Thoughts on policy, history, faith, baseball when I get around to it, waterfowl, and life in general by a junior attorney who'd much rather have Jonah Goldberg's job. Or possibly Darin Erstad's.

 
In the words of Indiana Jones, "Didn't [this guy] ever go to Sunday school?"

Jon Meacham, writing in Newsweek about the biblical Christmas story (predictably, he insinuates the whole thing was custom-tailored in the first century to enhance Jesus' messianic credentials) offers this whiplash-inducer to anyone with a passing knowledge of the Bible:

"Enraged and jealous, Herod orders a massacre of all the male children in Bethlehem—thus connecting Jesus' birth with the first Passover, when God spared Israel's sons from the same bloody decree by Pharaoh." [Emphasis added.]

Or not. Passover commemorates God's sparing Israel's sons not from a "bloody decree by Pharoah," but from His own "bloody decree," which fell rather spectacularly on Egyptian first-born sons according to the account in [i]Exodus.[/i]

An interesting subject -- I've always questioned whether the "virgin shall conceive" passage in Isaiah doesn't refer to an event in Isaiah's own time rather than Christ's (the context suggests that if the passage is Messianic, it is so by a double meaning). But Meacham annihilates his credibility on this subject with that kind of junior Sunday school mistake.
posted by Thomas at 8:22 PM