypha gets interesting in light of "All Scripture is God Breathed" and the implications of that. Because if Paul included books like Enoch in what he thought of as Scripture, it's on par with all the rest of what we consider Scripture today.

My personal theory is the issue with the Apocrypha during the Protestant Reformation had more to do with the church's position on infallibility and the "traditions and teachings" of the church than anything else. When I see situations like that I always think "hurricane" because in normal weather it's normal to walk around upright. During a hurricane with gale-force winds blowing, one walks leaning into the wind. If one tried that on a normal day it would result in falling. The lesson being that looking at the reaction to something needs to be considered in context to the force the reaction was taken against.

During the time after I became a Christian I wound up with a lot of friends who were stationed at the Post Office academy at Colorado Springs. One of them had as his mission in life removing the book of Esther from the canon of Scripture. He was notably silent on the Apocrypha though, which I always thought strange, but I put it down to him being a pilot. Being anal keeps them alive so you have to make allowances.

It would be interesting to have Panin's process computerized, which would allow searches for anomalies and other issues. An optimizing script might be interesting to run and would allow the comparison of various ancient manuscripts. It's not possible to argue against his work because it is what it is, but I can see how this would make a lot of scholars very uncomfortable, especially if the simple numerics proved their analysis or pet theories wrong. And what took Panin 50 years to do, a computer could do in seconds using the original language text as data and a few well-written scripts to manipulate it.

If I understand it, this can also be done with the Hebrew manuscripts. That would be even more interesting and maybe get somebody a visit from the KoM. Who knows.
 
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