“The brethren immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived, they went into the synagogue of the Jews.
Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.
Therefore many of them believed, along with a number of prominent Greek women and men.”
ACTS 17:10-12 (NASB)
A few months ago, I sought to find out how to correctly pronounce the Hebrew name of the God of Abraham — spelled YHWH in English. As it turns out, this is a question that has sparked much debate over the centuries and has produced a great quantity of scholarship and commentary. The short answer, which I’ll describe in fuller detail in my next post, is Yehowah. But here I want to reiterate the importance of careful discernment and verification of information.
As demonstrated in the video embedded in my previous post, regarding the duration of the stay of the sons of Israel in Egypt, it is critical that we don’t take for granted the accuracy of information. Bad information leads to wrong conclusions — or as the computer science adage goes, “garbage in, garbage out”. Luke describes in the above quote, from the book of Acts, that a rigorous verification was the modus operandi of the first-century Berean Jews of Thessalonica. Today, in the Age of Information, we would do well to apply the Berean approach in our examination of Scripture and as we sort through the wealth of related scholarship that is available to us at our fingertips. With so much information to parse, it is tempting to stop digging and yield to conventional wisdom and appeals to authority. But we must be diligent, unafraid to disagree with others and follow where the evidence leads, even when the most compelling conclusions are unpopular.
The reason I want to reiterate the importance of the Berean approach, is because Yehowah is not the most popular answer to the question of the Hebrew pronunciation of YHWH. As I investigated this question, it became clear the great courage it took for researchers to put forth conclusions regarding the pronunciation that differed from the establishment. And I found this demonstration of courage to be remarkable in itself. I think it needs to be highlighted before moving on.
To illustrate what this brave Berean mentality looks like, I will turn to the example of a scientist I read about in my own training, Kary Mullis. He was considered a maverick for his anti-establishment views on the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and its relationship to the disease called acquired immune-deficiency syndrome (AIDS). Mullis had some significant cachet as a researcher, as he was a Nobel laureate for his development of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). He could have chosen to retire comfortably and travel the world giving invited talks to academic institutions about how he invented PCR. But instead he knowingly rocked the boat with his vocal anti-establishment conclusions regarding HIV and AIDS. Unfazed by what must have been enormous peer pressure, he showed great courage and was true to his noble-minded approach and the conclusions it revealed.
What follows is a transcription of Kary Mullis speaking as an invited panel member at a meeting in Santa Monica in July 1997. He describes to his audience how his frustration grew after trying to identify the published study that proved the retrovirus HIV was the cause of AIDS. The backstory is that Mullis had used PCR to test for the presence of HIV in Los Angeles blood banks. And afterwards, while writing up a report of his findings to the NIH, which had granted him $50K for the study, he got stuck at the very beginning of the report. He could not find a reference — a published peer-reviewed study — to support the fundamental claim that HIV is the probable cause of AIDs.
(Below the transcription is an embedded video of the meeting excerpt from which the transcription is derived.)
Kary Mullis: I was writing this little paragraph and I said [to myself], well I’ve gotta explain why we were doing it in the first place. So I said, “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS.” That was my first sentence. Because I thought it was. Because that’s what I’d heard and I hadn’t questioned it. I just heard it. I said [to myself], if all these people think that’s true, there’s probably evidence back there somewhere that suggests it. And so I asked somebody: “What reference, what little work of scientific reporting should I quote, so that somebody interested in finding out why I thought that, could find out himself?”
… Well I didn’t care that much about AIDS to begin with, but I started caring after I realized none of these people [fellow researchers], when asked directly, privately, sweetly, could come up with anything to help me out. And all I wanted to have was one scientific paper to quote that I could say, “This is where I got the concept from, that HIV is the probable cause of AIDS.” And I thought — at that point — that that’s pretty damn significant.
… Not a single one of them can find a quote that I could use in a simple little paper to the NIH — that’s the National Institutes of Health — that said, “The reason you guys sent us fifty-thousand bucks for this project is because HIV is the probable cause of AIDS and it would be a good idea to see if it’s in the blood supply.” Alright? There’s no way to support that statement — no reason to do that work. It was all a waste a time.
… I changed the question after a while because I was getting no luck with: “What should I quote?” I finally said, “When was it that you came to the conclusion?” — because you must be [convinced], because you just gave a talk about AIDS and HIV — “When did you come to the conclusion that HIV was the probable cause of AIDS? Personally. When did you come to the conclusion?” And they would generally allude to some paper or something that they had read or whatever. But no one has ever been able to explain to me anything else than, “I heard it in the New York Times” or “on TV”. Oh, was that fiction or was that fact on TV? It didn’t bother anybody — they didn’t think about it! I don’t know how it is that we all overlook real obvious things like that, but we’ve done it before on this planet. We do it regularly. It’s expected of us to be idiots.”