Never Been Accused of Being Smart

I’d like to say I’ve never been accused of being smart but I have been and it is horrifying. Tonight was another instance and proof of the fact you never know the impression you make on people. Especially ones that you don’t know are there.

Our church does something interesting. They attach the Bible study to the service. They have Sunday school for the adults as well as the children and it happens between the early and the regular service. They also do a good number of social events which is nice for people like myself and my wife who are not social creatures. We got to get out tonight and meet a few people, and one of them accused me of being smart.

They happened to be someone from our Sunday school class and they told me they were sitting behind me listening to the smart things I said. Now I didn’t think I was saying anything smart and a lot of what I was saying felt like shots in the dark.

Trying to understand a text as old as the Bible is impossible. Think about it this way. There is an Icelandic translation of Dracula that isn’t a translation of Dracula at all but an Icelandic authors rewrite or retelling of Dracula. It is different enough from the original text to be a completely different book.

Think about how the Bible arrived to us. The Gospels were originally oral tradition and then they were written down in Greek and then that Greek was translated to Latin and then to several other languages when the printing press was invented.

In all those translations and hand copying and oral traditions who knows what was changed or lost or left out or any number of things that could have changed between the original telling and what we’re reading. Then think about the difference between modern Greek and Ancient Greek. Now I don’t know what those differences are but look at English tales like The Canterbury Tales or Beowulf and how works much newer than the Bible and allegedly in English are so different from our modern use of the language.

the Bible is an obscure text about a culture so different from our own that we cannot understand it. Anything I say that is intelligent on the matter is purely accidental. I would also like to add to the fact that I called Athena god in front of our Sunday school class which included the preacher and got away with it.

The expectations of being smart are not something I’ve ever asked for nor is it something that I want. I’d much rather be considered of average intellect and then I wouldn’t feel like such an underachiever.