{"id":4345,"date":"2025-01-15T07:28:34","date_gmt":"2025-01-15T12:28:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=4345"},"modified":"2025-01-15T07:28:34","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T12:28:34","slug":"how-we-know-what-we-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/15\/how-we-know-what-we-know\/","title":{"rendered":"How We Know What We Know"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>

\u201cIt ain\u2019t what you don\u2019t know that gets you into trouble.\u00a0It\u2019s what you know for sure that just ain\u2019t so.\u201d<\/em>

That\u2019s a great quote.

Those 21 words are routinely attributed to Mark Twain. In fact, I attributed them to Twain in a reflection a number of years ago. So did the director of The Big Short<\/em>, who displayed the quote and Twain\u2019s name in the 2015 film\u2019s opening frames. Likewise Al Gore, who made good use of the quote nine years earlier in his award-winning An Inconvenient Truth.\u00a0<\/em>

There\u2019s an inconvenient truth, however, concerning this famous nugget of wisdom from Mark Twain:

There\u2019s absolutely no evidence he actually said it.

Which, when you think about it, is a wonderful illustration of the very danger these words are warning us about.

British language expert Nigel Rees, in an article in Forbes<\/em>, traces the history of this memorable quotation.

It was originally published by American humorist Josh Billings in 1874.\u00a0But Twain is far better known than Billings.\u00a0And besides, it sounds like something Twain should<\/em> have said.\u00a0Thus it gradually became \u201chis.\u201d

Walter Mondale even got in on the act. During 1984, when he was running for president, Mondale said, \u201cI\u2019m reminded a little bit of what Will Rogers once said of [Herbert] Hoover.\u00a0He said, \u2018It\u2019s not what he doesn\u2019t know that bothers me, it\u2019s what he knows for sure that just ain\u2019t so.\u2019\u201d\u00a0

So now we have a third party attributing a mangled quote to the wrong person in the wrong context.\u00a0

At this point Bible skeptics smile knowingly.\u00a0If it\u2019s this hard to nail down the source of just 21 words only about a century ago, who in their right mind would trust the literary integrity of words written 2,000 years ago?

Some liken the evolution of Scripture to the game of Telephone that can be so amusing at parties.\u00a0

Maybe you\u2019ve played it.\u00a0Everyone gets into a line.\u00a0Someone whispers a sentence into the ear of the first person, who them whispers it to the second, and so on down the line.\u00a0The fun is revealing what the last person hears compared to the original message.\u00a0The more people who play, the crazier the distortions become.

The odds are pretty good that if you\u2019ve ever held a Bible in your hands, you\u2019ve wondered if you\u2019re holding nothing more than the \u201cfinal product\u201d of a first century game of Telephone \u2013 the semi-garbled reconstruction of an original message that can never be satisfactorily recovered.\u00a0

So, if God really spoke a message (or The<\/u><\/em> Message) to somebody a long time ago, how in the world can we trust that sloppy human intermediaries haven\u2019t fumbled the words on their long journey to our ears?

Here\u2019s what the apostle Paul had to say:\u00a0

\u201cThe first thing I did was place before you what was placed so emphatically before me: that the Messiah died for our sins, exactly as Scripture tells it; that he was buried; that he was raised from death on the third day, again exactly as Scripture says; that he presented himself alive to Peter, then to his closest followers, and later to more than 500 of his followers all at the same time, most of them still around (although a few have since died); that he then spent time with James and the rest of those he commissioned to represent him; and that he finally presented himself alive to me<\/u><\/em>\u201d (I Corinthians 15:3-7).\u00a0

What\u2019s Paul telling us here?\u00a0

Let\u2019s return to the game of Telephone.\u00a0

Things would be very different (though not nearly as much fun) if we changed one of the rules.\u00a0What if the first person was free to move down the line and occasionally listen in on what was being reported?\u00a0The first person could interrupt and say, \u201cYes, you\u2019ve got that part right, but I definitely never said this.\u201d\u00a0

There is every reason to believe that\u2019s what happened during the earliest years of the church.\u00a0Recent research on the phenomenon of oral tradition in the Middle East has revealed that a community committed to keeping alive an important story would take great pains to preserve the key details of that story<\/em>.\u00a0

Even to this day, in small villages in the developing world, there are certain respected members of the community who are empowered to say, \u201cYes, that is how the story goes, but these details are not quite right.\u201d Studies show that such a self-correcting mechanism in an ancient oral culture ensured that the right things were remembered for the right reasons.\u00a0

What Christians believe is that Jesus\u2019 first followers received the original Message firsthand.\u00a0They told it to a great many people and ultimately put their memories into print, choosing to be publicly accountable along the way to fellow apostles like Peter, James, and John (not to mention the whopping 500 other early witnesses who could be consulted in the pursuit of accuracy).

Does all this really matter?

It matters if we want to know where we stand with God in this world and the next. Did Jesus really defeat Death \u2013 the greatest enemy any of us will ever face \u2013 on the first Easter?

We truly need to know what we really know, and how we know that we actually know it. \u00a0\u00a0<\/em>

Mark Twain could hardly have said it better.

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here \u201cIt ain\u2019t what you don\u2019t know that gets you into trouble.\u00a0It\u2019s what you know for sure that just ain\u2019t so.\u201d That\u2019s a great quote. Those 21 words are routinely attributed to Mark Twain. In fact, I attributed them to Twain in a reflection a number of years ago. So did the… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4346,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[660,853],"class_list":["post-4345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-assurance","tag-knowledge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4345"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4347,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4345\/revisions\/4347"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}