You should see some of the posts he made on YeOldeSodomiteMessageBoard.com back in his youth! 
Apparently sweet calamus was the error in translation to the Greek from hebrew and was actually referring to kaneh-bosem.
Evidently, this has been proven…
I didn’t say it was wrong. What I said was that your links are thoroughly unconvincing evidence, more easily explained as pipe dreams (in a more-classical-than-usual sense) than as grounded in proper scholarship. devilsknew comes closer, though I’d still like to see a peer-reviewed journal citation for his last quote.
KJV uses semicolons at the end of parenthetical comments. This board renders such as smilies.
Let there be leet.
Well, this is the best and most authorative source I have found. I believe it is a convincing argument for the mistranslation of kaneh-bosm. I haven’t been able to find stand alone evidence of The Hebrew University of Israel’s 1980 confirmation of its etymology, however.
Here’s something slightly better… getting warmer.
this is what i thinx too.
Okay. Next we need a biochemist in here to verify that the amount of THC left in oil after steeping cannabis (and, mind you, cannabis before it had been selectively bred within the last century) is (a) sufficient to induce any psychoactive effects and (b) sufficient to be absorbed transdermally.
The other tack is the use as incense, which again we’d need an archaeo-botanist to tell us how strong the smoke would be, and if much of a “contact high” would be expected. Is this something where it just smelled nice but didn’t really mess you up at all?
bzzzzzzt!
It is true that in the Latin Rite the vulgate (i.e. common, referring to the Latin into which Jerome translated the bible) edition was considered the official version of Scripture. However, the Septuagint (2d century B.C.E. translation to Greek) remained the official translation for the Eastern Churches throughout that period. In addition, the Jews continued to use the Hebrew bible throughout their history, never resorting to either the Septuagint nor the vulgate. Therefore, while I cannot declare that no mistranslation is possible, the reason proferred for the purported mistranslation is clearly wrong, casting more than a bit of doubt upon the rest of the claims. To get our bad translation, we must not merely posit that Jerome (or one of his later redactors) messed it up; we must also assume that the original translators of the Septuagint made the same error (or that they made the error that influenced Jerome’s error as with almah/parthenos), but we must also assume that Jewish scholars, scattered across Mesopotamia, Palestine, Egypt, and the European branches of the diaspora, also forgot what their own word meant and decided to accept a meaning taken from the Greek translation.
Do we have any independent verification of the linguistic trail? Do we even have evidence that the citations in that text are to genuine works? (Jurgen has always been my favorite authority for these sorts of discussions.)
There’s an intriguing possibility that we may owe the last 2000 years of Christianity to an irascible gardener.
**Hic est, quem clam discentes subripuerunt, ut surrexisse dicatur, vel hortulanus detraxit, ne lactucae suae frequentia commeantium adlaederentur. **
(This is He whom His disciples secretly stole away, that it might be said He had risen again, or the gardener abstracted, that his lettuces might come to no harm from the crowds of visitants! )
Tertullian, De Spectaculis, XXX
Tertullian is, of course, mocking such stories, put about by the opponents of Christianity. (Another popular canard was that Mary had an affair with a Roman legionary called Panthera and that Jesus was the fruit of this liaison.)
There’s definitely a movie in this somewhere. I see Mel Gibson as the the gardener.
Yea, I’m not holding Stan White’s statement up as proof of anything and I believe he was editorializing with that and making a point in his full context as to the nature of the Church and its habit of withholding or suppressing information that is controversial or otherwise threatens the status quo and its interests.
I do give more creedence to this, though.
[QUOTE=The Apples of Apollo:
Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist Ruck, Carl A. P.; Staples, Blaise Daniel, and Heinrich, Clark. (2001)]
The first solid evidence of the Hebrew use of cannabis was established in 1936 by Sula Menet (Benetowa), a little known Polish etymologist from the Institute of Anthropological Sciences, Warsaw. Cannabis, usually thought to be of Scythian origin, has a much earlier occurrence in Semitic languages and appears several times through out the Old Testament. The word in question is kaneh bosm, which in traditional Hebrew is kannabos or kannabus. Kan means “reed” or “hemp”; and bosm, means “aromatic.” It is now translated as “calamus,” the mistranslation starting as early as the Septuagint. Kaneh bosm occurs also in Song of Songs 4.14, where it grows in an orchard of exotic fruits, herbs, and spices: on the Song of Songs as an ethnobotanical encomium of the entheogen. It occurs also in Isiah 43,24 where Yahweh lists amongst the slights received in sacrifice, the insufficient offerings of kaneh bosm; and Jeremiah 6,20, where Yahweh, displeased with his people, rejects such an offering; and Ezekiel 27.19, where it occurs in a catalogue of the luxurious items in the import trade of Tyre. Benet concludes that these references confirm that hemp was used by the Hebrews as incense and intoxicant. This conclusion has since been affirmed by other scholars. It is ironic that calamus “sweet flag,” the substitute for the alleged cannabis, is itself a known hallucinogen for which TMA-2 is derived. (pages 147 - 149)
[/QUOTE]
It appears from an linguistic viewpoint that the only two possibilities that the translators had was which entheogen this was referring to- the cannaboid, kaneh-bosm or the hallucinogen, kaneh-bosm.
tomndebb quote: “Kaneh bosm was mis-translated after the dark ages, where the Bible was prohibited by the Roman Empire.”
Two points to bear in mind:
- The Bible was never prohibited by the Roman Empire.
- Any plausible reading of “the dark ages” (if the term has any useful historical meaning at all) would put them after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Quoth Mathochist:
At least, the master of the feast was able to judge, but it’s my understanding that he was a high-ranking servant, not one of the partiers. And the practice of serving the good wine first and then the cheap stuff seems to imply at least some impairment of the the drinkers’ ability to discern quality.