🚀 go-pugleaf

Greg Hartman <ghartman@aracnet.com> wrote:
.  On May 26, 1583, their
>daughter Susanna was baptized in Holy Trinity.�

>So we have the Catholic Church letting a fornicating, sinful writer of
>horrid, sinful plays writing the Bible. I don�t think so.

Whoa!  Wrong church. Pretty elementary mistake from a theological
scholar.   The Catholic church did not approve of laity reading the
Bible and opposed translations into the vernacular -- burning some
translators as well as their Bibles.  The King James was a Protestant
translation.   And the king, the head of the Church of England, was
boss.  If he said, "put Will on the committee, but don't mention his
name", it would be done.  (Not that I'm saying I think it was. Sounds
farfetched to me.  What does Shaxicon say?)


>(By the way--I�m not saying I support the way the Church would have
>looked at Shakespeare or his plays. He was immensely talented; history
>bears it out. But the fact is he wouldn�t have had a chance to try).

>3. I looked up all the info I could find on the production of the King
>James Version in all the works I have access to (I�m a Systematic
>Theology/Journalism major at Mutlnomah Bible College in Portland; we
>have a 65,000-volume theological library). You�d think if Shakespeare
>helped write the KJV, it would show up somewhere. No mention. Where dod
>you hear it?

>Also, the KJV was partly based on revisions of several earlier works,
>including the Great Bible (1539), the Geneva Bible (1560), and the
>Rheims-Douai Bible (1582, 1609). This is why they were able to complete
>the KJV in only seven years. Most of those works were completed before
>Shakespeare was born--and in Germany and Switzerland to boot (Unger�s
>Bible Dictionary, pp. 1301-1303).

>4. From 1604 to 1611, the time when the KJV was being translated,
>Shakespeare wrote and/or produced the following plays for the Globe
>Theatre, which he partly owned, at the rate of about one play every six
>months. He also acted in some of them: Troilius and Cressida, All's Well
>That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Pericles (c.1608), Cymbeline
>(1609-1610), The Winter's Tale (1610-1611), and The Tempest (this is all
>from Grolier�s Multimedia again). Busy guy, as you pointed out on your
>web page. When was he supposed to have time to translate the Bible, too?

>So we have a playwright, a father out of wedlock, that the Church
>supposedly let help translate the Bible. No mention of it in history. No
>mention of it in theology. No evidence that Shakespeare knew Greek and
>Hebrew (he�d also have to know German, Latin and Aramaic for reasons I
>won�t get into here). And last but not least, the �easter egg� he
>allegedly left in the Psalms doesn�t exist unless you play games with
>the text.

>This is a cute theory, though. It forces me to argue from silence for
>the most part--except for the fact that Selah is part of the original
>Hebrew. Sorry to burst your bubble.

>Check out my website: "Do We Have To Give Up Our Brains For Jesus?"
>http://www.aracnet.com/~ghartman/index.shtml

Gerry Horton
www.tiac.net/users/ghorton