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Loading...In my previous post I talked about the locally famous story about (my teacher) Bruce Metzger and the dead (dying?) squirrel. Here I continue the story to show why in fact is has some relevance to the New Testament!
As I indicated, for years friends of mine were eager for me to find out whether the story about Metzger and the squirrel really happened. They wanted me just to ask Metzger. But there were problems with that. Among other things, if it had happened, he almost certainly wouldn’t remember, since it would have simply been something that happened with no significance to him – only to the one who thought it was very odd that Metzger would happen to know the Greek word for squirrel and that he would volunteer it at that rather inauspicious moment.
Moreover, there were aspects of the story that did not “ring true.” Metzger was not heartless toward other living beings and he was not one to boast about his knowledge about Greek — or about anything else. Years later something happened to me that made me realize that the narrative itself could not be true. I was riding my bike to my office in Chapel Hill one day, and was passing by a yard with large trees in it. (This is a true story!) High overhead a squirrel jumped from one branch to the next, missed, and fell to the ground. I saw it happen with my own eyes! And guess what? It did not go “Splat!” and then die. It scurried off to the next tree. Squirrels don’t die when they fall out of trees.
When I saw this I immediately realized the narrative had been made up. I got to a phone and called one of my best friends from graduate school and told her what had just happened – without mentioning Metzger – and we both laughed and laughed. The squirrel story itself almost certainly hadn’t happened. But what did? What led to the story?
I think I finally figured it out, and it was by pure serendipity.
Years later, after I had finished my PhD with Metzger, and I was teaching part time at Rutgers University, Metzger hired me
As it turns out, my analysis of the story is related to how we can understand the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ teachings. Wanna see how? Join the blog and you can keep reading!Click here for membership options
Bruce Metzger is the author of several books including The Early Versions of the New Testament and The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, And Restoration.
The Swedish term “ekorre” may have to do with oak (“ek”), but we’re not sure. It may mean something like “quick” instead. Or it may be onomatopoetic: “ek! ek! ek!”.
And there is actually a kind of squirrel – the Cape ground squirrel – that uses its tail as a portable parasol.
I have an off-topic question, with some background,
I recently learned that the book now titled “Introduction to the History of Christianity”, edited by Tim Dowley, is still going strong, with the most recent edition published in 2018.
I own a 1987 reprint of the original 1977 edition, when it was titled “A Lion Handbook: The History of Christianity” (and marketed less as a seminary textbook and more for the home). I have owned it for decades, and before it was mine, it belonged to my grandparents, and I would sometimes read it when I visited them. So it forms a core part of the “general knowledge” of Christian history that I’ve had since youth.
I won’t ask if you’ve read it, but am curious if you know it by reputation, and whether you have anything at all to say about it. On the whole, by having it as a foundation to build on, would you say I’ve been well served, or dangerously misled…?
I’m afraid that I don’t know it, and don’t recall ever having heard of it, but it is published by a reputable press
Thank you so much for this post. It has helped me see some things in a better light. It gives me a context to better understand how the story of Jesus evolved.
While I have never heard of an apothegm before reading your post learning this new word and the concept it describes is very powerful for me.
To make sure I am grasping it as you have described in your post I have a couple questions.
We all know many sayings that people use that either sounds like they are a proverb or some phrase from the Bible… “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” and “God helps those who helps themselves.”
Are these above phrases still examples of the word apothegm even though they are not Biblical?
Last question… Are proverbs from other cultures be they Aesop’s fables or a saying like…
“Everyone is kneaded out of the same dough, but not baked in the same oven” examples of an apothegm?
Fundamentalist Christians I know would hold a verse out of Proverbs as a spiritually superior sentence from God yet they may look at a Chinese proverb that is saying the same thing as “man made” or a counterfeit. To me these Christian Proverbs or apothegm’s are very similar to proverbs I have read from other cultures.
Have these apothegms in the Bible been transformed into the inerrant Word of God?
The term “apothegm” simply means a short pithy saying, and aphorism. I suppose biboical scholars use it because it has a Greek derivation; its etymology is “to speak out” (i.e., in a short pithy way!). It applies to any saying like this, whether in the BIble or not. And btw, your second two examples are not from the Bible. It’s most famous formulation comes from Benjamin Franklin, but he apparently had predecessors….
I thoroughly enjoyed this two part post. Absolutely brilliant- and I just about figured out the NT connection a nano second before reaching the final paragraph. Blame it on the fact that I was riveted by the story 😁
I can easily see how this happens. I have never really had what I would consider a genuinely supernatural event, but I do have two fairly good ghost stories, which I have often been asked to tell. And I know that they have greatly improved over the years in the repeated telling. The memory of an event gets slowly modified each time you drag it out for a new occasion, and bits that do not quite fit often get smoothed out. With an audience, you also get to tweak the story in response to reactions. (The process can even be subliminal, as I suspect often happens with politicians who over-emphasize some parts of their own histories, and eventually come to believe them as if they were simply true.) That is just how memory works, and how storytelling works. I am sure that something very much like it explains most (maybe all) of what people have convinced themselves over the years are actual encounters with ghosts or aliens.
And now that I know the Greek word for squirrel, I hope to remember it for a suitable occasion, although I am not sure of the pronunciation.
SKEE–ooh-ross.
I’ve assumed for decades that the word “squirrel” derived from some Indian language, as I do with other small mammals native to the New World, opossum, muskrat, raccoon, etc. It is supposedly very difficult for non-native speakers of English to pronounce properly, though as an (almost) native speaker, I can’t hear why that would be so. it’s a lot of consonants for only two syllables, but that’s not so strange in English: “squashed” and “thwarted” and other words seem to have about the same proportion of consonants and vowels, and they don’t have the difficult reputation that “squirrel” has. It’s an odd word.
Isn’t “Lord is the son of man even of the sabbath” a secondary version of this saying?
I’m not sure what you’re asking. I’ve never seen the verse worded this way.
“Lord is the son of man even of the sabbath” is Mark’s version
κυριος εστιν ο υιος του ανθρωπου και του σαββατου
Not only an additional “even” but the saying is structured in such a way that the son of man being “Lord” is the salient point and “of the sabbath” is just an afterthought.
Isn’t this a secondary version?
No, I”m afraid that’s a mistranslation. The anarthrous substantive is the predicate, so “Son of Man” has to be the subject. ANd yes, “kai” in this context is used dverbially, in this case to stress that he is Lord not only of people but of the sabbath. No, that doesn’t make it an afterthought; it’s actually what he’s trying to say.
Yes “son of man” is the subject. For Matthew/Luke the “son of man” is “lord of the sabbath”.
But for Mark “the son of man” is “lord” first and foremost. That he’s lord “also of the sabbath” is the afterthought.
The original saying is “lord of the sabbath” but Mark emphasizes the “lord” part.
For Matthew/Luke he might be lord only of the sabbath and nothing else.
Matthew/Luke “κυριος εστιν του σαββατου ο υιος του ανθρωπου”
Mark “κυριος εστιν ο υιος του ανθρωπου και του σαββατου”
Are there any words of comfort you can offer us English fans that despite reaching a major final, that it is not in fact coming home this time? I personally feel like Job and Jonah all rolled into one.
Well, I hope you’re right about the biblical allusions, since they both came back from horrible sufferings to prosper. THe English team is young and dynamic, and will be around for years, God willing….
Sure seems plausible and very entertaining to boot!
Maybe it was not just out of the blue. What if it was an intentional pun of “tail” and “tale”? Something related to the subject of the session before that lunch.
There’s another reason to believe that the story is false and that is that the squirrel died from the fall (unless it was already very sick). Squirrels are champion jumpers and landers and when they fall they instinctively spread their arms and legs so that the skin acts as a mini-parachute. They can survive a fall from practically any height because their terminal velocity is so low.
So I have since observed!
Also, squirrels can survive falls simply because they’re small. People talk about how a mouse can walk away from a fall off the Empire State building.
Because volume is cubed as it increases and surface area only squared, humans have far less surface area relative to volume than a smaller critter does. That is, they have relatively lots more surface to absorb the shock than we would.
This is why you should never put an elephant up in a tree.
This is amazing stuff! Both hilarious and educational!
I would like to ask you, Mr. Ehrman, what percentage, roughly, do you estimate to be historically accurate with regard to Jesus stories? You have talked about something similar, but concerning Jesus’s sayings I believe. If we apply certain criteria (context, attestations, dissimilarity etc.), can we have a rough percentage of accuracy in Jesus stories? Can we ferret out the real ones with high level of probability?
I really don’t know. I don’t put percentages on such things — in part because it is hard to know eactly what any of us might mean by a statistically established probability of a story about Jesus. Does it mean every word of teh story? Every part? some parts? I’m not sure it’s helpf to say that 83% of this particular story is 61% accurate, if you see what I mean. Or even in rough terms: 75% of the stories are 40% accurate.
Yes, I can see what you’re saying. You’re right, it’s not a question that can be answered even roughly accurately.
Thank You Professor Ehrman…
Yes sir I realize those sayings are not in the Bible but my jumbled writing may have presented to the reader that I thought they were from the Bible.
I was trying to give examples of people repeating something like those sayings like “spare the rod, spoil the child” for so long as “apothegms” that because it sounds like a proverb, they begin to think they are found in the Bible.
Perhaps I am stretching in my examples I used but I was wondering if these apothegms that have been used for decades and centuries could have been absorbed into the Bible as inspired words from God?
Thank you again for your time in helping me gain new knowledge.
Yes, they are often thought to have been in circulation before being written. At least a lot of them.
Do you think that most of Jesus’ sayings got stripped of their original context, passed around and then re-attached to a narrative story? That might explain why some of them are hard to interpret since context is often important in understanding what is being said.
It’s hard to say, but yes, that’s what I suspect.
One thing I already found really interesting was how a lot of people still think it was your scholarship that led to your atheism.
This is something that happened during your life, let alone something a hundred years from now.
Makes you wonder how accurate history is even within a century.
Let alone actual stories I hear about me. I suppose that’s true of lots of us…
Coincidentally a YouTube video was just released about a certain “atheist scholar who misleads millions” recommended by MythVision Podcast:
https://youtu.be/g2ne3ndnVQk
I just had a quick look into the etymology of this word, and the shadow-tail-explanation might be an ancient Greek folk etymology to try to explain the meaning while actually being a loan-word of a pre-Greek language that was spoken before the (proto-)indo-Europeans moved there. See for example “Sievers’ Law and the History of Semivowel Syllabicity in Indo-European and Ancient Greek” by Barber (2013) p. 138-140, who lists σκίουρος as “words without convincing etymology” (p.140). Or just Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%BA%CE%AF%CE%BF%CF%85%CF%81%CE%BF%CF%82#Ancient_Greek
I just thought of something. You can read Koine Greek, but can you speak it? If you were dropped into Corinth, circa 55 AD, could you talk to Paul (and probably grill him on his theology).
A related question. If you could talk to Paul, what would you ask him?
NOPE! I’m not sure anyone does, but why knows. I’d ask him waht he knows about the historical Jesus.
And he would probably say “read my book” (that is, his letters).
Ha! Maybe. But at the end of the day, I don’t think so. THat’s more or less my point. He doesn’t tell us much of anything about what Jesus said and did while he was alive (i.e., between the time of his birth and his death.) So I’d love to know what he did know, and why he almost never says anthing about it….
Some people can, I believe. It’s a whole thing with some people, who try to figure out the original pronunciation of languages at various times in history. I think we have a pretty good picture for Greek.
I wonder how Paul would answer your question. I would guess he knows a bit more than he says in his letters, but not much. What do you think?
I think he surely knew a bit more, yes. But the big issue is: how big was the bit? Hugely more? If not, why doesn’t he use what he knows when it seems like it might help his arguments?
Well, I have just finished my mammoth, self-assigned task of reading through the entire blog, April 2012 to present. And what a great post to have finally caught up on!
Now, if you’ll all excuse me, I’m off to start on Mark Goodacre’s blog…and possibly maybe do some actual work on my PhD at some point, who knows?!
Many thanks, Bart, for all the hard work!
P.S. Bart, it seems to me the only thread in nine years you’ve left dangling was the one on whether Cephas and Peter were, in fact, different people. Perhaps you might revisit that topic at some point?
Wow?!? Really? OK, then, you should win some kind of prize… And yup, I need to do a reprise on that, and actually finish it!
What a great illustration of how the historicity of a saying can differ from that of the story.
Can you give us a sense of how the story was traced back to the disgruntled faculty member?
I traced the various lines of transmission to the earliest one and the person involved made good sense as the originator, based on what we knew about him. ANd since the setting of the story makes sense given how I heard Metzger himself make lunch time conversation, I drew the conclusion. It may be wrong, but I don’t think it’s wrong by *much*…
Dr. Ehrman, when you were a Christian, did you have what you thought was a personal relationship with Jesus? And if so, did you miss Him when you first left? …Cynthia
Absolutely. That for me was the entire point of being Christian. And yes, I felt a bit of a void when I realized he was not a divine being with whom I had entered into a personal relationship.
thank you for answering this personal question.
Dr. Ehrman, you have not only changed the way I approach Jesus and the Biblical text but now also the way I will see squirrels and the legend of the historical Metzger!
As an engineer, my perspective differs quite a bit. My initial thought when reading the story in your last post was ‘It died? Was there something wrong with it?’ Have you seen a wet squirrel? They’re small enough as it is, but that’s mostly fur. The terminal velocity just isn’t going to be all that high so falling from a tree, even a pretty tall one, won’t be too hard on them. The ‘splatting’ really jarred. A little numeracy and really basic physics can go a long way in testing the veracity of stories. One recent fun example I heard was about the Israelites escaping Egypt, if you go by the numbers claimed, if they walked single file, the front of the line would have reached the destination long before the tail end left, how could they be lost for so long in such as small area?
Yup. It’s a story, not a historical reality. Kind a like lots of stories about famous religious figures which make no scientific sense!
Great story! Now I’m left wondering where/if the good doctor came across this vocab in NT related texts. Does it occur anywhere of interest?
Nope. It’s from classical non-Christian texts. I”m not sure the word ever occurs in early Xn texts at all….
I received a scholarship in history during my undergraduate studies that bore the name of a legendary professor with whom my father once studied. My father’s one story about sitting in the professor’s second story classroom and listening to the professor’s droning lectures: the students knew to close the classroom windows for fear the squirrels would be lulled into sleep and fall out of the trees.
Sorry Professor but I don’t think this story is quite over yet. I have just found a dead squirrel in my garden that appears to have fallen off a tree. Perhaps Dr Metzger is sending us a message from beyond the grave 😉🐿