Loch Ness Monster cousin is NOT found

In the British paper the Telegraph, there's a gullible story claiming that someone with a cell phone caught a picture of "Brownessie," hailed as the English cousin to the Loch Ness monster.

Well, the story's not totally gullible. It did interview one skeptic:

Photo expert David Farnell of Farnell’s photographic laboratory in Lancaster said: “It does look like a real photo but because it’s been taken on a phone the file size is too small to really tell whether it has been altered on Photoshop or not.”

OK, here's why I'm skeptical.

Shutterbug Tom Pickles describes the event:

“It was petrifying and we paddled back to the shore straight away. At first I thought it was a dog and then saw it was much bigger and moving really quickly at about 10mph.

Really? 10 miles per hour? I would think something swimming that fast would produce more ripples.

OK, so Pickles misestimated the speed. Then, we can rightfully ask, what else did he misjudge? The size?

He claims it was three cars in size. Moving even close to 10 mph, something that big would surely produce bigger ripples than in the picture.

Then, we have conflicting comments.

Pickles says:

“Its skin was like a seal’s but it’s shape was completely abnormal – it’s not like any animal I’ve ever seen before."

But kayak companion Sarah Harrington says:

“It was like an enormous snake.

Snakes don't have abnormal shapes. True, eyewitnesses have unreliable testimony, but that different?

The kicker? The story says Pickles and Harrington were out "as part of a team building exercise with his IT company, CapGemini."

OK, how many other people were getting built up? Any of them want to comment?

That said, speaking of comments, people on the story's website nail it. The "creature" looks too sharp, compared to the rest of the image. The perspective looks too "high" for it to be shot from a kayak, unless it was quite close. And, in that case, something three car lengths in size and moving at 10 mph would surely have swamped a kayak. In which case, the couple would have been seen being swamped by other IT team builders.

One other commenter notes a 24-year-old man and 23-year-old woman out on a lake together ... this might be a hoax not just to be a hoaxer, but to cover some tracks ...

Ezra, meet Snopes

Biblical literalists, or semi-literalists, who think the allegedly pious intent of the allegedly known authors means the material must be true, should read Snopes. No, the editor of Isaiah I, II and III, or the E, J, D and P threads of the Torah didn’t have Photoshop, but he had a fair amount of technical skill, an editor’s technique and a polemicist’s eye.

Yes, mistakes were made. The wonder is not so many but so few. With literacy rates of 5 percent and literally only a dozen or two copies of, let’s say, the different strands of the Torah floating around, an editor by the name of, shall we say, Ezra, didn’t have the luxury of typewriter inventor Christopher Sholes, let alone our computerized world today.

No double spaced lines or marginal room for extensive copy editing or proofreading notes. No nice blank parchment to transcribe comments to, oir make notes. No extra copy of the parment to refer upward from what would become Exodus 34 back to Exodus 28.

Nope, it all was done by memory. Even with priestly assistants, this would not have been easy.

Why don’t we have even more variants today?

A number of answers abound.

First, Ezra may have deliberately burned exemplars. This would not have been to hide his tracks, but to remove confusion, on the one hand, and to get people to focus on him as a religious leader, along with his new all-in-one edition, on the other hand.

Second, despite conservatives’ brushoffs that they have just minor textual differences, we do have a number of variants. Qumran, with close but different versions, plus more variant versions sounding like midrash at points, show the difference. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Torah, reflects some of these variants. There are even more variants in the other two divisions of the Tanakh — the Nibi’im and the Kethubim (the Prophets and the Writings).

The former prophets of Joshua-Kings have different versions with major genealogical differences. Jeremiah in Greek and Qumran Hebrew versions is more than 10 percent shorter and in different order.

The point of the Snopes link is to show how easily something that people want to believe gets spread around.

Take the Torah. Take it in its historical context.

Judah is a Persian backwater named Yehud, ca. 450 BCE. The alleged permanency of the Davidic dynasty, as claimed in Samuel, seems laughable if not pathetic. The hopes of some sort of restoration, reflected in Haggai and the first part of Zechariah, have gone by the boards. The priestly line does some more permanence (we won’t get into Aaronic, Zadokite and other priestly lines that may have actually or legendarily existed) but may be at loggerheads with itself.

Then Ezra presents a fait accompli. Yes, the learned had earlier versions of a proto-Torah, but as separate writings, not as one theoretically continuous narrative. Nor did they have literature presented as though it had one overarching theology.

The leaders of Yehud wanted to believe they were more than a Persian backwater. And so Ezra’s Torah spread like wildfire.