h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Always happy to bring a smile to someone

Red

--But how relevent would Greek myths be to Judaic-Aramaic culture anyway?
(We need UBB code style [QUOTE] tags in this place...)

Given how much the Romans were getting about at the time, I would imagine that if the Greeks were swimming, Romans would have caught on and brought it to other cultures...

Going with the flow?

agcB

Hell, the Romans could certainly swim, I learned latin from a book called Latin With Laughter which had sailors swimming all over the place. Cant remember the latin, but can remember the picture.

Nautica nautat, I think. Or natat, but that looks suspicously like being born.

And of course totae puellae bonae nauticam amant (all the nice girls love a sailor).

a nice girl called Ben

After successfully introducing safe boating practises and the life preserving technique of 'progress through water' to a few Jewish fishermen, Jesus and the life-guards held a mass demonstration of the skills for all of god's people.
Miraculously they were able to stave off a food riot by the unexpectedly large crowd with another new invention - chowder and croutons, a recipe for stretching a few flounders and bits of stale bread.
So yes, the is an important element of the Christian mythos, just as the happyface is to Apollonians and the number 42 is to a weird subsect of Cybermaniacs.

>And of course Jesus and his buddy John invented swimming.

woah, slow down there, native americans, aust aborigines, maoris and others didn't swim? Proof needed for that one.

That is a far out theory. The people living at that time must have seen tons of dogs and such swimming. At least one would have gotten the idea to try it on shallow water. Besides, doesn´t babies swim naturally?

Swimming is a fairly natural thing, yes, of course, and yes dogs and Indians and Greeks and lotsa people knew how to do it. But it was news to the jews. Or rather it had been lost to their culture over the years.
Remember they'd been wandering around in the desert for ages after leaving Egypt. And remember the Red Sea partition bit when they left - they'd already developed a god-sized fear of water after generations of desert life working for the Pharohs.
So when they finally got to the sea of Galilee and got back into fishing it was a very brave man indeed who would set out to cast his nets. J&J merely re-introduced the technique to the children of Isreal, who by then had no word left to describe it.

Swimming.....

fish do it quite well, too, so I'm told

Hang on JWF - this IS a wind-up, though it is a very good one.

The gospels were written in Greek, not Aramaic, and Matthew Mark and John were disciples, and there at the time, so even if there wasn't a word for it in Aramaic, there was in Latin, and there would have been in Greek.

Sorry, this one doesnt float my boat....

But it has been a very good wind-up, all the same, and I may borrow it to use on other people another time.

agcB

Don't forget to throw in the Red Sea bit as a setup.
There is a natural inclination to believe it, because it resolves the 'walking on water' issue in a very practical and pragmatic way.
Many people don't realise the Apostles and the Disciples were two different groups - all them Johns and Mathews and Marks and Lukes.

How about the chowder and croutons theory to explain the miracle of loaves and fishes. I noticed no one wanted to touch that one at all.