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This is probably going to have fairly limited appeal, but here's a bit of fun for language nerds! Your assignment is to imagine that a group of people get their first copy of a religion's sacred scripture where something is a bit off.

Some scribe has either miscopied or mistranslated a word or phrase in this copy of the scripture that alters the meaning of a sentence. The locals, not realizing the mistake, take that line and run wild with some wildly different theological interpretation from the mainstream faith leading to a totally new sect or even a whole new religion!

Pick a sentence from Old Testament, New Testament, Quran, etc. The mistake can be miscopying in the same language such as Hebrew, Greek or Arabic, or a mistranslation from one language to another like Greek to Syriac. You should probably have in mind a historical context as well, but it's not necessary.




Here's an example where a mistranslation or bad transcription can occur. In the Ethiopic book of I Enoch 90:37-38:

And I saw till all their generations where transformed, and they all were white bulls; and the first among them was a nagar, the nagar was a great beast and had great black horns on its head.

The word nagar means "word", which doesn't really make sense in context here. What this should probably read is "aurochs", an extinct wild-ox that used to live in the Middle East. The Hebrew word for the aurochs is re'em, which became rema in Aramaic. A Greek scribe probably translated the book from Aramaic and, not knowing what an aurochs was since they were already extinct by that time, simply transliterated Aramaic rema into the Greek rhema. Rhema in Greek means "word", and when it was translated by an Ethiopic scribe from a Greek manuscript, "word" was kept in the new translation.
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