The Reader had tried to prepare carefully for the difficult task of doing the Bible reading at the Sunday service. The passage contained hard-to-pronounce words. He wanted to speak clearly enough for everyone to hear even though the passage was up, in large, friendly letters, behind him, twice, on the big screens, right and left. To leave nothing to chance, he'd photocopied the week's passage and made it extra-large. He'd got this. He read with confidence.

Until he got to the place where the Apostle Paul told his listeners, 'Remember the words of Jesus, how he said…'

There was an awkward pause. People reading along wanted to help but didn't want to interrupt. What was the problem, anyway?

The speaker looked up with a sheepish grin. 'The printer was set on black-and-white.' And everyone laughed.

What follows is not intended as a criticism of that Reader. Printers – even the ones in the church offices – are tools of some devil or other. Probably Titivillus. The red-letter Bible was probably a family gift. He'd probably had it so long he didn't even think about it…

But my theme this month – and one I hope you'll join me in – is finding metaphors in our daily lives. And this is one for the books.

What's with these red-letter Bibles, anyway?

Sacred Texting

When you particularly like a text, you often decorate it. What? You don't own a fancy printing of The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide? Or a Tolkien volume with elaborate maps in it? When I was in 8th grade, I won the school's poetry contest. The Parent-Teacher Association gave me my choice of books. I've hauled that complete Shakespeare up hill and down dale and across two continents and an ocean. So yeah, people hang on to iconic texts, whatever your cultural subgroup's idea of an iconic text is.

Medieval monks hand-wrote their copies of the Bible and other books they thought of as 'must-haves': Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae¹, the Physiologus (a natural-history encyclopedia that tells us many, many things about animals that are weirder than what you find on Twitter, even), Aristotle (who would have been really popular on Twitter, and not in a good way, especially with @Bad Medical Takes), etc.

Medieval monks wanted to save parchment, ink, and elbow grease, so they invented 'sacred abbreviations' for words like 'God', 'Jesus', 'Lord', etc. 'See?' they said. 'These aren't lazy abbreviations. They're sacred. By learning them, you are letting everyone know how pious you are.'

You can never go wrong with humans if you virtue-signal like mad. It worked.

500-1500 years later? Not so much. My 1950s childhood was plagued by adults lamenting the abbreviation 'Xmas' on space-challenged signs.

'They took the Christ out of Christmas!' they'd wail in mock dudgeon. A few years later I longed to tell them that Xmas was simply a 'sacred abbreviation.' Keep this example in mind as we go along.

What Was That I Just Read?

Selling Bibles has tended to be a lucrative business. Think about it: what was practically the first thing Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg printed in any quantity? Yep. Every church and monastery needed one. In Latin, of course: that was the fashionable language. Money was made.

Later, people died for smuggling vernacular copies of that book. Died. In nasty ways. Why? Because when people read the book in a language they could understand, they found out that it didn't say what the professional virtue-signallers were telling them it said. In other words, they had been lied to. Revolutions broke out. Borders changed. Statues got smashed, things like that.

Multi-Use Books

For most of the 19th Century, the far-flung farms of North America didn't have much in the way of home literature: a Farmer's Almanac, maybe, a local newspaper, an inherited copy of Shakespeare or an old primer. But everyone wanted a Bible. Fast-talking and long-distance-walking travelling salesmen used to go around flogging extra-large 'family Bibles' that fit on a shelf or the table in the middle of the parlour. Family Bible had large print: a blessing for Grandpa in his old age. Deluxe editions, paid for in installments, had illustrations, reproductions of famous pictures by Doré or Dürer or others. Most importantly, they had blank sheets in the middle. Families recorded births, marriages, deaths.

Those old family Bibles are valuable genealogical resources. Not all were in English. When I was fifteen, I deciphered family genealogy for a colleague of my dad's. The Bible, and the handwriting, were in German. Mr Koch didn't read German and couldn't make head or tail of that old kind of writing. But once I'd figured it out, his ancestors were able to tell him where he was from.

Does this give you LOTR fans any ideas?

Red-Letter Day for a Printer

With all this Bible hoarding it will be obvious that Bible salesmen around 1900 had to get canny if they hoped to penetrate new markets. And they did. When I was a kid, they pushed the idea that each family member should have a copy, with or without concordance (footnotes and reference links, although not hyper), in varying shades of leather: white for ladies, etc.

Obviously, there needed to be a new innovation to sell more Bibles. Enter Louis Klopsch, born in 1852 in Prussia but now a US citizen and printer. Klopsch was the US editor of a British weekly called The Christian Herald. He eventually bought it out and increased its circulation dramatically.

In other words, he knew how to make piety pay off. That doesn't mean he didn't have good intentions: most people do, or think they do. Think about all the people today who use their fame to tout charities. They do good, right? Just like Mr Klopsch, who raised more than $3m, which was more than it sounds like back then, for international efforts such as flood relief. The people in Japan and Sweden probably didn't care what the philosophy was, but were grateful for the help, just as people benefit from other charities without having the slightest idea about red noses and bad jokes or even worse pop music. But it doesn't mean those benefactors don't groove on the attention².

Anyway, yes, you will have guessed by now that Mr Klopsch also came up with the idea of printing Jesus' words in red. And yes, that I think it was probably a gimmick for simultaneously virtue-signalling and boosting book sales.

Which is bad news if your printer is set on 'black and white' to save ink.

But What's the Morec?

Philip K Dick, that amazing prophet, wrote a novel, or parable, called The Man Who Japed. In it, he described an Earth dominated by a massively virtue-signalling movement called Moral Reclamation, Morec for short. The novel's not one of his best, but his deconstruction of moralistic thinking is valuable. The propaganda writers have to figure out how to sell the regime's dodgy ideas to the public, see? So they tell stories with 'Morecs', morals that reinforce society's goals. And yes, the dictator is from South Africa and you may see parallels to the 21st Century…go read it on Internet Archive, I'm not stopping you.

Morecs reinforce society. I suppose my 'metaphor memories' do the opposite: they make you stop and wonder where it's all going. So what's the metaphor memory of the red-letter Bible?

If you're not careful, your virtue-signalling move ends up cutting you off from what inspired you in the first place. For Christians it's supposed to be the words of Jesus, who is after all the founder of the movement.

Somewhat to my shock, I have just found this online from an allegedly Christian source, 'It’s really a false distinction anyway, to suggest that the direct quotations of Jesus are somehow more authoritative or inspired than the words of the New Testament writers.' Well, I would disagree, Brother. I'm supposed to take the word of that nincompoop fisherman Peter over his teacher? Nope.

This guy goes on to warn that you can't take the words of Jesus literally, you know: you gotta know the context, by which I think he means you've got to let writers like him have a chance to explain them to you before you do something about it they don't like. That's his Morec and I'll bet he's sticking to it.

That commentator is to me symptomatic of what the problem is these days: Christian nationalism isn't a real thing, 'fundamentalism' is a fancy word for intolerance, and like the old song says, not everybody talkin' 'bout heaven is goin' there.

And if they'd read the words in red, they'd have known that already. You know what he said about 'wolves in sheeps' clothing', right?

End of sermon, sorry for running on so long, friends, kthxbai.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

05.06.23 Front Page

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