I discovered this book wandering through the big B&N in Paramus. I think I was there documenting how to set up the games displays for the holidays.* Something you may not realize, if you weren’t in the business but, up until recently, almost every display in every B&N was dictated by the buyers in the corporate office.** And yet, as I visited different B&N locations – part of my job – I could discover books that I couldn’t remember seeing at other stores, though I remembered seeing that required table and, when I checked the planogram later, that book was on there so the book must have been at the 10 other stores I had just visited. Weird.
Anyway, I was breezing past this table on the way from the stockroom and this title caught my eye. It caught my eye because I misread it. I thought it said, “Mosquitoing Jesus.” My grandfather used to tell this joke that was big when he was a boy growing up in Florida during WWI. Floridians had a belief then that the mosquitos in St. Pete’s were bigger and more ferocious than anywhere else. Pop would tell how, when the train pulled into St. Petersburg, tourists would cry out, “It’s so hot – open the windows!” and the crackers would overrule them, “Close the windows – the mosquitos!” The joke that he always then told went, “A passenger waiting in St. Petersburg for the train to restart was just dozing off when he heard two mosquitos talking. One suggests, Let’s carry him down to the river and finish him off there. And the other replies, Nah! If we take him down by the river, the big ones will take him away from us.” Bad-dum-dum. But this story and the title I mis-read, formed an immediate picture in my head of an outstretched Jesus being bodily carried away by one of Pop’s St. Pete’s mosquitos.
So I grabbed it and, it wasn’t until I got home that I realized that this book is actually about misquotations in the bible. Oh, okay, cool. That’s a topic I can get interested in; so I read it.
I devoured it. And then my husband read it. And then we bought every other book that Bart D. Ehrman has written. And we’ve kept buying them. By now we probably have a whole shelf of his stuff – except I switched to e- at some point. So half of shelf of physical books and half of e-books.
Ehrman, a professor at Chapel Hill, studies the bible as a document. A document that can be – and was – transposed, miscopied, and deliberately changed by authors who felt they should “make the point clearer” or just deliberately change what Jesus had to say. Ehrman’s own story is fascinating: he had become born-again in high school and had gone off to bible college. While there, he felt so passionate that he wanted to continue by studying the historical bible but the only place he could do that was at a secular grad school. Don’t do it, his evangelical advisors warned him, they will teach you things that will cause you to doubt the word of God. He had confidence that he was following the right path and did learn the inside story of the writing of the bible and leave his church who had taught that you had to adhere to the words as written in the bible. I think it was Ehrman who said that, if you truly believe in God, your belief will be strong enough to endure even while accepting that the humans who scribed the bible made mistakes. (If it was him, he probably said it more eloquently than my own mosquitation.)
What I enjoy about Ehrman’s work is the pictures that form in my head, as he describes various early Christian and medieval*** monks hunched over their desks in the scriptorum, scribbling away, copying by candlelight. They lose focus, just for a moment, achoo! When their eyes return to the page, they return to the wrong spot and accidentally leave out a line of text or – as is famously noted – a word. Just one word, for example, not. As in, Thou shalt not commit adultery. Oops!
Writing a blog teaches you how easily this can happen. Sometimes, when I realize it’s – holy cow, how did it get to be 7:45 and I’ve got to get to work and I’m still in my pajamas – and then you post without proofreading too carefully… It happens.
The part of me that gets an endorphin rush working on jigsaw puzzles also enjoys the process by which biblical scholars sort through various ancient copies, determining which is the eldest, sometimes recognizing a later interpretation or error, based on a fragment of papyrus no bigger than the size of a credit card.****
If you want to learn more about how the bible evolved – or if you enjoy books where you get to learn the inside scoop on something – give this one a try. He also cashed in on the brief Da Vinci Code craze, if that was your jam. But beware – Ehrman’s work is addictively fun, and you may get hooked.
*Most laypeople won’t realize that store had an enormous stockroom – almost as big as the salesfloor – and we often set up fake “stores” back there with shelves, where the merchants could play around with layouts and set planograms. Which the stores could never execute as required because the final trim-size shifted or the measurements on the racks in the stores varied from the measurements of the racks in the fake store, or there were supply chain issues that caused stock to arrive early and sell out, or late. This was a huge distraction to the booksellers; and my team had repetitive discussions with the merchants and the district managers about, when the stock hasn’t arrived, should you leave a hole until it does? Or when something arrives too big to fit in the planned spot, should you turn it sideways or adapt the planogram for it? Since publishers and vendors paid for these spaces – and any changes meant additional work that ate up the dwindling payroll – these discussions became quite hot. And this little story has gotten too long so moving it to a footnote.
** When you walk into the store and see that big round table (actually an octagon): the merchants dictated what went on that table, which side of the table each book was displayed on, and each tier of the table (in the business this is called planogramming because we sent them a picture – a planogram – showing exactly where to put each book). The tables as you walked down the main aisle – planogrammed. The ends of the bookshelves, where they displayed books vertically – called, in retail, endcaps – planogrammed. Even within the shelves themselves, if you saw a shelf of books – or even a single book – with some kind of fancy shelf-talker beneath them or sign above them, talking about the books or the author, planogrammed. The company spent a lot of time, effort, and money dictating what goes where, making sure they actually put it there, and following up about “non-compliance.” I hear the new guy has changed all this – thank god. And this story also got way too long so into the footnotes!
***I know I’ve used this word too often recently. I can never spell it and always have to spell-check it.
****Soon that reference will have kids scratching their head, like kids do now when they see a princess phone or a phone booth or a floppy disk. Mommy, what’s a credit card. My great aunt, by the way of nothing, had a solid gold Burdines charge card. She married into it.
Change+Management 