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Hands up all those who know the tale of Joseph and his “Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat”. Everyone? Excellent, that saves me having to recap the entire story for you, since it’s only a single verse in Joseph’s narrative that I’m interested in today. As you all evidently know, Joseph, having been betrayed and popped in a pit by his dastardly brethren, was sold to a travelling group of merchants who took him to Egypt. Who they were is not entirely clear (the text states that they were Ishmaelites (Arabs) from Gilead, but then also claims they were Midianites from about 150 miles further south (Gen 37:36…), but we are told unambiguously in the Bible where they were going, their cargo and what they were riding:
“And they sat down to eat bread: and they lifted up their eyes and looked, and, behold, a company of Ishmaelites came from Gilead with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt.” (Genesis 37:25)
Your average Bible-reader will skim casually over this passage as an inconsequential bit of period detail, providing a touch of atmosphere. Which indeed it is – but the period it details is the wrong one. Joseph’s story is from around the 19th century BCE, but the Ishmaelites seem a bit out of context in that setting.
For starters, they were, by name, descendants of Ishmael, the son of Abraham by his maidservant Hagar (see Genesis 16). Joseph could also have traced his ancestry back to Abraham – he was in fact Abraham’s great-grandson. It seems a little odd that on the Jewish (ie. descended from Isaac) side of the family tree we have only three generations, yet on the Arabic (descended from Ishmael) branch we already have a tribe, even a fledgling nation. Even if they were Midianites, that doesn’t help – Midian himself was also one of Abraham’s sons (by his second wife Keturah (Gen 25:1-4), so there’s still a need to explain why Isaac’s family are doing so poorly in the nation-raising stakes whilst their cousins have already carved out trading routes and small kingdoms.
The second problem with the Ishmaelite caravan is their choice of mount. Camels had roamed wild on the Eurasian supercontinent since the Pleistocene Era, when their ancestors crossed over the Bering land bridge from North America and migrated across the steppe of Mongolia to Central Asia. However, with the exception of a few tribes thousands of miles away on the Arabian peninsula, no-one in the 19th century had had the bright idea of keeping them as pets. Tame camels would have been unknown to Joseph and his contemporaries – they are unmentioned in texts of that time, and archaeological evidence demonstrates that the use of camel as transport didn’t take off in Canaan until at least 800 years later. Camel usage reached its zenith in the 7th century BCE (as demonstrated by the large increase in camel bones found at archaeological digs from that time onwards), which has implications that I shall reveal further on.
Before that, though, let’s just consider what these Ishmaelites were carrying. It seems, according to the Bible, that they were on their way to Egypt to flog their spicy resins (“spicery and balm and myrrh”) to the evidently perfume-poor Nile-dwellers. It’s certainly true that Arab trade routes to Egypt existed for these goods – during the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. Again, that’s more than 500 years too late for Joseph to have been picked up by these pungency-pedlars.
The overall picture we can glean from this single verse, then, is one of the period around 700 BCE, when the Ishmaelites were an established nation, the camel was a common beast of burden and a trade route for fragrant resins existed between Egypt and Arabia. It’s exactly the sort of inclusion you might find if a seventh-century writer, trying to give a bit of atmosphere to his story, decided to incorporate some elements which would seem familiar to his contemporary audience. In other words, this casual verse adds substantially to the volume of evidence which suggests that, much as fundamentalists might like to believe otherwise, the stories of the patriarchs and the Exodus were composed hundreds of years after they supposedly happened, by authors who were writing with a specific religious and political agenda. We don’t treat Homer as history, so why then do we accord such special attention to the myths of Jewish nationhood perpetuated by the scribes of seventh-century Judah?
I often find it slightly incredible that more attention isn’t given to the subject of forgery in the Bible. Occasionally I attempt to redress the balance, but generally it just seems taken as read that Christians are happy to ignore the fact that the three Pastoral Epistles, the book of Hebrews and most probably Ephesians, Colossians and 2 Thessalonians are all – to put it politely – pseudonymous. This is on top of the fact that the Gospels were not written by their named authors, that the histories in the books of Kings and Chronicles appear to contradict the archaeological evidence, that the prophecies of Daniel were written long after their actual “fulfillment”, and that the books of Job, Esther and Ruth bear all the hallmarks of early historical fiction. None of this appears to matter to those who wish to believe the stories found therein.
There is a precedent for accepting forged documents in Christianity, though, possibly the largest and most profitable fraud in all history. It post-dates the Bible, but still stands as a perfect example of how inconvenient truths can be ignored for the sake of the Church’s “greater good”. To better understand this mentality, let me take you back to the Europe of the Early Rennaissance, when Italy has become the treasurehouse of Europe and scary Islamists are nosing round the corners of the Mediterranean, waiting to pounce. The Crusades have failed, the power of Papal Rome is waning, and France and Spain are jostling for control of the central continent. In this atmosphere, the Roman Popes still command substantial lands and power, most notably in the form of the Papal States – a substantial tract of territory in central and Northern Italy, which were handed over to the Vatican in the 9th century by the excellently-named Emperor Pippin, father of the slightly better-known Charlemagne. The Catholic Church’s ownership of this mini-Empire rested on an ancient document called the Donation of Constantine, a hangover from the early days of Christianity. Shortly after his conversion, the text relates, Emperor Constantine was stricken with leprosy. Previously this would have been the end of the line for His Imperial Majesty, but thanks to his newfound faith he was the lucky recipiant of a miraculous healing, credited to Pope Sylvester I. As a token of his gratitude and piety, Constantine then willed his Western empire (he had enough to be going on with in Byzantium) to the Church, in whose hands it remained. This legacy formed the basis of the Pope’s power. It granted him the right to raise armies across these territories, to levy taxes, to anoint bishops and even to have a say in the appointment of kings and emperors. Good stuff, and boy, did the Popes ever milk it! The Holy See was the political powerhouse of medieval Europe, commanding respect and fealty from virtually every state on the continent.
Except, of course, it was all founded on a lie. In one of the first known examples of textual criticism, a Florentine linguist named Lorenzo Valla (previously known for his work on ancient philosophy and Latin grammar reform) proved conclusively that the Donation was a fraud. In De falso credita et ementita Constantini Donatione declamatio, he demonstrated that Constantine’s legacy was written in the Latin vernacular of the 8th Century – putting its authorship about 400 years too late for it to be legitimate. Unsurprisingly, the Church put the frighteners on Valla (who, fortunately, enjoyed the protection of the powerful Duke of Aragon, and so escaped any serious retaliation) and heavily suppressed the essay, which was not publically circulated until 1517 – more than seventy years after its composition. Naturally, it became a key weapon in the fledgling Protestant arsenal, and, thanks to the recent invention of the printing press, was made widely available. Valla’s scholarship has since been vindicated by modern techniques, and it is now universally accepted that the European powerbase of Catholicism was founded – like so much of their religion – on a lie. But then, should anyone be surprised?
It is commonly believed that when Darwin published On The Origin Of Species in 1859, there was a tremendous religious outcry. In actual fact, notwithstanding Robert FitzRoy’s embarrassing outburst at the British Association For The Advancement of Science, there was little immediate opposition to the idea of evolution by natural selection, at least from religious circles. A far greater hullabaloo was generated by a book published the following year, which has now been largely forgotten – Essays And Reviews, by a coalition of seven liberal clergymen (including the soon-to-be Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, and Master of Balliol College Benjamin Jowett), caused a furore on its publication, which resulted in two of its authors being indicted for heresy and an official synodical condemnation from the Church of England. It outsold On The Origin Of Species by a huge margin, selling more copies in two years than Darwin managed in two decades, yet today is almost unheard of. So what was all the fuss about?
For about a hundred years prior to Essays And Reviews, scholars had been tentatively applying the ideas of what was to become known as “Higher Criticism” to the Bible. Higher Criticism is a form of textual analysis which seeks to place a text in a particular socio-historic context, by comparing it to other literature of a similar period and by cross-referencing with the fields of geology and archaeology. It was generally considered a purely scholastic discipline, and was virtually unheard of outside academia, but Essays And Reviews blew that idea completely out of the water by making the methods and conclusions of Higher Criticism available to the lay public for the first time. Central to the book was the essay by Benjamin Jowett entitled “On The Interpretation Of Scripture”, which argued strongly for a position viewing Genesis as myth, the Gospels as propaganda and Paul’s use of Jewish Scriptures as highly selective. None of these concepts appears novel to us today, of course – indeed, virtually all Biblical scholars working in modern academic circles today see Jowett’s views as entirely correct – but in the 1860s, this was heresy of the first order. The knives came out, in the form of pamphlets, petitions, letters to the national press, threats, court injunctions and appeals to the Privy Council. Darwin joined others in defending the “Seven Against Christ”, as their detractors called them, and commended Essays And Reviews for trying to “establish religious teachings on a firmer and broader foundation.”
The main opponent of the essayists was Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, best known today as a fierce critic of – you guessed it – On The Origin Of Species. It was he who famously asked Thomas Huxley if he was descended from an ape through his grandfather or his grandmother. Wilberforce first attacked Essays And Reviews through an article in The Quarterly Review, and followed with an open letter in The Times, but as is so often the case, it was the vigorous criticism and resultant controversy which propelled the book up the bestseller lists. Wilberforce’s assaults thus served to push the ideas of Higher Criticism still further into the public eye. Another inadvertent publicist was the novelist Mrs Humphrey Ward, who wrote her novel Robert Ellsmere as a direct response to the Essays And Reviews scandal. In the book, the titular character undergoes a crisis of faith brought on by the study of Higher Criticism, and goes from a Bible-believing rector to an agnostic libertarian.
It’s quite amusing that, a century and a half later, Biblical literalists are still huffing and puffing over Darwin’s straightforward solution to evolution, whilst the insidious ideas of Jowett et al are quietly ignored. In many ways, Essays And Reviews was a far more damning indictment of literalism than natural selection could ever be, demonstrating as it did that the Bible, far from being the divinely inspired Word of God, is in fact a collection of jumbled, contradictory and very human writing. It’s also interesting to consider, in the light of archaeological finds during the last twenty-five years or so, that Higher Criticism is enjoying something of a renaissance. Now that archaeology has started to disprove large sections of the Old Testament Histories, we need more than ever to examine the Bible with regards to its true origins, and understand it in the same way that we understand other works of the same period. To do so is the only honest, respectful and realistic way to approach this strange and divisive book.
Having mentioned them in a previous post, I got to thinking about the tribe of the Ammonites, and, by extension, the other tribes pottering around the Near East at the time of the early Israelites. They appear only as bit-players in the great drama of the Hebrews played out across the Old Testament Histories, popping up in the text only for the purposes of being slaughtered in great numbers by whichever king happened to be running the Israeli war-machine at the time. So who were the Ammonites, and what gave them the audacity to live in lands which Yahweh had promised to his chosen people?
The Bible identifies them as the descendants of Benammi, a relative of Abraham. How close a relative? Well, remember the story of Sodom and Gomorrah? Fleeing the scene of Yahweh’s burning-sulphur-based wrath, Abraham’s nephew Lot escapes (minus his now-composed-of-condiment wife) to the mountains, along with his two daughters. Said daughters, believing that the cataclysm they’ve just high-tailed it away from represents the end of humanity, see it as their duty to re-populate the world with their offspring. Only problem is, there’s a distinct lack of eligible bachelors around, on account of them all perishing in the aforementioned rain of sulphurous death. So they hatch a plot to sleep with the only available male around…
“And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth: Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.
And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.
Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father. And the first born bare a son, and called his name Moab: the same is the father of the Moabites unto this day. And the younger, she also bare a son, and called his name Benammi: the same is the father of the children of Ammon unto this day.” Genesis 19:31-38
In a rather amusing bit of propaganda, the Hebrew scriptures make the point that their enemies are the offspring of an incestuous father-daughter relationship – you have to wonder how often that taunt came up on the battlefield.
Of course the Ammonites were’t really the spawn of Lot’s over-randy daughter. They were a small kingdom located to the east of the Dead Sea, in the north of modern-day Jordan. It seems likely that there were close genealogical relationships between them, the Israelites, the Moabites and the other small Semitic tribes knocking around Canaan at the time, and there was probably a good deal of intermarrying going on as well (which, as the Bible makes very clear, God was not pleased about). They were certainly much more closely related to the Hebrew tribes than the pesky Philsitines, Israel’s other major bugbear at the time (the Philistines, who occupied what is now the Gaza Strip, were most likely an offshoot of the Mycenaeans – making them, ironically, far more culturally refined than the Israelites of the time). The kingdom of Ammon was predominantly agricultural – their lands were highly fertile and the number of ruined settlements in the area attests to a settled and agrarian population.
The Ammonites had close diplomatic ties with their neighbours and kinsmen, the Moabites, and they banded together to defend against the aggressive Israelite expansionist policies, to the extent that they were often referred to as a single group (the “Children Of Lot”). They were excluded from “the congregation of the LORD” because they supposedly prevented the Israelites from crossing their lands during the conquest of Canaan – in spite of the fact that the kingdom of Ammon lay to the east of Canaan, and the Israelites (supposedly) invaded from the west. This charge smacks of Hebrew propaganda, but was clearly a popular belief among the ancient Israelites, who needed a good excuse to vilify their neighbours.
Among their other excuses was, naturally, the fact that the Ammonites followed a different religion, worshipping a pantheon which included Baal and Yahweh, but set them under the jurisdiction of the Ammonite deity Milcom. So disapproving were the Yahweh-worshippers that they actually co-opted Milcom (under the slightly different pronunciation Molech) as part of the demonic hierarchy – an idea expounded upon by Christianity, which made him a major figure in the Fall and a Prince of Hell. It’s worth noting that Milcom/Molech was also worshipped by the Moabites (as Chemosh), by the Edomites (as Quaush) and was sometimes seen as an aspect of Baal by the ancient Semites, so he was a pretty major figure in ancient Near-Eastern religion.
Unfortunately, most of what we know of the Ammonites is from the Old Testament itself (and other Israelite sources, plus a few mentions in the records of the Assyrians). Only a few fragments of their own texts survive – a short inscription, a bronze bottle and a few scraps of pottery are all we have. As a result, most of what we know about the Ammonites comes from their enemies, who naturally portray them in the worst light possible. With the aid of archaeology, some additional pieces of the puzzle appear, but we will probably never know the full story of the Israelites’ ancient foe.
I’ve been reading up on the Riemann Hypothesis lately (and all you non-math-nerds can breathe a sigh of relief, because I’m not going to go into it here. Suffice to say that it’s a very important mathematical theory which no-one has yet been able to prove) and chanced across an amusing anecdote about noted British mathematician G H Hardy. As well as being a mathematical genius, Hardy was also an atheist – a fact which perturbed him when he came to make one of his regular trips across the turbulent North Sea to visit his friend and collaborator, Niels Bohr. Fearing the wrath of a vengeful deity, Hardy decided upon a cunning insurance scheme to get himself safely to Norway in the event that he was wrong and that God actually existed. Immediately prior to taking ship, he mailed a postcard claiming that he had solved the famous Riemann Hypothesis, and would give full details on his return…
The solution of the Hypothesis is practically the Holy Grail as far as mathematics is concerned. Whilst the details are remarkably obscure to the non-mathematician (this is the simplest explanation I can find on the intertubes… good luck…) the theory, if proven, would have wide-ranging implications for prime number theory and thence for cryptography and data security. It is considered the last great unproved milestone in mathematics, and the person who finds a solution would go down in history (as well as picking up a prize of a cool million dollars).
Sending the postcard, Hardy figured, would guarantee him safe passage to Norway if it turned out he’d backed the wrong horse by choosing atheism. If he drowned on the voyage, then the postcard would ensure his posthumous glory as the solver of one of maths’ greatest conundrums. God would surely not wish an atheist to partake of such a prestigious reputation, and so would be compelled to keep the ship afloat all the way to the Scandinavian shore. Logically sound? Well, probably not, but it makes for a good story, nevertheless. Hardy did indeed make it safely to Norway and back (several times), but although he made some significant steps towards a Riemann solution, the million-dollar prize (and eternal mathematical reknown) is still up for grabs, if you want to have a crack.
Galileo’s development of the telescope in 1609 resulted, as you all know, in many new cosmological discoveries. Not least of these was the observation of the moons of Jupiter, which led Galileo to the conclusion that not all heavenly bodies revolved around the Earth, and therefore we could not be at the centre of the universe (cue a big old ring-ding with the Catholic Church and the most famous faith/science disagreement in history). Whilst Jupiter’s satellites were a pretty straightforward bit of astronomy, Galileo was puzzled by the strange “ears” that seemed to adjoin the planet Saturn. He made a number of observations of the phenomenon, but never managed to deduce the structure of what we now know to be Saturn’s rings. An actual description had to wait until the improved telescope of Christiaan Huygens in 1665, but during the interim between the Rings’ first appearance and Huygens’ discovery, a number of theories were put forth as to their nature. Easily the best of these was that of the scholar and theologian Leo Allatius…
Allatius lived in a time when the Catholic Church did a roaring trade on Holy Relics. Bits of the True Cross were on sale in every market bazaar, every church worth its steeple had a bit of dead saint stored away under the altar, and if you wanted absolution, you had only to fondle a bit of cloth which the priest swore blind had once been part of Simon Peter’s favourite pyjamas. Relics were big business, and one of the most sought after was known as the Holy Prepuce. What was the Prepuce? Well, like any good Jew, Jesus was circumcised eight days after birth (see Luke 2:22). The Prepuce is… well, it’s the leftovers from that event, basically. Churches across 17th Century Europe were vying to own a bit of Jesus’ cock. The abbey of Charroux was one claimant, although when they presented their holy foreskin to Pope Innocent the Third he declined to say whether it was the real deal or not. The best claim was made by the St John Lateran Church in Rome, whose relic apparently enlarged in the presence of attractive young women – a surefire indicator that Our Lord was, at heart, a bit of a randy bugger. As if that wasn’t strange enough, Saint Catherine of Siena had a particularly noteworthy vision in which she got married to Jesus. That in itself isn’t so weird, but when you consider that He supposedly offered her His foreskin as a wedding ring you have to wonder exactly what had gotten into the Sienese water supply…
All in all the Prepuce rates as one of the stranger relics of Christendom, so all involved probably breathed a sigh of relief when Leo Allatius revealed that he had finally found the resting place of the holy knob-end. Theorising that the relic would have ascended into the Heavens with Jesus, Allatius concluded that the (then) recently discovered Rings of Saturn, inexplicable to contemporary science, were surely the remnants of Jesus’ sacred schmuck. Thus was the matter of who had the genuine Prepuce resolved (at least for Allatius – the Italian village of Calcata claimed to be in possession of the relic until as recently as 1983, when it was supposedly stolen). Now there’s an idea for George Lucas – Indiana Jones and the Lost Jesus-Penis! It’d have to be better than that Crystal Skull shite…
It’s rather childish of me to be amused by stories involving poo, I know, but I’ve just been reading about the Essenes in David Plotz’s rather excellent The Good Book (a review will probably follow when I finish it) and the tales he told of their toilet habits were too good not to share.
The Essene sect, as you probably know, were the fringe religious group who wrote and deposited the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were a strange and remote cult, living in a small, monastic community on the shores of the Dead Sea and waiting patiently for the apocalypse they keenly anticipated, shunning the outside world and generally keeping themselves to themselves. Among their stranger doctrines was an excessive obsession with personal hygiene. Much of the Qumran complex in which they lived was devoted to bathrooms, and their surviving literature suggests that they engaged in ritual ablutions at the drop of a hat. As a corollary to this, they were apparently extremely squeamish about going to the toilet – they avoided it entirely on the Sabbath (which must have made for some bloody uncomfortable, not to mention dehydrated, weekends) and when they had to do the necessary, they climbed up a huge great hill behind their kibbutz and took care of business up there.
In toilets, as in so much of real estate, location is everything. Putting the thunderbox at the top of the hill meant that every time it rained, the water filtered down through the rock and soil of the Essenes’ communal lavatory and straight into their water supply at the bottom, carrying with it the delightful melange of piss and shit that they had so dutifully deposited up the mountain. Of course, given their predilection for regular bathing, the Qumran monks basically washed in their own excrement several times a day, which didn’t do wonders for their general health. Life expectancy for the group was substantially shorter than for neighbouring communities, and it’s pretty likely that their unsanitary bathroom arrangements (ironically put in place because of their obsession with cleanliness) were primarily to blame.
What atheist worth their salt has not found time to dismiss the famous argument of Pascal’s Wager? You all know it: better to believe in God and find He does not exist than to be an atheist and find out that He does. The Chaplain recently did a dissection job on it, and I’ve mentioned it before as well. However, in our eagerness to dismiss the Wager, we might be in danger of forgetting about Pascal himself, who (with the exception of his betting theories) was perhaps one of the greatest minds in history. I thought I’d redress the balance a bit and give you a quick rundown of some of the man’s many achievements.
You may well already be aware of Pascal’s most well-known contribution to the field of mathematics, since it too is named after him. Pascal’s Triangle is a simple geometric arrangement of whole numbers such that each number is the sum of the two directly above it. As well as looking rather cool, it has important repercussions for probability theory and also for non-Euclidean geometry, which in turn allowed Einstein to develop the Theory of Relativity and later was instrumental in the discovery of quantum physics. Although important, the Triangle was far from the only mathematical development spearheaded by Pascal. He also invented a calculator, the Pascaline (yeah, there are a whole bunch of things named after this man, alright), which was the distant forerunner of Charles Babbage’s mechanical computer and hence an ancestor of the machine you’re looking at right now.
With the aid of Pierre de Fermat, Pascal devised modern probability theory (you’d think his Wager would have been better thought out, given that he basically invented systematic gambling), and he also made substantial contributions to the field of geometry, particularly as regards axiomatic theory. Maths, however, was not the only string to his bow. Ever been inoculated against a dangerous disease? Well, doctors may have invented the medicine, but Pascal came up with the method of delivery, perfecting the syringe as a sideline of his study of hydraulics. In a similar vein, he also disproved the common contemporary notion (derived from Aristotle) that true vacuums were an impossibility, and thus laid the foundations for the widespread use of the barometer, and (rather more indirectly) modern meteorology. In the process, he also defined the scientific method in as precise a form as could be desired:
“In order to show that a hypothesis is evident, it does not suffice that all the phenomena follow from it; instead, if it leads to something contrary to a single one of the phenomena, that suffices to establish its falsity.”
As a philosopher, Pascal spoke out against empiricism and causality, his gift for language making his work extremely popular. Voltaire and Rousseau were among his admirers, and he is credited with provoking many of Pope Alexander VII’s reforms (in spite of the fact that the Pope publicly denounced Pascal’s works). He composed the Pensees, which was, in its day, the premier piece of Christian apologetics, in spite of the fact that Pascal died prior to the book’s completion. That a collection of disparate scraps and posthumous scribblings could be considered “the most eloquent book in French prose” give some idea of the quality of the author’s writing.
In other words, Blaise Pascal can be said to have substantially influenced the fields of: particle physics, economics, actuarial science, meteorology, geometry, computing, hydraulics, engineering, medicine, philosophy, literature and theology, to name but a few. Next time you run up against the infamous Wager, consider (as you trample your evidently inept apologist opponent into the floorboards) that Pascal deserves to be remembered for more than just a bad bet.
The other day, I served as a guinea-pig for a memory test designed to assess for dementia. Since I swanned through it with ease, I was feeling pretty good about my mental capacities – until I discovered that I’m already over the hill. Apparently our cognitive capacities start to dwindle far earlier than was previously thought, which would explain why I poured orange juice instead of milk on my muesli this morning.
This is why I play so much Go.
The waterways of Bristol are predominantly the province of seagulls, intermittent cormorants and a particularly aggressive flotilla of swans, so I was surprised on my stroll into work this morning to spot a couple of barnacle geese pottering about on the harbourside. Not a bird we often see around these parts, Bristol being somewhat off their main migratory routes. They’re prettier (IMHO) than regular geese, slightly smaller, and less keen to take off your arm at the elbow (I’m never going back to that petting zoo, mummy!). The most interesting thing about barnacle geese, though, is the name. Why the hell would someone think to name a large bird after a tiny crustacean?
The answer lies in Catholicism, oddly enough. In times gone by, observant Catholics had a rough time of it during Lent, when delicious meaty goodness had to be replaced by fish, or worse (if you lived far from the sea) beans and vegetables. Desperate for the juicy savour of animal flesh, the Catholic Church decided that geese – you’ll love this – were in fact a kind of seafood. The logic? They figured that, since the head and neck plumage of the goose bears a vague resemblance to the shell of the goose barnacle, the two were obviously related. In fact, concluded the protein-starved churchgoers, it’s clear that the barnacle must be the juvenile form of the goose. Since baby geese are a kind of shellfish, it follows that adult geese must be shellfish too, and shellfish (in spite of Leviticus) are perfectly permissable during Lent. More roast goose, bishop?
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