I hope you had a good Thanksgiving!

I had spent most of my time since Sunday buying materials and building a ramp for a motorized cart and a platform for an E-Z chair in preparation for the arrival of my wife's identical twin, who has MS and now suffers also from lung cancer.  (She never smoked but did have environmental exposure for a couple of years in one job.) She and her traveling companion arrived at 1:00 AM by train from Tacoma Washington at Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, down in the delta.  

I met them with my SUV and a tilt trailer in which we could transport her mobility cart, we spent the night at a motel in Pocahantas, 15 miles north of Walnut Ridge and drove back to Mountain Home the next morning.  It is only about 130 miles, but, over winding two lane Ozark roads, it takes about three hours.  Last night I got 8 hrs sleep for the first time in days and the wife's twin seemed to recover well from the rigors of the trip by this morning.

I enjoy both my sister-in-law and her traveling companion and friend and my wife and her twin are never so happy as when together, so it has been a very good Thanksgiving.  Company will remain for another week and we intend to visit Branson, Missouri, which has lots of entertainment, and may get down to Hot Springs, AR, which was the first area protected, (1832,) as part of what eventually became the National Park Service.  Lots of history there.

But there is another subject with a long history with  which I have more familiarity.  It is sometimes called "higher criticism of the Bible," and an early example was The Jefferson Bible.  My wife was once involved in a home study program that included much of the reading material from a first year Jesuit seminary program.  The Jesuits were keen to expose seminary students to higher criticism at the beginning of their studies. That is where we acquired much of our biblical library, including a Concordance, a Bible dictionary and several works of biblical criticism.  I naturally used or read many of these books also. They complemented and provided a contrast to much of what I had learned in my grad school history  studies.  

Throughout the 80s and 90s there was an ongoing project, The Jesus Seminar Fourm, amongst academic and church based theologians who were attempting to achieve consensus on which of the saying attributed to Jesus were likely genuine and which might have been words put in his mouth by copyists, etc.  (Leading candidate in the latter category: "A little wine for thy stomach's sake.") While this forum included a broad range of views, those who view the Bible as the inerrant Word of God naturally self selected out of the project.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."