Okay, I had intended to leave this topic mostly to my New Testament colleagues, but it’s rather interesting and there seems to be a lot of “talking past” going on. Ben Witherington, together with other New Testament scholars, has issued a press release (through Christian Newswire—why choose such a limited outlet?) listing “Ten Reasons Why the Jesus Tomb Claim is Bogus.” The “ten reasons” are stated as “bullet points,” without much unpacking or analysis. James Tabor, author of The Jesus Dynasty and, as far as I can tell, the only actual scholar who supports the identifications proposed in The Lost Tomb of Jesus, has answered some of these points (though some of his critics don’t seem to have noticed). Let’s lay out both sides of the arguments, using Witherington et alii’s ten points as a structure.

1. DNA Evidence

The “anti-tomb” press release states that “There is no DNA evidence that this is the historical Jesus of Nazareth.” Of course there isn’t, nor could there be. We don’t possess a database filled with the genetic “fingerprints” of first-century CE Galileans and Judeans. Without a sample of DNA known to be that of Jesus of Nazareth, there’s no way that any DNA recoverable from the ossuaries could be “matched” to any particular historical individual.

What available DNA strands could provide is some degree of information about the family relationships between the persons whose bones are in those ossuaries. As it turns out, the only DNA-based claim made by the filmmakers is that the Talpiot tomb’s Mariamne Mara was neither Yeshua bar Yehosef’s sister nor mother. This is a fairly modest claim, and needs to be evaluated for the claim that it is, not for some other claim that critics set up as a straw opponent.

And yet this does not mean that there are no problems with the DNA evidence. The Discovery Channel website specifically says that the DNA tested was mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA):

The human remains were analyzed by Carney Matheson, a scientist at the Paleo-DNA Laboratory at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada. Mitochondrial DNA examination determined the individual in the Jesus ossuary and the person in the ossuary linked to Mary Magdalene were not related.

As I understand it, the chain of reasoning then goes as follows: (1) The Talpiot tomb is a family tomb. (2) The only women buried in a family tomb would be (a) women who married into the family or (b) women born into the family who, at the time of their death, had never been married. (3) Since Yeshua and Miriamne were not related, Miriamne must have married into the family.

That much seems reasonable, but there remain some unresolved issues. One major problem is the gratuitous assumption that, if Miriamne married into the family, she married Yeshua. Four of the six ossuary inscriptions name men. Why should it be assumed that Miriamne was Yeshua’s wife? Why not Yehudah’s wife, or Yose’s wife, or Matia’s wife? And, of course, the possibility would still remain that she was Yeshua’s daughter, or Yehudah’s or Yose’s or Matia’s daughter, and so on down the line. The full range of possibilities has not been explored. Rather, the filmmakers have jumped to a “sexy” conclusion that is not contravened by the available evidence, but neither is it really supported by the evidence.

Another major problem here is that, if I understand things correctly, mtDNA testing could only reveal whether Yeshua and Miriamne had the same mother, not the same father:

Mitochondrial DNA maternal lineage testing is used to determine whether two or more individuals are related through their mother’s ancestral line. This test may be used to provide additional evidence in difficult maternity cases where the alleged mother is not available for testing, or in cases where a single non-matching genetic system is observed between the alleged mother and the child in question. A single non-matching genetic variation in a maternity test is often the result of a mutation (a random change in the DNA which occurs in the formation of the egg used for conception). Since mtDNA is inherited through the maternal line, all sons and daughters inherit their mother’s mtDNA. However, only daughters pass on their mother’s mtDNA to their offspring. mtDNA is composed of a string of DNA nucleotides (the 4 building blocks of DNA represented by the letters A, C, G and T) in a particular sequence. In the mtDNA maternal lineage test, a short segment of the mtDNA is sequenced (the order of DNA molecules is determined) and the mtDNA sequences from each individual are compared to see if they could come from the same maternal line. Everyone from the same maternal line will have similar mtDNA sequences. mtDNA maternal lineage testing takes much more time to complete as compared to other types of DNA paternity or maternity testing. UNTHSC is one of only a small number of labs in the country capable of performing this type of DNA testing. (University of North Texas Health Science Center at Forth Worth, DNA Identity Lab, with thanks to my student Chris Thomas for introducing me to this aspect of DNA testing)

Since mtDNA testing could only reveal common maternity, if Yeshua and Miriamne had the same father but different mothers, mitochondrial DNA testing would not reveal their common paternity. Filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici appears to be aware of this—see the quotation from the New York Times a bit lower in this post—but apparently he blithely ignores any other possibilities than “related on their mothers’ side” and “married.” And yet, that is at most what mtDNA testing could reveal: that Yeshua and Miriamne had different mothers. Everything else is speculation.

This consideration of DNA testing brings up another, very important issue: why was the only DNA test that was conducted focused on Yeshua’s and Miriamne’s common maternity? The filmmakers also claim that one of the occupants of another ossuary, Maria, was Yeshua’s mother. Why didn’t they test Yeshua’s and Mariah’s mtDNA to see whether Mariah really was Yeshua’s mother? They also claim that Miriamne was the mother of Yehudah bar Yeshua; why didn’t they test Yehudah’s mtDNA to determine whether Miriamne really was Yehudah’s mother? It turns out that the answer is that the filmmakers were impatient. Read more about this in Carl Zimmer’s post on his fine science journalism blog, The Loom (hat tip to Duane Smith—although I also keep Carl’s blog on my RSS feed, I saw the discussion first on Abnormal Interests).

There is another important dimension to the DNA “evidence” that I have not yet seen explicitly discussed (though it may have been discussed and I just missed it). According to the New York Times article that prompted Carl Zimmer’s above-mentioned blog post:

The filmmakers commissioned DNA testing on the residue in the boxes said to have held Jesus and Mary Magdalene. There are no bones left, because the religious custom in Israel is to bury archeological remains in a cemetery.

However, the documentary’s director and its driving force, Simcha Jacobovici, an Israeli-born Canadian, said there was enough mitochondrial DNA for a laboratory in Ontario to conclude that the bodies in the “Jesus” and “Mary Magdalene” ossuaries were not related on their mothers’ side. From this, Mr. Jacobovici deduced that they were a couple, because otherwise they would not have been buried together in a family tomb.

See above on the hasty generalization from “children of different mothers” to “married,” but down here I want to address a different point. The reports I have seen thus far are quite vague on where the DNA came from. Presumably, the DNA came from within the relevant ossuaries. But how do we know that the DNA in the ossuary came from the person named on the ossuary’s inscription? People do not put themselves into ossuaries, and they do not take themselves out of ossuaries. Several different people will have handled the ossuaries and the bones inside of them, not only in the first year but over the centuries, and they won’t have been wearing latex gloves á là CSI. How does Jacobovici know that his lab was really testing Yeshua bar Yehosef’s DNA against Miriamne Mara’s DNA, and not, to be fanciful, Amos Kloner’s DNA against Levi Rahmani’s DNA? Unless the DNA in question can be shown to have come from the person named in the ossuary’s inscription, the DNA evidence is absolutely meaningless for reconstructing the relationship between the parties buried in the tomb.

So Witherington et al. have targeted bullet point #1 against a straw argument. Nobody is claiming that the DNA from the Yeshua ossuary is a “match” for the historical Jesus of Nazareth. The bullet misses its target, since the target is a much more modest claim. Even that more modest claim, however, is rife with difficulties, and very difficult to take as a serious and powerful contribution toward the identification of the Talpiot tomb’s Yeshua bar Yehosef with Christian history’s Jesus of Nazareth.

Next time: statistics.

Update: A March 2, 2007 entry on the Scientific American blog reveals that Carney Matheson, who conducted the DNA tests for Jacobovici et al., characterized the results of the DNA tests as “absolutely nothing.”

… is another remake of “Big Yellow Taxi.”

Barely a year after misdating artifacts and misinterpreting texts (including the Bible) willy-nilly to try to convince viewers that the biblical exodus from Egypt really happened (albeit not like the Bible narrates it), James Cameron, Simcha Jacobovici, and Charles Pellegrino are back to try to convince us that a tomb unearthed in 1980 is “The Jesus Family Tomb.”

I’ll undoubtedly watch the program, though please don’t expect a long review á là my review of The Exodus Decoded. I am skeptical of Jacobovici’s claims, especially after seeing the way he rode roughshod over the evidence in The Exodus Decoded. I also think it’s significant that the original excavators didn’t make the connection that Jacobovici is trying to make, and in fact disavowed it. But the main reason I won’t blog a long review of the documentary is that I don’t have sufficient expertise in New Testament studies and “historical Jesus” studies. I’ll leave the substantial reviews to other bibliobloggers, though I do hope that somebody like Mark Goodacre or Jim Davila will undertake a significant review of the film.

My a priori skepticism was heightened by this message from Stephen Goranson, which came across Jim West’s biblical studies e-mail list:

According to Toronto Star:

“The documentary speculates that the James ossuary was stolen shortly after the tomb was found. The archaeologists examining the tomb 26 years ago found 10 ossuaries, but only nine are in storage at the IAA. In The Lost Tomb, it is alleged that the James ossuary is that missing box.”

http://www.thestar.com/Unassigned/article/185534

James Tabor’s The Jesus Dynasty (pp. 31–33) previously raised this as a possible identity.

But Amos Kloner, “A Tomb with Inscribed Ossuaries in East Talpiot,” ‘Atiqot 29 (1996) page 17 Table 3 plainly lists that (#10) ossuary as having “No Inscription.” If it had no inscription in 1980 how can it be an anciently-inscribed “James” ossuary?

This is merely one of the items that do not add up.

Jacobovici never let a fact get in the way of a good theory before. Why start now?

For a long time, I’ve enjoyed various retellings of the battle of Thermopylae, where Leonidas of Sparta faced off against Xerxes I. Now comes what has been described as a “ferocious retelling” of the battle in the movie 300, based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel of the same name. I’m intrigued by the movie, but I have to wonder, dare I see it? Or will my ability to suspend the desire for authentic portrayals fail, and the goofball costuming therefore drive me up the wall?

Here’s how Xerxes looks in a Persian relief:

And here’s how Xerxes looks in 300 (graphic novel on the left, Rodrigo Santoro in the movie on the right):

What in the world is up with this portrayal? Xerxes looks positively Ethiopian in the graphic novel. Rodrigo Santoro’s Brazilian skin tone is more convincing for a Persian, but the movie preserves all the gold and body-piercing and exhibitionism and baldness of the comic. Xerxes must be spinning in his grave. At least my friends at TriKing did better with the Xerxes I card for Anachronism, released as a promotional card just last month, suspiciously close to the release date for 300:

“I’ve said my peace.”

The various circumstances that have slowed down my blogging in general have also taken their toll on my serial review of Richard Dawkins’ recent book The God Delusion. Hopefully, now that things are settling back down from outright crazy to just plain hectic, I can continue the series with a bit more regularity.

The Ontological Argument and Other A Priori Arguments

Having discussed and (to his own satisfaction, if not the satisfaction of readers) dispensed with Thomas Aquinas’s five ways of attempting to demonstrate God’s existence, Dawkins moves on to Anselm’s “ontological argument.” Here is Dawkins’s summary of the ontological argument:

It is possible to conceive, Anselm said, of a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Even an atheist can conceive of such a superlative being, though he would deny its existence in the real world. But, goes the argument, a being that doesn’t exist in the real world is, by that very fact, less than perfect, therefore we have a contradiction and hey, presto, God exists.

I am no medievalist, and no philosopher, nor a theologian, so I have no great first-hand knowledge of historical, philosophical, and theological studies of Anselm’s Proslogion. I have an immediate, affective, negative reaction to Dawkins’s cheeky “hey, presto, God exists” at the end of the above quotation, not to mention that Dawkins then spends half of p. 80—I finally got tired of trying to follow the audiobook and decided to get a hardback—trying to cast Anselm as a schoolyard bully. And yet, I must admit, I have never been impressed with the ontological argument in the forms that I’ve seen it. (I have recently re-read the parts of the Proslogion quoted by Dawkins, but I haven’t spent a lot of time with it.) Like Dawkins, I find myself unconvinced that one can simply define God into existence, and yet that is what purveyors of the ontological argument seem to want to do. I cannot convince myself that it is sound procedure to “prove” God’s existence by defining “God” in such a way that the definition implies ontological necessity.

To point up how may value-laden assumptions are built into the ontological argument—assumptions that beg the question—Dawkins presents the following “proof” of God’s non-existence, offered by Douglas Gasking:

1. The creation of the world is the most marvellous achievement imaginable.
2. The merit of an achievement is the product of (a) its intrinsic quality, and (b) the ability of its creator.
3. The greater the disability (or handicap) of the creator, the more impressive the achievement.
4. Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive a greater being—namely, one who created everything while not existing.
5. An existing God therefore would not be a being greater than which a greater cannot be conceived because an even more formidable and incredible creator would be a God which did not exist.

Ergo:

6. God does not exist.

You may think that Gasking’s “proof” is a bit silly, but why should it be thought so? As usually presented, the ontological argument wants to prove God’s existence by defining God as that being than whom no greater being can be conceived, but since an existent being is greater than a nonexistent being, the very definition of “God” requires that God exist. What Gasking’s “proof” shows is that the classic ontological argument assumes, without demonstrating it, both the definition of “God” and the value judgment that an existent being is “greater” than an otherwise equivalent but nonexistent being. Yet the argument itself does not justify this value judgment, and Gasking’s “proof” goes directly toward challenging this value judgment.

“Israelites” can first be identified in Canaan—on a particular reading of the archaeological evidence (whether or not this reading is correct need not detain us here, for the coming anecdote works without engaging that discussion)—around 1200 BCE. All attempts to archaeologically connect the Israelites with a destructive battle against Jericho around 1200 BCE have failed, despite the famous biblical story in which Joshua fought the battle of Jericho and the walls came a-tumbling down. In fact, attempts to even find a settlement at Jericho for Joshua to defeat have failed. Jericho appears to have been uninhabited, or insignificant, in the appropriate time frame for Joshua. Bill Dever likes to quip that while the miracle of the a-tumbling walls related in the Bible is impressive, destroying a non-existent city is even more miraculous. Gasking’s “disproof” reminds me of Dever’s quip.

On the whole, I find myself largely agreeing with Dawkins’s criticisms of the ontological argument (though disliking the snarkiness of his presentation). I’ve never found it to be a convincing argument. I am a theist—but in no way does the ontological argument contribute to that stance in my case. If any of you know know Anselm better than I wish to “rehabilitate” the ontological argument, please feel free to comment on this post. I am not violently opposed to the argument, I just have never found it convincing.

Metacomment on the review: I have been away from this review for too long. Having a printed copy of the book will help me get back into stride. Also, I am likely to post more frequently on shorter sections of the book now, so that I can maintain a fairly even pace.

Although I generally like Apple software, I’ve decided to give Camino a spin for a while as my default browser. By comparison, Safari is slow, and for some reason it doesn’t play nice with the back end of Blackboard.

Update: I take it back. Camino does some things better than Safari, but it draws some pages really ugly. It doesn’t handle scaling fonts well at all.

Update 2: I found out that my font issue was really in the way I had defined font sizes in my CSS. So now I’m back to Camino by default, for a while anyway. It’s nice to go to just about any site and have it work right.

It’s been a week or so since the New York Times ran a profile of Marcus Ross, a young-earth creationist who recently completed a Ph.D. in geosciences at the University of Rhode Island. Ross apparently wrote his dissertation in O. J. Simpson (”if it happened”) mode:

His subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that, as he wrote, vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago. The work is “impeccable,” said David E. Fastovsky, a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at the university who was Dr. Ross’s dissertation adviser. “He was working within a strictly scientific framework, a conventional scientific framework.”

But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a “young earth creationist” — he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.

Regular readers of this blog know that the interaction between religious faith, especially Christian faith, and science is one of my special areas of interest. I haven’t had anything to say on the Marcus Ross profile, though, because I haven’t really had time to sit down and think about it rigorously. As of yet, I still haven’t had time to think through these matters as carefully as I would like. Nevertheless, I’m going to go ahead and do just a little “thinking out loud” here.

My gut reaction to what Ross has “accomplished” is a mixture of astonishment and offense. There are really two separable issues here: academic integrity and disciplinary validity.

On the academic integrity side, I agree with the following comments by Larry Moran (please see his original post for the elided portions, and credit Duane Smith for leading me to Moran’s post):

The goal is to appease the Professors by telling them what they (presumably) want to hear, in order to get the Ph.D. That student would fail, I hope. Universities are no place for lies and deceit. You must stand up for what you believe and learn to defend it in an academic context. Otherwise, you don’t deserve a Ph.D.

Marcus Ross thinks it’s okay to write a thesis about 65 million year old reptiles when, in fact, he doesn’t believe a word of it. He justifies this by referring to “different paradigms.” Apparently, there’s one kind of “paradigm” when you are trying to get your Professors to give you a Ph.D. and another kind of “paradigm” at all other times. This is just a euphemism for “lying.” In this case, it’s lying for Jesus.

… It is not intellectually honest to write something in a thesis that you “know” to be incorrect. …

It appears to be the case that Ross knowingly submitted a dissertation in which he made statements that he considers to be false, fully aware that if his dissertation contained versions of those statements that he considered to be true, his dissertation would likely have been rejected. I find this offensive as a professor, as a Christian, and as an undereducated science enthusiast.

In my role as a professor who teaches religion classes that are required by my University, I try to make it clear to students that they will never be graded up or down based on agreement or disagreement of their religious views with my own. I am not offended when students challenge my religious beliefs; if anything, I’m delighted that students are starting to think critically about such things, whatever their conclusions in relation to my own thoughts. I do not want students telling me what they think I want to hear, or just parroting my own judgments back to me. A rigorous critique of my work would be a much higher compliment than a deceitful regurgitation thereof.

Perhaps more to the point, however, there are some things about which students are not free to disagree with me. They are not free to think that the Iron Age kingdoms of Israel and Judah were located somewhere in southern Montana. They are not free to think that the Tanakh was originally written in Arabic. I could go on but I don’t need to; you see the point. It’s not just that Ross’s personal beliefs are incompatible with the claims made in his Ph.D. thesis. The reason that Ross’s personal beliefs about the age of the earth would have been rejected had he written them into his thesis is because they are demonstrably false. The earth is some 4.5 billion years old, not younger than 10,000 years. Radioactive isotopes don’t lie to curry favor with dissertation committees.

From my point of view as a biblical scholar, Ross’s doubletalk is theologically offensive. One of my favorite passages of scripture is Job 13:4–10, where Job asserts that God prefers honest to piety:

As for you, you whitewash with lies;
all of you are worthless physicians.
If you would only keep silent,
that would be your wisdom!
Hear now my reasoning,
and listen to the pleadings of my lips.
Will you speak falsely for God,
and speak deceitfully for him?
Will you show partiality toward him,
will you plead the case for God?
Will it be well with you when he searches you out?
Or can you deceive him, as one person deceives another?
He will surely rebuke you
if in secret you show partiality. (Job 13:4–10 NRSV)

This all brings to mind some of Richard Dawkins’s comments on “Pascal’s wager.” I haven’t quite gotten up to blogging about this in my serial review of Dawkins’s book The God Delusion, but here are some of his provocative comments:

Pascal’s wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he’d see through the deception. … What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue? … Mightn’t God respect [Bertrand] Russell for his courageous scepticism … far more than he would respect Pascal for his cowardly bet-hedging? And, while we cannot know which way God would jump, we don’t need to know in order to refute Pascal’s Wager. We are talking about a bet, remember, and Pascal wasn’t claiming that his wager enjoyed anything but very long odds. Would you bet on God’s valuing dishonestly faked belief (or even honest belief) over honest scepticism?

Ross’s case is the flip side of Dawkins’s coin. Ross appears to have faked an acceptance of scientific geochronology in order to get his degree, and somehow he thinks that deception is compatible with his fundamentalist Christianity. The aforementioned Larry Moran aptly calls it “lying for Jesus.”

I’ll leave the scientists to talk about the science side of Ross’s story, and instead move on to talk about Ross’s explanation of his use of different “paradigms.” Here’s how the Times reported it:

For him, Dr. Ross said, the methods and theories of paleontology are one “paradigm” for studying the past, and Scripture is another. In the paleontological paradigm, he said, the dates in his dissertation are entirely appropriate. The fact that as a young earth creationist he has a different view just means, he said, “that I am separating the different paradigms.”

He likened his situation to that of a socialist studying economics in a department with a supply-side bent. “People hold all sorts of opinions different from the department in which they graduate,” he said. “What’s that to anybody else?”

Moran (follow the earlier link) has already fisked Ross’s nonsensical talk, and his ill-considered analogies. Instead, let me turn the analogy on its head and test Ross’s talk of “different paradigms” from another angle. Consider an atheist who is interested in biblical studies and decides to get an M.A. or Ph.D. granted by a seminary or church-related institution, perhaps because this atheist considers that institution’s faculty to have fine technical competence in their field. Is there anything deceitful or hypocritical about an atheist getting a degree in biblical studies at a seminary or church-supported university? There is not, as long as the atheist doesn’t pretend to be a believer in order to curry favor with the faculty. There is no inherent deceit or hypocrisy in the concept of an atheist doing biblical scholarship, and in fact I could name several very fine biblical scholars who are not Jewish or Christian believers, nor religious in any particular way.

If it’s not deceitful for an atheist to become a biblical scholar, why should anyone regard it as deceitful for a young-earth creationist to become a paleontologist? There is, of course, the issue of presenting as your own conclusions statements you believe to be false, but that’s already been discussed above. Here I want to point to another important distinction: an atheist who decides to become a biblical scholar will want to be engaged in studying the history of Israelite/Judean or early Christian history, or better yet the history of Israelite, Judean, or early Christian religious ideas, or perhaps that person will want to explore the linguistic, literary, and aesthetic features of the texts, or perhaps that individual is curious about the impact of the Bible on western civilization, and of course these are not the only possible motives. None of these lines of study require assent to the materials being studied or to their conventional theological interpretations. But Ross’s course of study is quite different. He wrote his thesis in the guise of a paleontologist, not as a historian of paleontology; he wrote his thesis in the guise of a scientist, not a philosopher of science. I think this is an important distinction; at the very least, it has been significant in my thinking about these matters.

As a biblical scholar, I’m also put off by Ross’s attempt to present the reading and study of scripture (and not just the study of scripture, but a particularly literalistic style of studying scripture) as a “paradigm” for studying the same past that paleontology studies by gathering physical evidence. The Bible simply is not suited for such a task. The Bible is well suited for the task of studying Israelite/Judean, Jewish, and Christian religious ideas from the Iron Age (how early in the Iron Age is debated) through the second (some would say only first) century CE. Some scholars argue that the Bible is also useful for reconstructing the history of Israel, Judah, the Persian-era Jewish community in Judea, a few slices of Hellenistic diaspora Judaism, and earliest Christianity. If you identify yourself as Jewish or Christian and therefore accept, even in some highly attenuated form, whatever you see as the enduring ideas that come out of the ancient Israelite/Judean, Jewish, and Christian traditions, then you would probably agree that the Bible is well suited for shaping contemporary religious thought and practice. But it is virtually impossible to assert with any degree of intellectual rigor or even exegetical robustness that the primeval narratives of Genesis 1–11, and specifically the short creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2, provide a resource for studying the era of the mososaurs. That’s not what the texts are there for, and that’s not what they’re good for. It’s like saying that stethoscopes and needle-nosed pliers are alternate paradigms for checking someone’s pulse.

As you can tell, I am not impressed with Marcus Ross’s “achievement.” I do not wish to get involved in a debate over whether the University of Rhode Island faculty was “right” or “wrong” to admit Ross in the first place or to award him a Ph.D. on the basis of a disingenuous thesis. My bigger concern is with Ross’s disingenuity itself, for I think such behavior is intellectually dishonest and reflects badly on conservative Christianity.

I haven’t had much time to think, much less blog, in the last week. Nay, the last month. Even though my course load is back to normal, mostly, I’m barely keeping up. My NetNewsWire has 800+ unread messages in the queue. But I have observed that in the last week or two there has been some really good stuff on some of the blogs on my roll. Thank you to all of you who are continuing to write stimulating posts. I hope that I’ll rejoin that number soon … but first I have to write a test for my Wisdom Literature class, another for Religion 101, relearn Spanish, and other such minor tasks.

i’ve been reading some “customer reviews” of books this afternoon, and here are three things that really bug me:

1. When people use “would of” instead of “would have.”
2. When people use “dribble” as a noun instead of “drivel.”
3. When people write “here, here” when they really mean “hear, hear.”

(Groan.)