Buglers

I saw that a police department was warning its citizens recently about buglers that were operating in the neighborhood.  That isn’t a typo.  Or rather, it’s not my typo. Or maybe it’s not a typo at all.  Maybe some crazy band students were running around neighborhoods playing Reveille at all hours of the night.  But I doubt it.

Common sense is not the cure-all it is often made out to be (largely because true “sense” is not as “common” as some people seem to think).  But it does have its place.  People make mistakes.  Sometimes they are so obvious that they hardly need correcting.  I’m sure, for instance, that plenty of people saw the warning to which I referred earlier and made a mental note to double-check their deadbolts before going to bed that night.  You know, so the buglers don’t get in and steal their sheet music.

People put the Bible together.  And yes, sometimes those people made mistakes.  One of the advantages of having tens of thousands of copies out there (far and away the most of any ancient document) is that outliers are identified quickly and pushed to the side.  And on the extremely rare occasion that a universally accepted reading appears to have a legitimate error, the error is of such a minor nature that it practically corrects itself. 

My go-to example is the age of King Jehoiachin. He was 18 when he took the throne, according to 2 Kings 24:8; 2 Chronicles 36:9 says he was only eight.  The 2 Kings reading is probably right — but in the end, who cares?  Some scribe thousands of years ago missed a stroke.  The Bible message is completely unaltered.  Show me a passage that teaches Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross, and then we can talk about problems in the text.