Recently I felt like I was going OUT-OF-MY-MIND trying to find a reference in C.H. Dodd's The Bible and the Greeks [1935] p.117:StephenGoranson wrote: ↑Mon Jun 07, 2021 5:40 amIf imagined--Reminds me of (Nassim Talib, Guardian 26 June 2015):
> “While researching his own PhD, [Umberto] Eco recalls, he got deeply stuck, and one day happened to buy a book by an obscure 19th-century abbot, mainly because he liked the binding. Idly paging through it, he found, in a throwaway line, a stunning idea that led him to a breakthrough. Who’d have predicted it? Except that, years later, when a friend asked to see the passage in question, he climbed a ladder to a high bookshelf, located the book… and the line wasn’t there. Stimulated by the abbot’s words, it seems, he’d come up with it himself. You never know where good ideas will come from, even when they come from you.”
The sudden personification of the Word is surprising. Yet, as we have seen, the idea of a divine word which leaps from heaven and marches upon earth like an armed warrior is natural to a Jewish-Hellenistic thinker at Alexandria.
I knew what that was originally referencing (Wisdom 18:15-16, where the divine word leaps down from heaven as a warrior armed with a sword*), but Dodd's implication was that he'd discussed it earlier in this book. That was omitted! Perhaps the ms. was edited and this was not corrected, but my mind 'filled in the blank' and I could have sworn I'd seen the concept from Wisdom 18:15-6 discussed elsewhere in his text. No dice! Very frustrating & futile search-around.
I wouldn't characterize this as foolishness - I think mental association is a key to humans' success retaining great quantities of information - but this blessing is not a flawless process.
* Wisdom 18:15-16, cited on another thread:
Your all powerful word leaped from the heavens, from the kingly thrones, into the midst of the land that was doomed, a stern warrior carrying the sharp sword of Your authentic command, and stood and filled all things with death, and touched heaven while standing on the earth.