(CNN)— NFL legend Mike Ditka was giving a
news conference one day after being fired as the
coach of the Chicago Bears when he decided to
quote the Bible.
"Scripture tells you that all things shall pass," a
choked-up Ditka said after leading his team to
only five wins during the previous season. "This,
too, shall pass."
Ditka fumbled his biblical citation, though. The
phrase "This, too, shall pass" doesn't appear in
the Bible. Ditka was quoting a phantom scripture
that sounds like it belongs in the Bible, but look
closer and it's not there.
Ditka's biblical blunder is as common as
preachers delivering long-winded public prayers.
The Bible may be the most revered book in
America, but it's also one of the most
misquoted. Politicians, motivational speakers,
coaches - all types of people - quote passages
that actually have no place in the Bible, religious
scholars say.
These phantom passages include:
"God helps those who help themselves."
"Spare the rod, spoil the child."
And there is this often-cited paraphrase: Satan
tempted Eve to eat the forbidden apple in the
Garden of Eden.
None of those passages appear in the Bible, and
one is actually anti-biblical, scholars say.
But people rarely challenge them because
biblical ignorance is so pervasive that it even
reaches groups of people who should know
better, says Steve Bouma-Prediger, a religion
professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
"In my college religion classes, I sometimes
quote 2 Hesitations 4:3 ('There are no internal
combustion engines in heaven')," Bouma-
Prediger says. "I wait to see if anyone realizes
that there is no such book in the Bible and
therefore no such verse.
"Only a few catch on."
Few catch on because they don't want to -
people prefer knowing biblical passages that
reinforce their pre-existing beliefs, a Bible
professor says.
"Most people who profess a deep love of the
Bible have never actually read the book," says
Rabbi Rami Shapiro, who once had to persuade
a student in his Bible class at Middle Tennessee
State University that the saying "this dog won't
hunt" doesn't appear in the Book of Proverbs.
"They have memorized parts of texts that they
can string together to prove the biblical basis for
whatever it is they believe in," he says, "but they
ignore the vast majority of the text."
Phantom biblical passages work in mysterious
ways
Ignorance isn't the only cause for phantom Bible
verses. Confusion is another.
Some of the most popular faux verses are pithy
paraphrases of biblical concepts or bits of folk
wisdom.
Consider these two:
"God works in mysterious ways."
"Cleanliness is next to Godliness."
Both sound as if they are taken from the Bible,
but they're not. The first is a paraphrase of a
19th century hymn by the English poet William
Cowper ("God moves in a mysterious way, His
wonders to perform).
The "cleanliness" passage was coined by John
Wesley, the 18th century evangelist who founded
Methodism, says Thomas Kidd, a history
professor at Baylor University in Texas.
"No matter if John Wesley or someone else came
up with a wise saying - if it sounds proverbish,
people figure it must come from the Bible," Kidd
says.
Our fondness for the short and tweet-worthy
may also explain our fondness for phantom
biblical phrases. The pseudo-verses function like
theological tweets: They're pithy summarizations
of biblical concepts.
"Spare the rod, spoil the child" falls into that
category. It's a popular verse - and painful for
many kids. Could some enterprising kid avoid the
rod by pointing out to his mother that it's not in
the Bible?
It's doubtful. Her possible retort: The popular
saying is a distillation of Proverbs 13:24: "The
one who withholds [or spares] the rod is one
who hates his son."
Another saying that sounds Bible-worthy: "Pride
goes before a fall." But its approximation,
Proverbs 16:18, is actually written: "Pride goeth
before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a
fall."
There are some phantom biblical verses for
which no excuse can be offered. The speaker
goofed.
That's what Bruce Wells, a theology professor,
thinks happened to Ditka, the former NFL coach,
when he strayed from the gridiron to biblical
commentary during his 1993 press conference in
Chicago.
Wells watched Ditka's biblical blunder on local
television when he lived in Chicago. After Ditka
cited the mysterious passage, reporters
scrambled unsuccessfully the next day to find
the biblical source.
They should have consulted Wells, who is now
director of the ancient studies program at Saint
Joseph's University in Pennsylvania. Wells says
Ditka's error probably came from a peculiar
feature of the King James Bible.
"My hunch on the Ditka quote is that it comes
from a quirk of the King James translation,"
Wells says. "Ancient Hebrew had a particular
way of saying things like, 'and the next thing
that happened was...' The King James
translators of the Old Testament consistently
rendered this as 'and it came to pass.' ''
When phantom Bible passages turn dangerous
People may get verses wrong, but they also
mangle plenty of well-known biblical stories as
well.
Two examples: The scripture never says a whale
swallowed Jonah, the Old Testament prophet,
nor did any New Testament passages say that
three wise men visited baby Jesus, scholars say.
Those details may seem minor, but scholars say
one popular phantom Bible story stands above
the rest: The Genesis story about the fall of
humanity.
Most people know the popular version - Satan in
the guise of a serpent tempts Eve to pick the
forbidden apple from the Tree of Life. It's been
downhill ever since.
But the story in the book of Genesis never places
Satan in the Garden of Eden.
"Genesis mentions nothing but a serpent," says
Kevin Dunn, chair of the department of religion at
Tufts University in Massachusetts.
"Not only does the text not mention Satan, the
very idea of Satan as a devilish tempter
postdates the composition of the Garden of Eden
story by at least 500 years," Dunn says.
Getting biblical scriptures and stories wrong may
not seem significant, but it can become
dangerous, one scholar says.
Most people have heard this one: "God helps
those that help themselves." It's another
phantom scripture that appears nowhere in the
Bible, but many people think it does. It's
actually attributed to Benjamin Franklin, one of
the nation's founding fathers.
The passage is popular in part because it is a
reflection of cherished American values:
individual liberty and self-reliance, says Sidnie
White Crawford, a religious studies scholar at the
University of Nebraska.
Yet that passage contradicts the biblical
definition of goodness: defining one's worth by
what one does for others, like the poor and the
outcast, Crawford says.
Crawford cites a scripture from Leviticus that
tells people that when they harvest the land,
they should leave some "for the poor and the
alien" (Leviticus 19:9-10), and another passage
from Deuteronomy that declares that people
should not be "tight-fisted toward your needy
neighbor."
"We often infect the Bible with our own values
and morals, not asking what the Bible's values
and morals really are," Crawford says.
Where do these phantom passages come from?
It's easy to blame the spread of phantom
biblical passages on pervasive biblical illiteracy.
But the causes are varied and go back centuries.
Some of the guilty parties are anonymous, lost
to history. They are artists and storytellers who
over the years embellished biblical stories and
passages with their own twists.
If, say, you were an anonymous artist painting
the Garden of Eden during the Renaissance, why
not portray the serpent as the devil to give some
punch to your creation? And if you're a preacher
telling a story about Jonah, doesn't it just sound
better to say that Jonah was swallowed by a
whale, not a "great fish"?
Others blame the spread of phantom Bible
passages on King James, or more specifically
the declining popularity of the King James
translation of the Bible.
That translation, which marks 400 years of
existence this year, had a near monopoly on the
Bible market as recently as 50 years ago, says
Douglas Jacobsen, a professor of church history
and theology at Messiah College in
Pennsylvania.
"If you quoted the Bible and got it wrong then,
people were more likely to notice because there
was only one text," he says. "Today, so many
different translations are used that almost no
one can tell for sure if something supposedly
from the Bible is being quoted accurately or
not."
Others blame the spread of phantom biblical
verses on Martin Luther, the German monk who
ignited the Protestant Reformation, the massive
"protest" against the excesses of the Roman
Catholic Church that led to the formation of
Protestant church denominations.
"It is a great Protestant tradition for anyone -
milkmaid, cobbler, or innkeeper - to be able to
pick up the Bible and read for herself. No need
for a highly trained scholar or cleric to walk a lay
person through the text," says Craig Hazen,
director of the Christian Apologetics program at
Biola University in Southern California.
But often the milkmaid, the cobbler - and the
NFL coach - start creating biblical passages
without the guidance of biblical experts, he says.
"You can see this manifest today in living room
Bible studies across North America where lovely
Christian people, with no training whatsoever,
drink decaf, eat brownies and ask each other,
'What does this text mean to you?''' Hazen says.
"Not only do they get the interpretation wrong,
but very often end up quoting verses that really
aren't there."
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/19/living/bible-not-jesus/index.html