September Status

It has been a busy summer, and much has been going on. With this post our old email list has been brought back online, as well as a few new subscribers. This post covers project and personal status.

Blog Status

Since about the start of 2018 I have been collecting email addresses from folks who wanted to be on the new Paleo.In blog/email list.

This Blog post is the first going out to the complete list. If you are receiving this via email, and don't want to be on the list, or are somehow here by accident, please use the links at the bottom of the email to unsubscribe.

This blog is also available via RSS. Visit the website to get setup with RSS instead of email.

For reasons made clear below, I've been very slow getting everything setup and running. I don't expect to be regular with blog posts until later this fall. Please continue to be patient.

There are a couple of earlier posts on the website that were used to test all the new software. There may yet still be bugs, but things seem to be running well enough to go live.

Move Status

As most of you know, we moved from Oklahoma in December of 2017. Delays in closing meant we moved into our new place in Colorado at the start of March, 2018.

The house was (maybe still is?) a serious fixer, needing much rehab. Maybe 1/2 of our time has been working on the house. We should get a working kitchen sink and a working range later this week. We'll finally be able to stop with paper plates and stop cooking in an electric skillet.

We're looking at outside work that needs to be done before snow flies here at 9200 feet in Colorado, so we still have urgent work on the house to do.

Project Status

On May 8 I was helping to move a new, heavy, wood stove into the house. In that process I sprained my right ankle and for several weeks thereafter could do nothing besides stay off my foot -- mostly by sitting at the computer.

The next day the Holy Spirit came down, and for about 6 weeks we made significant progress on finding all the inspired books, and their order. Briefly, there are a bunch of books named in the Bible which do not exist in the Bible. Chronicles and Hebrews being rich sources of missing book names. Why is that?

We think the missing books were composited to form some of the books that survive into our modern printed Bibles. Finding the inspired form requires breaking those books up, and then setting the original names and original book order of those older books.

If you have the TAB installed you can see our current thinking. Lots of good reasons why there should be 75 books, and lots of strange names. I'll be replacing the TAB application soon, so don't worry if you don't have it installed. Instructions on installing the new version will be posted to this list when it is ready.

Mission Status

Each time we have made a major advance in the process of finding the inspired text of the Bible, we have made major advances in our understanding of the problem. This round of breaking out the individual inspired books has changed our high level understanding of the problem. Let me summarize it briefly here.

When we started this work we thought we were out to find the original "autograph" of the Bible. This is a technical term used in various domains that is a theoretical version, unknown from history. The autograph is thought to be the Bible as written by the people originally inspired by the Holy Spirit to write.

Now I would explain it this way. The Bible describes a completely different book, with a completely different name, which was the actual, original, autograph. That book is called "The Testimony of Joshua" or simply "The Testimony."

Moses built a chest to hold "The Testimony" as it existed in his day. In his day The Testimony held the scrolls named in the Bible's book of Hebrews that were later merged and expanded to become Genesis. The Testimony gained scrolls across history, eventually even including an inspired New Testament.

Because of extensive human editing, the Bible itself has no original autograph, but the Testimony is recoverable from the manuscripts of the Bible passed to us by history.

The Testimony was lost, and recovered, at several times in history, usually by pulling a vault copy. The 2 times you might recognize are Hilkiah's remodel of the Temple, when his men found a vault copy, and from the field near Sychar, when it was pulled from the vault again. The Testimony was lost for the last time while Paul was detained by the Romans as a favor to the Judeans at the end of Acts.

There is a huge number of additional references in the Bible that tell a much more robust story than I am covering here. Virtually all significant conflict is between those who held copies of the Testimony, and those who would rewrite it. The villains in this story often won and the Bible is their work.

In our era the recovery of the Testimony will be done mostly by computer. The computer is needed not for algorithmic reasons. The recovery algorithm itself can be taught as a child's game. The computer is needed because of the scale of the problem. 30,000+ badly broken verses must each be played as a game, similar in scale to playing a winning round of Chinese Checkers.

Travel Status

We have been on the road for much of the summer, and still have more travel to come. We've been visiting our long time supporters, giving in-depth, in-person, updates on the project. We have been getting useful feedback, especially feedback around the Testimony as a separate work.

We have a place to do videos so we can record some of that material and put it online for others to think about. I'd hoped to start those videos here in September, but, life is still too crazy to start that now.

Website Status

When I was laid up with a sore foot, I moved most of our websites and webapps to the cloud. The prophetic was clear to do this for needs of future problems of scale. As part of that cloud move, I've been doing cleanup to keep up with current web standards, primarily https instead of http and service workers instead of appcache.

Besides the paleo.in website, I've moved the Calendar and Clock webapps to the cloud. In watching these apps across the summer I've found some lingering, subtle, bugs in their off-line support. Once I've had time to diagnose and fix those off-line problems I will turn my attention to moving the TAB over to the cloud.

When the TAB comes over to the cloud it will be rebranded as The Testimony. This is not a quick piece of work and waits until I'm seated at my desk all day every day later this year.

I've dropped all of our other websites with "Bible" in their name. The Bible Time and Bible Tribes websites being the most important.

Key lessons from these studies undergird the language reconstruction, so the material cannot be left off-line forever. But, they are based on the Bible and not the Testimony. Those Time and Tribes studies will get told in a different way.

We have other webapps in the works, including a massive study guide for the Testimony based on its structure. The Testimony's internal structure is why we are confident in the work we are doing. More on that when we are ready to release.

Thanks

I wanted to end this post with a big Thank You for everyone who has been encouraging us to keep going. You keep our spirits up.