(H.T. Kim Riddlebarger)
A young monk (brother Joseph) arrives at the monastery. Excited about his new call, he is soon assigned a painstaking but important task–helping a group of monks copy volumes of canon law.
However, brother Joseph soon notices that the monks are copying from copies of canon law, they are not consulting the original manuscript.
So, brother Joseph sheepishly summons up the courage to go to the head abbot to question this method. If someone made even the smallest error in an earlier copy, it would never be caught and corrected by those making copies of a copy! In fact, that error would be continued in all of the subsequent copies.
The abbot replied to Joseph’s query, “We have been copying from the copies for centuries, but you make a good point, my son.”
So the abbot hurried off down into the dark archives underneath the monastery where the original manuscripts of canon law were held in a locked vault that hadn’t been opened for hundreds of years.
Hours go by and nobody sees the abbot . . . So, brother Joseph gets quite worried about the old man and goes down to look for him.
In the dim light, Joseph sees the abbot banging his head against the wall and wailing in a broken and cracking voice, “We missed the R! We missed the R! We missed the R!” The abbot’s forehead was bloody and bruised and he was crying uncontrollably.
Brother Joseph rushes to his side and asks him, “What’s wrong, father?”
Barely able to utter the words, the old abbot replied, “The word was . . . “CELEBRATE!!!”
Oh, man! I’ve only heard it told with a Pope dying and going to heaven, and wanting to read the original Bible. Of course, that would always afford me the opportunity to point out two outrageously unbelievable things about that joke: a) a Pope who doesn’t know how to spell (“celebate”?!) and b) a Pope who dies and goes to heaven. Har har.
I kid, I kid. For the most part.
But in any case, this is clearly a more theologically sophisticated telling of the joke!
Great stuff. I’m surprised this one hasn’t made it into all the Intro to Textual Criticism lectures.