The Lying Chisels of Scribes
“‘How can you say, “We are wise,
Jeremiah 8:8 New International Version
for we have the law of the Lord,”
when actually the lying pen of the scribes
has handled it falsely?
The ancient world was a long time ago, but even in antiquity it was often hard to know what happened in the ancient world. With no trusted neutral institutions to establish facts, and no way of making many identical copies of a text or a speech, the curious had no reliable way to decide between competing claims by different interested parties. Already in antiquity, clever people turned to old writing painted on wood or carved on stone. But dishonest people realized that they could destroy or alter awkward inscriptions and forge new ones. Greeks, Romans, and Babylonians show us how this worked.
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