Sorry, Wrong Answer

by Rod L. Evans, Ph. D.

  2. According to the Bible, a large fish (not a whale) swallowed Jonah.

  3. Delilah was not the person who cut Samson’s hair; it was one of her servants.

  4. According to the Bible, Lucifer was a king of Babylon (Isaiah 14:12).

  5. According to the Bible, the root of all evil is not money but the love of money (1 Timothy 6:10).

  6. Contrary to traditional legend, the Bible doesn’t say that the wise men rode camels. They might have walked.

  7. Contrary to popular belief, Jesus, according to the Bible, was not a baby and wasn’t in a manger when the wise men visited. He was a “young child ” and in a house. Immediately after the visit from the wise men, Herod ordered the slaughter of male children under the age of two. According to the Bible, Jesus could, then, have been about two at the time, certainly no older and certainly not a newborn.

  8. The number of goats on Noah’s Ark was not two; it was possibly seven but probably fourteen. Note that in Genesis 7:2 (King James Version) God tells Noah: “Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of the beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.” Clean animals were animals that were ritually edible and included sheep, goats, cattle, antelopes, and so on. Unclean animals were ritually inedible and included pigs, camels, eagles, owls, snails, and so on. In the Douay-Rheims Bible, authoritative for Roman Catholics, the passage says: “Of all clean beasts, take seven and seven, the male and the female.” It appears, then, that there were fourteen goats on the Ark.

  9. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that exactly three wise men visited Jesus, though many people have assumed that there were three biblical magi because of the three gifts mentioned.

  10. The Bible does not specifically condemn gambling or betting, though it does condemn the love of money (1 Timothy 6:10; Hebrews 13:5) and counsels against attempts to “get rich quick” (Proverbs 13:11; Ecclesiastes 5:10).

  11. The Bible doesn’t say anything about Mary Magdalene’s livelihood. Contrary to popular opinion, the Bible never says that she was a prostitute. Apart from her presence at the Resurrection, the only thing the Bible says about her is that she was possessed by seven demons (Luke 8:2).

  12. According to the Bible, God didn’t answer Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

  13. The Bible presents Moses as having climbed Mt. Sinai at least seven times, though in the movie The Ten Commandments, starring the late Charlton Heston, Moses goes up the mountain only twice. As just stated, the Bible implies that Moses made at least seven trips. During Moses’ first trip, God offers to make the Israelites a holy people. During the second trip, Moses accepts God’s offer. During the third trip, God commands Moses to set bounds to the Israelites to prevent them from climbing the mountain. The fourth trip occurs after God speaks the Ten Commandments to all the people at the base of Mt. Sinai. During the fourth trip, Moses receives the commandments that form the book of the covenant. During the fifth trip, Moses is gone for forty days and forty nights, and receives two tablets of stone, which he smashes after discovering the Israelites worshiping the golden calf. During the sixth trip, Moses atones for the people. During the seventh trip, Moses carries up two tablets of stone, spending another forty days and forty nights.

  14. A cathedral is distinguished not by its size or majesty but by its being the home church of a bishop’s diocese or territory.

  15. The Day of Doom is supposed to describe not a day on which everyone will be doomed but the Day of Judgment. Doom, in fact, derives from the Old English dōm (“ judgment”).

  16. Catholic priests aren’t supposed to get married after they’ve been ordained, but some branches of Catholicism, such as the Eastern Orthodox Church, will allow married men to be ordained. Before the Second Lateran Council in 1139, celibacy wasn’t mandatory for all priests and other Roman Catholic clerics. Originally, and for many centuries, Catholic priests were allowed to be married.

  17. The saying “God helps those who help themselves” can be found in Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac and perhaps elsewhere too but nowhere in the Bible.

  18. Contrary to popular opinion and The Da Vinci Code, Constantine didn’t create the New Testament canon at the first Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. The work of collating the New Testament books had been done over the preceding centuries.

  19. The word good in Good Friday is associated with the earlier, archaic meaning in which good meant “holy,” as when the Bible is called the Good Book.

  20. Albert Einstein’s religious beliefs have been widely misrepresented by both religious and unreligious people. He explicitly denied believing in a personal God but didn’t call himself an atheist. Instead, he expressed a belief that the universe is in some sense divine (pantheism). In a letter to an atheist (1954), quoted in Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Einstein wrote: “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as science can reveal it.” At the same time, Einstein rejected the word atheist to describe himself. When responding to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein’s question “Do you believe in God?” Einstein responded, as quoted in Victor J. Stenger’s Has Science Found God? “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”

  21. The country that donated the Spanish Steps in Rome was France. Begun in 1495 by the generosity of King Charles VIII of France, the Spanish Steps were designed in the baroque style and were given by the French to the city of Rome in the eighteenth century. Soaring up from the piazza to the French-built church and convent of Trinitá dei Monti in Rome, the Spanish Steps were thought to glorify the approach to the church. The steps are named after the Spanish and not the French because they are in the Piazza di Spagna, home to the Spanish Embassy, founded in the early seventeenth century.

  22. When early Christians were in Roman catacombs, they were probably not hiding there to escape from persecution, but lying there dead because they were buried there.

  Quiz 4

  Quotations (Part I)

  1. Who originally said “Give me liberty, or give me death”?

  2. Which American founder wrote “This would be the best of all possible Worlds, if there were no religion in it”?

  3. Who said “Elementary, my dear Watson”?

  4. Who originally wrote “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”?

  5. Which American wrote “That government is best which governs least”?

  6. Who wrote “He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much”?

  7. Who first said “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”?

  8. Who wrote “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door”?

  9. Who said “There’s a sucker born every minute”?

  10. Which American politician said “I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret that I have was that I didn’t study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people”?

  11. Who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”?

  12. Where would you find the quotation “Spare the rod and spoil the child”?

  13. Who originated the expression “Iron Curtain”?

  14. Who originally said “Anyone who hates children and dogs can’t be all bad”?

  15. Who was the first to write “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”?

  16. Who said “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”?

  17. Who originally said “blood, sweat, and tears”?

  18. Who said “Every man has his price”?

  19. Who was the first person to
write “Music has charms to soothe a savage beast”?

  20. Who was the first philosopher to assert “I think; therefore, I am”?

  Quiz 4 Answers

  Quotations (Part I)

  1. There is a good chance that Patrick Henry did not say to his fellow members of the second Virginia Convention on March 23, 1775, “Give me liberty or give me death.” We have no unimpeachable firsthand testimony that Henry uttered those words. Further, although both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were present at the speech in which Henry was supposed to have uttered the words quoted, neither man ever mentioned the quotation in his writings. The words were reconstructed by biographer and U.S. Attorney General William Wirt from the recollection of two of Henry’s contemporaries. Some scholars have speculated that Wirt might have gotten the words from Joseph Addison’s 1713 play Cato, which included the lines, “It is not now a time to talk of aught / But chains or conquest; liberty or death.” Note, finally, that Douglas Southall Freeman, in his biography of George Washington, said that it was his “thankless duty” to conclude that Patrick Henry probably did not utter the line for which he is most famous.

  2. The quotation, taken out of context, appears to be thoroughly antireligious. Although those words look as if they might have been lifted from Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason or one of Thomas Jefferson’s anticlerical letters, they came from the pen of John Adams, who, despite his harsh words, saw religion as generally a civilizing force. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson on April 19, 1817, Adams mentioned reading some polemical books that reminded him of divisive religious arguments, such as those advanced by his boyhood minister, Lemuel Bryant, and his Latin teacher, Joseph Cleverly. Adams wasn’t endorsing atheism, nor was he categorically denouncing organized religion. Rather, he was expressing frustration with hostile religious arguments. He wrote: “Twenty times, in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, ‘this world be the best of all possible Worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!!’ But in this exclamation, I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in public company—I mean hell.” In short, the full context of Adams’s quotation shows that he thought that, despite the divisions produced by religion, religion is generally a civilizing force.

  3. The words “Elementary, my dear Watson” never came out of the mouth of A. Conan Doyle’s literary character Sherlock Holmes, though one can find the expressions “my dear Watson” and “Elementary” near each other in Doyle’s short story “The Crooked Man.” The expression “Elementary, my dear Watson” gained mass popularity in the movies, originally in the 1929 movie The Return of Sherlock Holmes, which starred Clive Brook as the detective and that contained in the last scene the words “Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary.” The actor William Gillette is often credited with originating the phrase in the 1899 stage production Sherlock Holmes, for which he wrote the script and played the lead role. The phrase, however, doesn’t appear in any published version of the script. Two things are certain: The quotation didn’t come from A. Conan Doyle, and people nowadays associate it with Sherlock Holmes because of movies, especially those starring Basil Rathbone.

  4. Although the statement about eternal vigilance and liberty sounds Jeffersonian, it appears nowhere in Jefferson’s writings. Sometimes the statement is attributed to Patrick Henry or Thomas Paine, but it isn’t in their writings either. The earliest recorded use of a similar statement was in the 1790 speech by Irish politician John Philpot Curran, who said: “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.” Abolitionist Wendell Phillips, during an 1852 address before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” He later wrote that he believed that the statement was original with him. Phillips might have originated it, though the idea underlying it was as early as the 1790 speech by John Philpot Curran.

  5. That libertarian sentiment sounds Jeffersonian, but it didn’t come from Jefferson’s pen. The call for minimizing government was quoted without attribution in Henry David Thoreau’s 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience.” Its original author might have been John L. O’Sullivan, editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. The introduction to that magazine, founded in 1837, included the line, “The best government is that which governs least.” John L. O’Sullivan, by the way, later coined the expression manifest destiny.

  6. Despite the advice columns of Ann Landers and Abigail van Buren and the opinions of millions of people, that quotation about success did not come from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nor did it come from author Elbert Hubbard, minister and author Harry Emerson Fosdick, or author Robert Louis Stevenson, contrary to various popular beliefs. The author of those words is Bessie Anderson Stanley of Lincoln, Nebraska, who, in 1905, won the first prize of $250 and publication in Modern Women for her answer to the question, “What constitutes success?” Stanley’s winning entry read: “He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has always looked for the best in others and given the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory is a benediction.”

  7. The first person who said “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” was the first person to misquote Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said instead “A foolish [emphasis added] consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

  8. Although the sentiment is Emersonian, those exact words are nowhere in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s public works. In 1889, Sarah Yule and Mary Keene published a book called Borrowings, an anthology of philosophical remarks, in which they ascribed the following saying to Emerson: “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” In his journal for 1855, Emerson did, however, write something like the quotation written above: “If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.” That quotation from Emerson can be found in Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols. (Boston and New York, 1912), VIII:528.

  9. Although nearly everyone thinks that P. T. Barnum, the primary founder of Barnum & Bailey Circus, originated the saying “There’s a sucker born every minute,” nearly everyone is incorrect. Because there is evidence that the saying was used by some nineteenth-century American gamblers, it is difficult to identify any one inventor of the saying. The saying, however, can be indirectly tied to Barnum. One of his enemies did use it, referring to the gullibility of Barnum’s customers in their readiness to believe in the Cardiff Giant, an exhibit purporting to be a ten-foot-tall “petrified man” that was a statue of gypsum designed to look like a dead giant. The man who uttered this remark was David Hannum, who was himself a charlatan. Hannum was one of a syndicate of five men who bought a statue from a man named George Hull, who had hired people to help him pull off a hoax. Some of the people knew what Hull was doing, but others did not, including two men who were hired by Hull’s cousin, William Newell, ostensibly to dig a well on Newell’s farm in Cardiff, New York. The two diggers found what appeared to be a ten-foot-tall petrified giant. Newell set up a tent over the so-called giant and first charged twenty-five cents for admission, and a few days later charged fifty cents. Archaeologists pronounced the object a fake, and geologists commented that there was no good reason to dig a well where the “giant” was found. Nonetheless, Hull, the originator of the hoax, eventually sold his interest for $37,500 to the syndicate of men headed by David Hannum.After the group moved the exhibit to Syracuse, New York, P. T. Barnum became so impressed by the crowds paying admiss
ion to see it that he offered $60,000 for a three-month lease of it, though in his memoirs he said he wanted to buy it. When David Hannum and his business partners turned down Barnum’s offer, Barnum hired a man to model the giant’s shape in wax and create a plaster replica. Then Barnum put the fake giant he had commissioned on display in New York, claiming that his giant was real and that David Hannum’s exhibit was fake. When the newspapers reported Barnum’s version of the story, Hannum was quoted as saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” to describe Barnum’s customers. Although both Barnum and Hannum were perpetrating frauds, Hannum sued Barnum. The presiding judge told Hannum that Hannum could win the case, provided that he could get his giant to swear on his own genuineness in court. Scientists, including the preeminent paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh, pronounced the giant a fake, and, on December 10, 1869, George Hull confessed to the press. On February 2, 1870, both giants were revealed as fakes in court. The judge ruled that Barnum could not be successfully sued for calling a fake giant a fake.

  10. Those words about Latin America were not from Vice President Dan Quayle but were attributed to him in a joke by Republican Representative Claudine Schneider of Rhode Island, who was making fun of him. Schneider was in office between 1981 and 1991.

  11. The person who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” was not Charles Darwin but the philosopher and sociological theorist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who tried to develop the principle that all organic development is change from indefinite homogeneity to definite heterogeneity. Spencer invented the phrase “survival of the fittest” in his Principles of Biology (1864).

  12. The expression “Spare the rod and spoil the child” is not in the Bible but in Samuel Butler’s mock-heroic narrative poem Hudibras, published in the seventeenth century. The Bible (King James Version) actually says in Proverbs 13:24: “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.”