Causa Sine Qua Non;

The Cliff's Notes edition was green, not the traditional yellow, but helpful; no more so than the run of the mill, but certainly no less. He regretted that he did not have a learning disability; if he DID, these nuggets of knowledge would not be so easily obtained, and he would be less inclined to forget them. He started taking notes.

The mode of citations among the ecclesiastical scholars was interesting - they all agreed to memorize the Torah, and after that, your specialty was the extra stuff you knew. Jesus and his gang (ecclesia, not militia) had quite a repertoire. It was interesting that they borrowed the Greek club name, but neglected the greatest Governmental invention ever - they must have thought the the natural extremes of Monarchy offer better odds on a long shot than the more moderate Democratic gamble.

In order not to embarrass the Priests, people didn't specify a citation exactly, but rather stipulated "...it is written." After you translate from Hebrew into Greek (Aramaic dialect - they used Coinae for legal stuff,)from Aramaic to Coinae, Coinae to Latin, and Latin to English, it was hard to find the citation from the reference section. He found several "study" editions that had citations in them. Thompson's chain didn't do citations much, but had Mr. Thompson's scripture chains in numbers in the study section. Charlie made a note to try and buy one with wide blank margins for his own notes, good citations and a complete concordance in the back. An exhaustive one was impossible, but if you represented each word once (after throwing out all the thees, thous, ands, if, buts and intos Etc,) it was adequate... as long as you knew ALL the words in the verse you were trying to find.

Charlie branched out. Gideon's was a translation authorized in violation of the Pope by King James I of England. To his surprise this was not the one trying to get a divorce - that was King Henry the Eighth, but James was the guilty party. He dated it to 1604, the early 1600's but academically speaking already the 17th Century. King James failed to predict the future and make it come true BOTH, just like Greek Cassandra, and skipped the CRUCIAL Academic step of translating into Latin first. His pragmatism was well rewarded, and the Authorized Edition is more reprinted than any other.... he did a quick computation in his head and balked at his estimate. What were they doing... eating the things? Oh yes... they burned a bunch in Russia, and had to import all knew copies.

Other translations attempt to use recent jargon and colloquialisms to better catch the meanings of the original. As he delved more deeply into what is called "textual criticism," (that branch of science where Scholars and Archeologists try to certify the authenticity of The Ovid, The Textus Receptus, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Aesop's Fables and similar old texts,) he discovered that before Gutenberg, the job of Scribe was a profession just like Doctor or Lawyer. Their qualifications included taking inventory of the number of lines, the number of words, letters in columns and rows, and finally a count of some kind on the diagonal. In this regard, the Library on the Banks of the Dead Sea was remarkable in one thing - it had ONLY ONE TEXT, but (colloquially speaking) Millions of them!

Figures... paper has ALWAYS been the biggest expense of printing.