Why it is that I like the LeCarre books. Why “Desk Set” is one of my favorite movies. Why I love movies and books about Bletchley Circle, why the work of John Cardinal Ratzinger has always been so interesting to me.

These are all stories about/by people who use their brains hard. People think of Einstein when you speak of smart people but most of the real brains in the world go unnoticed and ignored. Researchers are some of the most interesting people I have ever known, and I have known quite a few people. And research, as it once was, is just about gone, if it is not gone already.

I had a theology professor in seminary who considered himself an “Amateur biblical scholar”.

He knew the Pentateuch back and forth, in English and in Hebrew. He could quote chapter and verse, tell you of irregularities in different translations, and could even, he thought, distinguish the work of individual translators who worked under St Jerome. He knew the Gospels in Aramaic, Greek, and English, and could recite them from memory. And not just the four, the Gnostic gospels too.

And this was where he started. He considered the knowledge he had already acquired merely a tool to use to understand the theology he taught. And he was in the bottom percentile of the graduates of his school.

I will never know what he did. I will never have the brain he did, and now that brain is in a box under the turf somewhere in south America. Lost for all eternity.

While he could hold my attention in class for five minutes at a time, I was a daydreamer, with the attention span of a fox in a henhouse. I look at him, and the carefully trained minds of my other professors, and I think, what have we done to ourselves as a species? You can find an individual here and there capable of thought but I grew up surrounded by them. I had professors who considered you illiterate unless you could read latin and greek. Which put me in that category squarely; I can still pick out some Koine but my Latin is completely atrocious (My daughter has far outpaced me).

Anyway, now I understand why this is so important. When you read someone else’s translation you take for granted their translation is as accurate as it can be, and that it gives you the actual information you’re searching for. More often than not, this is not true.

The advent of computerization has put the world at our fingertips, but we spend all our time looking at cat pictures and bitching about who is using what restroom.