A Voice From The Sky

We are making various changes to the text based on using our new markup tools. This blog looks at a king list from Hebrews and then the famous voice from the skies at the Baptism. This blog ends with the history of our build environment, programming language choices and current status.

Lists

If you have been following along with our recent work you know we have added markup to the text so Ryan can annotate lists of things. As with virtually all markup in our texts, these various annotations must be enabled in the top right menu of the apps in order to see them. They can become overwhelming, so they are not visible by default.

As I have already explained in previous blogs, the length of various lists indicates where to look for back stories.

The longest lists appears to be lists that call out the kings. These are the people who wrote the text. Each appears to have various attributes that we are to learn from in various ways. They now occupy seats in the throne room.

A previous blog looked at 2 Corinthians 6, which Ryan has now marked up to include links to the specific back stories for the kings listed there. So you can go there if you want to see how this is growing.

Ryan has now gone on to the king list in the Book of Hebrews.

Hebrews (tt.paleo.in)

The link here is to Hebrews in the TT app. Because of this week's work Ryan has moved Hebrews back to the end of the TT.

I am giving the link into the TT because Hebrews in stock Bibles appears to be heavily edited by Ananias. The problem for Ananias with all of these lists is that these kings come and go from earth. The earth centered view of the edited OT is broken by their testimony and their interaction with people in the world. So Ananias must mess with text about them. So king lists are high ground for Ananias era insertions to the inspired text. Hebrews is perhaps the worst in this regard.

In the TT what you will see is the content from the Book of Hebrews passed to us by history, less what we currently think is Ananias' additions.

The Book of Hebrews has an overall design that runs the 25 kings, in order.

What Ryan has done this week is to give those kings the list markup. As per feedback from readers here, he is starting to include the king's name ahead of the numeric reference in the list medallion. This makes it much easier for most readers who, unlike Ryan, do not have the list memorized.

Ryan has also gone through and added quote links to the back story that is being referenced for each king in Hebrews itself. So as you read through the list in Hebrews you can also chase down the long form historical story.

Joshua 25|25

At the bottom of the list in Hebrews you will see Joshua himself listed as the 25th king. This is no surprise. But the surprise is what Hebrews lists for him. This is where he says, "As I have written you briefly."

In normal Christian circles there is great debate about who wrote Hebrews. It does not name the author. Often, Paul is thought to be the author. But this is disputed, as is almost everything in the NT.

Once you see the king list at work across the book, then you can see that the last king is writing the NT and specifically is likely signing the Book of Hebrews. This means that Joshua himself wrote that book. Presumably written earlier so as to be included in the NT canon at some point after his ascension.

This also means that in the NT set of writings Hebrews wants to be the last writing. We have had Hebrews at the back of the TT in the past, and it is now back at the end.

So this writing probably follows the tail of the inspired form of the Book of Revelation. It means the entire text of the Testimony of Joshua is but a brief writing, of which there may be more.

Using Back Stories

As users of the scripture apps we may think of these back story links as just a cool feature of the app. Indeed they are. They allow anyone who cares to go see the evidence behind the point the text is making.

From the perspective of our general work of finding and recovering the inspired manuscript itself, these links serve a very important but different purpose. These links are pointing at stories that themselves must be inspired.

Of course the referenced stories may have been edited too. But these references demand that those back stories have something inspired within them. This has given Ryan another reference system for figuring out what must be inspired. This is a very unexpected consequence of the new list markup system.

So Ryan is finding more stories that need to be in the TT. Hopefully, the various empty story headings in the TT can be filled in using clues like these lists are finding.

The other new set of tooling that Ryan is using to good effect is the harmony app. Using that tool he can compare and contrast the various versions of stories in the text in order to reason about which version is likely to be inspired.

So when Ryan is including stories in the TT he now has the tools to figure out which is likely the inspired form. One of the stories that he has recently returned to the TT text is the account of the voice from the skies that speaks over Joshua at the baptism.

To start this out, we need to look at Peter's reference to when he heard a voice from the skies. Here is the link into the BRB. Beware, he is talking about 2 different accounts, the voice at the baptism and the voice at the mount of transfiguration.

2 Peter 1:17 (BRB)

If you turn on filters, and all types of quote links, you can see that Peter is referencing the story of Joshua's baptism when a voice spoke from the skies. You will see if you chase the links, that event is reported in Matthew, Mark and Luke.

As background, for a long time, we thought this voice speaking story was not inspired at all. The reason is because Joshua is god. Trinitarianism is a creation of Ananias. Ananias made Joshua a son of the false Jewish god Yahweh. So we accepted what we were taught in church, that god the father, Yahweh, was speaking at that point.

So at first glance, this appears to be an Ananias edit where that god is speaking over Joshua. Thus that voice is not inspired.

OK, so we have had that voice marked out by filters for many years. We have changed our mind on this. Let me explain.

The 25 heavenly kings are walk offs. They were here on earth before they they were taken. They are mostly out of 1 family line. (Perhaps they are all out of 1 family line. This is likely, but we cannot yet prove the whole set.) For at least most of those writers they are sons of earlier writers.

So the insight that caused us to bring this story back is that someone in Joshua's own family line could have said this over Joshua. Joshua was that ancestor's actual earthly son born perhaps 1000+ years after that king walked off earth.

This is mind blowing because we do not normally think of tracking our own offspring over such great time frames. Those walk off kings had a different perspective. They could have been tracking their sons who are still on earth. Maybe even to our day.

This mind blowing idea appears to be the purpose of why that voice spoke. Joshua had ancestors who were in the skies and able to speak from there. Of course they are still there. They can still come to earth. They can still speak. Joshua is in their lineage.

Which Account Is Inspired?

So if you track down the story in the link above in the BRB, you will find quote links off to the Matthew, Mark and Luke versions of the voice at the baptism. Those links go to Matthew 3:13-17, Mark 1:9-11 and Luke 3:21-22.

Only 1 of those versions is going to be inspired. Ananias was playing a shell game by copying the inspired stories and then making changes.

If you want to try this yourself, stop here and go look at the links and try and pick out the inspired version. We will wait for you to return below.

Peter's Calling

The story about the voice from the skies appears to be Peter's personal witness to what he heard. When they replaced Judas early in Acts they needed someone who was a witness to events from that Baptism forward.

Peter, by giving this account, is demonstrating that he was there and heard the voice. He also retells the voice on the mountain. The baptism was not the only time Peter heard a voice from the skies. It was probably life changing and important for him to tell us. In the days before electronic public address systems this would have been stunning.

So if a gospel account places Peter's calling after that voice at the baptism, then it creates more disputable points that belie an editor's hand. The Matthew account has that problem later on related to this point.

OK, the time to try this on your own is now up.

Mark's Version

In Mark the voice says, "You are my beloved son, with you I am pleased."

Luke's Version

In Luke the voice says the same, "You are my beloved son, with you I am pleased."

Matthew's Version

In Matthew the voice says, "This is my beloved son with whom I am pleased."

Matthew is not quite the same as Mark and Luke. If we use consensus and vote, then Mark and Luke are in agreement and we would think they must be correct. This is still the modern way the heirs of the editors move crowds, they flood media channels with false statements to bury the real story. 'Flooding' is the keyword we use to describe this pattern in headline news. We first learned this strategy from a book called, 'The Protocols of Zion.' Ananias was using flooding to obscure the account of what that voice said from the skies. It must have bothered him in some way.

Peter's Version

In 2 Peter, we are told the voice said, "This is my beloved son, with whom I am pleased."

Now it is 2 against 2, so it is harder for some readers to decide which version is inspired. Peter's account was harder to flood. The creation of independent parallel gospel accounts is what made flooding much easier for Ananias to hide the inspired account. So with 2 Peter his version now weighs more heavily as the inspired form. But, there is another way to look at the baptism voice stories and pick out the inspired form.

So which Gospel Account Is Inspired?

The difference between these 3 baptism voice witnesses is the intended audience for the voice. Matthew (attested by Peter) is indicating that the voice is speaking to the crowds. How? By leading with the word 'this'. Luke and Mark indicate the voice was speaking to Joshua directly. How? By leading with the word 'you.'

Why would a voice from the skies need to speak to Joshua directly? That would normally happen in some sort of private setting. The voice from the skies is speaking publicly from the skies because there is a public audience.

But, only in Matthew's account does that voice speak to the whole audience. In Mark and Luke the crowd is listening in on a private message. So Matthew's account is internally consistent, while Mark and Luke are not.

So of these 3 primary accounts of the voice at the baptism, only Matthew's is likely to be inspired.

If you go chase this down to the various stories of the mount of transfiguration, see Matthew 17:5, Mark 9:7 and Luke 9:35, you will see that in all 3 of those the voice from the skies is speaking to the crowd. So this argument cannot be used to pick out the inspired form of the transfiguration stories.

Which King?

What, exactly, was said probably indicates which exact walk-off king is likely speaking. The king who has a story of a promised son was Abraham. He had to wait into his old age before Isaac was born. Abraham had trouble with his 2 sons. Which was pleasing? At first he defended Ishmael.

Abraham's struggle over sons appears to be a parable of waiting for Joshua himself. About being patient for promises of all types to fulfill. Abraham had to wait a long time after the promise about Isaac was given. He had to wait over 1500 years for the better promised son, Joshua himself.

Status

There are various regressions related to the new tag system used in the scripture apps. These are mostly related to how indexes are built and used. The most efficient work path for me is to rewrite the underlying code that drives the build process used for all of our apps and websites.

With that rewrite, I will be able to remove the remaining duplicate code spread across our various apps. So going forward I will only ever need to debug 1 piece of code, not the various evil twins created in a rush to get something out.

This rewrite will also provide a way to do much better auditing of the text and indexing of all manner of things like cross references.

I am deep into that rewrite this week. There is maybe another week or 2 before I can return to finish the work in the scripture apps.

The 3d models for the Ezekiel's Bones website are also waiting for this build environment rewrite. I need to test print everything using the exact deployed 3d model files.

It is not good enough to test print from some point earlier in the design/build process. There is no efficient way to do test prints now. When the build process is under better control this should be easy to do.

Warning: Geek Speak Begins Here

You non-geek types can safely scroll down to "Geek Speak Ends here."

Tech Details

For those who care, the build environment goes back to the days of server side page rendering in PHP. PHP has always been a disaster language. Our server was hacked at some point by someone going in through the php language engine itself. (I suspect at least 2 times, though I do not know for sure.)

I knew I needed to get off that system once I understood php security risks on public facing servers. The php code was ported to Python 2 and shifted off the server to offline computers in the office. The web server from that point to this day only holds read-only data files. Little to nothing else resides there, aside from feedback handling and chat in the classroom.

Php mixes html and php language in the source files. That is a conceptual mess too. Anyone writing in html needs to learn 2 languages. Fine for programmers, but not all of our Philologists are programmers.

The mixing of 2 languages in html pages also came to an end with Python. Python, instead, could just scan for special html tags that got replaced. It was a good theoretical start.

By 2008, Python 3 was released. This was a different language than Python 2. Code written in Python 2 would not run unmodified in Python 3. So all libraries and tools across the industry had to be rewritten, a process expected at the time to take many years, which in the end it did. Some Python libraries took the change in Python 3 to not just port, but to rewrite at the same time.

This meant that even if you rewrote code from Python 2 to Python 3 there was little chance it could run. The second round of timeline apps got caught in that mess.

Prophetic dreams were clear to get into 1 programming language. Since Javascript is the only language for use in browsers, that meant moving Python build tools to Javascript. Javascript became the only interesting language in our set of programming tools.

So the python code for html parsing was mechanically ported to Javascript using some conversion tool. I do not remember the name. It became independent apps that ran under a popular Javascript build tool named gulp. Gulp was slow, but worked. Though popular, Gulp was a mess of a tool. It seemed to have been designed by someone unskilled in using Javascript itself. In frustration, I later switched to an ancient build tool named make. This was way better than gulp in many ways, but still fairly slow.

To boost the speed of website builds, the independent apps were then merged into 1 standalone program. This is where it stands right now. Our build process works but, it is a massive kludge.

My Rewrite Goal

My skill at writing high speed, high quality, Javascript has changed over the years. The genome work, especially, forced me to think about speed. Javascript can be very, very fast, but it is tricky to use it well.

Good Javascript uses callbacks and closures extensively. At least in my day, these techniques were not taught in school.

The rewrite I am working on now, in terms of lines of code, is maybe 10 percent of the size of the old version. I am dropping everything that is not now regularly used in our current apps and websites. There is a lot of cruft that is going away.

The same design tricks I used for the new scripture markup code will work for html pages too. I can see in the early code running this week that it will be screaming fast. It will also be completely modular, important for the variety of build problems still to be solved.

Geek Speak Ends here

The headline stream of war news is lightening up. Trust this will be true for many more months. We can go back to regular work, but we need to keep an ear out for trouble in the distance.

More Later,

Phil