2. NATURAL
The N2LR (Natural language learning redundancy) Method
What's new?
The TENT is not only a new translation of the New Testament, but of the NT Greek itself. This became possible only by a new translation method -- the Natural Language Learning Redundancy Method, or the N2LR (pronounced "Entooler") Method, which, like our whole Information Age, was made possible by the birth of Information Theory, first described mathematically by Claude Shannon in 1948.
Information theory is concerned with how information can be transmitted even in a 'noisy' environment. Digital computation, signaling, codes, media, DNA, brain functioning and, evidently, physics, all on some level might be described by using information theoretic terms. How does information remain accurate when there is a lot of 'noise' interfering with the original transmission? At what point does the information become undecipherable? Are there strategies to prevent loss of coherence in the transmission signal? Information theory has the answers.
"Claude Shannon" - Wikipedia: "This was a new idea. Communication was then thought of as requiring electromagnetic waves to be sent down a wire, as with a dial telephone. The idea that one could transmit pictures, words, sounds etc. by sending a stream of 1s and 0s down a wire, something which today seems so obvious ... was fundamentally new. ... In 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication', which introduced a new meaning for the word "bit", Shannon showed that adding extra bits to a signal allowed transmission errors [noise] to be corrected."
[more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon]
This redundancy, the "extra bits," is the aspect of information theory which is necessary to mitigate errors, and to restore any loss of or change to, the original information in any form of communication, from DNA replication to interplanetary communication to language acquisition itself. Transmission "noise" in the signal can create errors in the message. "Noise" is any change that is not part of the intended message, for instance, static on a phone line, or a mistake in a text, or a mutant gene.
In his book Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life, Jeremy Campbell says this, "Noise always tends to add itself to messages, randomizing and distorting them, making them less reliable. Some way must be found --and nature has evidently succeeded in finding such a way-- whereby this tendency can be resisted, or at least reduced, so that the sequence of symbols sent by the message source reach their destination more or less in the original form. In nearly all forms of communication more messages are sent than are strictly necessary to convey the information intended by the sender. Such additional messages diminish the unexpectedness, the surprise effect, of the information itself, making it more predictable. This extra ration of predictability is called redundancy, and it is one of the most important concepts in information theory."(1)
Redundancy in language resides largely in its grammar, the rules which govern its meaning. And as Campbell notes, "Rules are a form of redundancy..."(2)
Why do we amplify sound waves? Redundancy. Why do we use back-ups? Redundancy. Why do machine language learning and computer vision use recurrent neural networks (RNNs)? Redundancy. Why is reproduction called reproduction? Redundancy. Why does YHWH tell us to remember His words? Redundancy. Why does the Bible have to be so big? Redundancy.
God is not like the castaway who put his message in a bottle and threw it into the sea. He sent, and is sending out, His message by the megaton, using countless "containers" - everything from the myriad forms and forces of nature to every recorded miracle or every truth ever uttered or written about our Creator. Information theory says that the more 'message bottles' that are sent out, the higher the probability becomes of the message being accurately received.
So what?
Doesn't the Creator of all information know how to preserve it? If His Word is inerrant, it is through redundancy. If a translation is accurate, it is through redundancy. Scripture is, always and everywhere, translating Scripture. Redundancy is perhaps a surprising means by which biblical information is accurately received, yet the Apostle Paul describes it well, "...for me to write the same things to you is not tedious, but for you it is safe (TENT-Phil 3:1)." Peter also says, "Therefore, I will not be negligent to remind you always of these things, though you know them and are established in the truth being present (TENT-2 Pet 1:12)."
Redundancy is the idea that has governed my quest to know the accurate message that has been transmitted down the ages in spite of transmission errors accumulating on the way. YHWH watches over His Word to perform it. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. The Word of YHWH stands forever. These truths gave me confidence that the truth of the Scriptures could be seen more clearly in translation if all the accumulated cruft could be undone or gotten rid of, and the original message be restored to accuracy. But how?
I knew the needed redundancy was there in the original languages. It was just a matter of allowing it to do its job in a translation in which every bit of original information was given a voice, and everything else added "for clarity" really did clarify or was eliminated. Yeshua stated in Mt 5:18, "... until whenever earth and sky would pass away, not one dot or one stroke would ever pass from the law, until whenever all things would come to be." I think He was, among other things, indicating that there is nothing superfluous in God's Word, that it is redundant for a reason.
Imagine correctly translating all the NT Greek grammar information found in the Greek text! What would that result in, except the message originally written down and understood two thousand years ago? Was I being naive and idealistic? I took it on faith that YHWH allowed His message to be preserved in an original text large enough to provide the needed redundancy. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was possible to recover a message as pure as any seen since before the very first translation was ever made from the earliest Greek New Testament texts.
You might ask, "Isn't this what bible translators have been doing all this time?" Yes, they have been making new translations for a very long time. But the method is key. The method, until the advent of the internet and digital search, was so laborious that it quickly became the norm to translate from one or more previous translations or lexicons . . . so much easier. And that is partly why many errors that got in or had been put in, stayed in.
Redundancy in language resides largely in its grammar, the rules which govern its meaning. And as Campbell notes, "Rules are a form of redundancy..."(2)
Why do we amplify sound waves? Redundancy. Why do we use back-ups? Redundancy. Why do machine language learning and computer vision use recurrent neural networks (RNNs)? Redundancy. Why is reproduction called reproduction? Redundancy. Why does YHWH tell us to remember His words? Redundancy. Why does the Bible have to be so big? Redundancy.
God is not like the castaway who put his message in a bottle and threw it into the sea. He sent, and is sending out, His message by the megaton, using countless "containers" - everything from the myriad forms and forces of nature to every recorded miracle or every truth ever uttered or written about our Creator. Information theory says that the more 'message bottles' that are sent out, the higher the probability becomes of the message being accurately received.
So what?
Doesn't the Creator of all information know how to preserve it? If His Word is inerrant, it is through redundancy. If a translation is accurate, it is through redundancy. Scripture is, always and everywhere, translating Scripture. Redundancy is perhaps a surprising means by which biblical information is accurately received, yet the Apostle Paul describes it well, "...for me to write the same things to you is not tedious, but for you it is safe (TENT-Phil 3:1)." Peter also says, "Therefore, I will not be negligent to remind you always of these things, though you know them and are established in the truth being present (TENT-2 Pet 1:12)."
Redundancy is the idea that has governed my quest to know the accurate message that has been transmitted down the ages in spite of transmission errors accumulating on the way. YHWH watches over His Word to perform it. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. The Word of YHWH stands forever. These truths gave me confidence that the truth of the Scriptures could be seen more clearly in translation if all the accumulated cruft could be undone or gotten rid of, and the original message be restored to accuracy. But how?
I knew the needed redundancy was there in the original languages. It was just a matter of allowing it to do its job in a translation in which every bit of original information was given a voice, and everything else added "for clarity" really did clarify or was eliminated. Yeshua stated in Mt 5:18, "... until whenever earth and sky would pass away, not one dot or one stroke would ever pass from the law, until whenever all things would come to be." I think He was, among other things, indicating that there is nothing superfluous in God's Word, that it is redundant for a reason.
Imagine correctly translating all the NT Greek grammar information found in the Greek text! What would that result in, except the message originally written down and understood two thousand years ago? Was I being naive and idealistic? I took it on faith that YHWH allowed His message to be preserved in an original text large enough to provide the needed redundancy. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was possible to recover a message as pure as any seen since before the very first translation was ever made from the earliest Greek New Testament texts.
You might ask, "Isn't this what bible translators have been doing all this time?" Yes, they have been making new translations for a very long time. But the method is key. The method, until the advent of the internet and digital search, was so laborious that it quickly became the norm to translate from one or more previous translations or lexicons . . . so much easier. And that is partly why many errors that got in or had been put in, stayed in.
In the last hundred years biblical archaeology has come into its own and that includes the study of old texts and fragments of texts. We have learned much from these. Yes, now we have new translations which incorporate the latest findings, but the new translations still seem to be translating those more ancient "traditional" errors in the same traditional way. What is needed is a better translation method, one which gets to the root of the problem.
Redundancy!
Such a new method must take advantage of all the redundancy available, not only in the original text, but of outside influences as well. There are various kinds of redundancy. All of them help to understand any message. In Teaching Writing as a Second Language, Alice Horning says, "Redundancy's importance in all aspects of language acquisition emerges clearly from a detailed definition of the term. One analysis ...divides redundancy into syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic types....syntactic redundancy is the overlap of information that derives from grammatical forms, endings, or markers providing the same information in several different places within a sentence..." (3)
Syntactic Redundancy
The method which developed, as I began taking forward steps, allowed me to learn the needed syntactic information in New Testament Greek almost like a child. A child learns language by comparing contexts, and thereby refining meanings. I certainly was a child when it came to Greek. It is an interesting fact that in rare historically recorded instances, a "feral child", one who grew up in the wild and never learned human language, could learn some vocabulary. But after an ill-defined time between puberty and adulthood, such a language-less person was not able to learn grammar. I was amazed when I realized that before adulthood I had already learned a grammatically case-based language --five years of German. That was a huge help, since Greek is also a case-based language. That quickly put me on the road to learning Greek grammar and syntax, allowing me to access and understand much syntactic redundancy.
Semantic Redundancy
Horning says, "...semantic redundancy is information overlap in the substance of a text, rather than its grammatical form ."
Nothing opened up to me the value of what was happening in my experiment more than the discovery of Greek compounds. As the translated word list became longer and longer, I had to move it to a database, and as the database became more populous, I began to notice the incredible semantic connections among the compound words. Thank God that Strong’s NT concordance is 'strong' on etymology!
Strong traced every Greek word used in the NT to its origin whenever possible. The meanings I saw emerging in compounds were often verified by the meanings of their constituent words. This enabled the creation of a new kind of search capability, which I labeled “Semantic Search.” Digitally searching for a Greek word's Strong's number in The TENT Lexicon will also find all the NT Greek compounds which use that same word. This connectivity was very valuable in refining meanings.
Another aspect of the N2LR method was that strict attention to all the grammar of a single word and translating it accurately in each occurrence enabled the resulting translation to achieve a clarity and transparency that I had never seen before in any version. The original beauty of an accurately translated Greek scripture was a humbling thing to see, because in it I saw YHWH our Restorer.
Pragmatic Redundancy
Pragmatic redundancy, the third type of redundancy in language acquisition, overlaps the information in the message itself with information the receiver (reader/hearer) brings to it. Alice Horning describes it this way, "The reader's prior knowledge of the information in the text is considered crucial in getting meaning from the printed page. Prior knowledge, or pragmatic redundancy, is the force of all experience that the receiver of a message has had, both real and vicarious, and both linguistic and substantive (that is, experience with language and experience with the way the real world functions)." (4)
So what pragmatic redundancy resources lay within my experience to help my translating efforts? What life experiences counted most toward this? Here's my walk down Pragmatic Redundancy Lane. My first eighteen years I lived in a Mediterranean climate of hot dry summers and not-too-cold foggy winters. There were palm trees. We got snow once. My hometown was diverse and multi-lingual; we had whole communities of descendants of Hispanic, Black, Chinese, Armenian (from the time of the genocide) and European immigrants. . . well, if you are interested in a longish mini-bio, go to Pragmatic Redundancy Lane. If not, just continue here.
What this meant for pragmatic redundancy is that I have spent forty years helping my husband in various leadership positions in Spirit-filled, Bible-reading, mostly Messianic Jewish environments in which a focus on both OT and NT and prayer was never lacking, along with decades of hands-on experience celebrating all the "Feasts of YHWH;" since 1989 living in Jerusalem (weather, flora, fauna so similar to my hometown! ); studying language acquisition by children first hand for forty years, mostly as a nursery coordinator for two congregations over a twenty year period including homeschooling for eight years; continuously educating myself about the world of hi-tech/science/cosmology/consciousness/AI and Judeo-Christian history --all of that was pragmatic redundancy! But I never could have imagined where it was all going. As it turned out after beginning this project, I was thrilled to keep discovering that many of my major life experiences were going to be very helpful indeed, to a point where I thought that this experiment with a new translation method might actually be possible.
Of course daily reading the Bible was giving me a good working knowledge of the text, but what I really found exciting was doing contextual biblical word studies. This is the experience which gave me the second type of redundancy, semantic redundancy. I wanted to know how accurate versions were, and why there were problems with certain verses. I soon found out there were many problems with translations, from version to version. Collecting enough information, I began to note discrepancies, misrepresentations, and it became frustrating. Not that YHWH wasn't using His Word to speak truth in every version; He can speak through a donkey, can't He? But I was not happy about not knowing in my mother tongue what the Greek actually said. My overwhelming desire was to see the truth as clearly as possible in English.
I had been a believer about five years, immersing myself in God's Word, when I read Grammatical Man by Jeremy Campbell, and suddenly I understood that there was a connection between information theory and God's Word. God created and holds all things together by the word of His power. If information theory applied to God's Word, then I knew where to begin to find the information I was looking for.
So, where to start and first steps? Information theory told me that words of most occurrence in the text would have the highest probability of already being correctly translated. But this needed to be checked, since many frequently used NT words have been translated with too many different English words. The parsings of each occurrence needed to be checked. How could I possibly do this for every Greek word in the NT?
I prayed to know how it could be done. It certainly could not be done by committee, because early on I ascertained that for this translation method to work, one corpus of text or speech must be linked to one human brain in both digital and semantic ways, akin to a child learning language though both auditory and contextual means. I think it is something like Steve Jobs was trying to articulate when he said in a 1980 talk, “There’s something very special and very historically different that takes place when you have one computer and one person — very different than if you have 10 people and one computer.” Which is not to say I think that other people cannot help with a translation according to this method, only that there must be one human consciousness on intimate terms with the whole text.
The parsings were the real guides to knowing if the word had been accurately translated in each of its occurrences. Of course, I had to take into account that each Greek word probably had more than one meaning - literal, figurative, idiomatic, Hebraic meanings were all possibilities for many Greek words, along with possible extra middle and passive meanings for verbs. But it wasn't too difficult to cull unnecessary meanings in the lexicon definitions, especially since secondary meanings were generally accompanied by grammatical indicators.
Green light!
All that was not enough, though. I still needed the Lord's "go ahead." The green light turned out to be a dream, what The TENT Lexicon calls a "guiding dream" (Strong's #NT3677). Many years previously, I had written down a dream, not knowing what it meant at the time. Being a pack-rat, I kept it. Then, quite a few years later, when I was ready to seriously ask the Lord Yeshua if He wanted me to begin this project, He answered before I called. I suddenly remembered the dream and at that instant I understood it. This floored me.
I had dreamed that in my childhood's backyard I had found on a white table-clothed table under one of our two sycamore trees, an intricately and beautifully decorated plate about 35 cm. in diameter. But the plate had been broken into countless pieces and glued back together in a terrible looking way, with fissures and gaps and rough edges sticking out. Looking at it, I was appalled. Immediately I knew that I had to re-break it (I know it sounds stupid) and put it back together the right way. I woke up and began to write down this dream, not because I wrote down my dreams, but because it was that kind of dream, one you know you need to remember.
At the very point I needed to remember it, I remembered it. I asked,"Lord, what should I do?" I wasn't journaling so it could have been moments or days later that I realized I needed to make a new lexicon. Then information theory kicked in. Ok, I thought, I need to translate each biblical Greek word so that it makes sense in all its grammatical forms and in all of its scriptural contexts. But what if it only occurs once in the NT? How do I know I have the right meaning? Then the redundancy LED came on. I had to translate the words in the order of how many times they occur in the NT, tackling the "biggest" ones first then working my way down. The multitude of contexts for a word occurring thousands of times would enable me to pinpoint its meaning(s). And the great number of times they occurred would then increase the probability of accurately translating, eventually, the words surrounding them in each of their own contexts.
So I began, and all along, the Lord was my help, encourager and problem solver. He suggested that I start inserting each newly translated word into all of its occurrences in a NT template having Strong's and Tense-Voice-Mood numbers, using a global search and replace function. I was on my way, or was I? It was scary and I still had doubts, until one day I determined that I should "set out a fleece" like Gideon did. Let's see, I thought, what would be a good fleece? Gathering my courage, I asked the Lord that if I was supposed to do this, that He would let me find something new and encouraging in the very first verse of the New Testament. To see if He did, click the link box below to "First Miracle of the Fleece" .
__________________________________
1. Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life, Jeremy Campbell, Simon & Schuster Inc., 1982, p. 68
2. ibid., p. 69
3. Teaching Writing as a Second Language by Alice S. Horning (partly funded by the Conference on College Composition and Communication of the National Council of Teachers of English), SIU Press, 1987 , pp.17-18
4. ibid., p.19
Redundancy!
Such a new method must take advantage of all the redundancy available, not only in the original text, but of outside influences as well. There are various kinds of redundancy. All of them help to understand any message. In Teaching Writing as a Second Language, Alice Horning says, "Redundancy's importance in all aspects of language acquisition emerges clearly from a detailed definition of the term. One analysis ...divides redundancy into syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic types....syntactic redundancy is the overlap of information that derives from grammatical forms, endings, or markers providing the same information in several different places within a sentence..." (3)
Syntactic Redundancy
The method which developed, as I began taking forward steps, allowed me to learn the needed syntactic information in New Testament Greek almost like a child. A child learns language by comparing contexts, and thereby refining meanings. I certainly was a child when it came to Greek. It is an interesting fact that in rare historically recorded instances, a "feral child", one who grew up in the wild and never learned human language, could learn some vocabulary. But after an ill-defined time between puberty and adulthood, such a language-less person was not able to learn grammar. I was amazed when I realized that before adulthood I had already learned a grammatically case-based language --five years of German. That was a huge help, since Greek is also a case-based language. That quickly put me on the road to learning Greek grammar and syntax, allowing me to access and understand much syntactic redundancy.
Semantic Redundancy
Horning says, "...semantic redundancy is information overlap in the substance of a text, rather than its grammatical form ."
Nothing opened up to me the value of what was happening in my experiment more than the discovery of Greek compounds. As the translated word list became longer and longer, I had to move it to a database, and as the database became more populous, I began to notice the incredible semantic connections among the compound words. Thank God that Strong’s NT concordance is 'strong' on etymology!
Strong traced every Greek word used in the NT to its origin whenever possible. The meanings I saw emerging in compounds were often verified by the meanings of their constituent words. This enabled the creation of a new kind of search capability, which I labeled “Semantic Search.” Digitally searching for a Greek word's Strong's number in The TENT Lexicon will also find all the NT Greek compounds which use that same word. This connectivity was very valuable in refining meanings.
Another aspect of the N2LR method was that strict attention to all the grammar of a single word and translating it accurately in each occurrence enabled the resulting translation to achieve a clarity and transparency that I had never seen before in any version. The original beauty of an accurately translated Greek scripture was a humbling thing to see, because in it I saw YHWH our Restorer.
Pragmatic Redundancy
Pragmatic redundancy, the third type of redundancy in language acquisition, overlaps the information in the message itself with information the receiver (reader/hearer) brings to it. Alice Horning describes it this way, "The reader's prior knowledge of the information in the text is considered crucial in getting meaning from the printed page. Prior knowledge, or pragmatic redundancy, is the force of all experience that the receiver of a message has had, both real and vicarious, and both linguistic and substantive (that is, experience with language and experience with the way the real world functions)." (4)
So what pragmatic redundancy resources lay within my experience to help my translating efforts? What life experiences counted most toward this? Here's my walk down Pragmatic Redundancy Lane. My first eighteen years I lived in a Mediterranean climate of hot dry summers and not-too-cold foggy winters. There were palm trees. We got snow once. My hometown was diverse and multi-lingual; we had whole communities of descendants of Hispanic, Black, Chinese, Armenian (from the time of the genocide) and European immigrants. . . well, if you are interested in a longish mini-bio, go to Pragmatic Redundancy Lane. If not, just continue here.
What this meant for pragmatic redundancy is that I have spent forty years helping my husband in various leadership positions in Spirit-filled, Bible-reading, mostly Messianic Jewish environments in which a focus on both OT and NT and prayer was never lacking, along with decades of hands-on experience celebrating all the "Feasts of YHWH;" since 1989 living in Jerusalem (weather, flora, fauna so similar to my hometown! ); studying language acquisition by children first hand for forty years, mostly as a nursery coordinator for two congregations over a twenty year period including homeschooling for eight years; continuously educating myself about the world of hi-tech/science/cosmology/consciousness/AI and Judeo-Christian history --all of that was pragmatic redundancy! But I never could have imagined where it was all going. As it turned out after beginning this project, I was thrilled to keep discovering that many of my major life experiences were going to be very helpful indeed, to a point where I thought that this experiment with a new translation method might actually be possible.
Of course daily reading the Bible was giving me a good working knowledge of the text, but what I really found exciting was doing contextual biblical word studies. This is the experience which gave me the second type of redundancy, semantic redundancy. I wanted to know how accurate versions were, and why there were problems with certain verses. I soon found out there were many problems with translations, from version to version. Collecting enough information, I began to note discrepancies, misrepresentations, and it became frustrating. Not that YHWH wasn't using His Word to speak truth in every version; He can speak through a donkey, can't He? But I was not happy about not knowing in my mother tongue what the Greek actually said. My overwhelming desire was to see the truth as clearly as possible in English.
I had been a believer about five years, immersing myself in God's Word, when I read Grammatical Man by Jeremy Campbell, and suddenly I understood that there was a connection between information theory and God's Word. God created and holds all things together by the word of His power. If information theory applied to God's Word, then I knew where to begin to find the information I was looking for.
So, where to start and first steps? Information theory told me that words of most occurrence in the text would have the highest probability of already being correctly translated. But this needed to be checked, since many frequently used NT words have been translated with too many different English words. The parsings of each occurrence needed to be checked. How could I possibly do this for every Greek word in the NT?
I prayed to know how it could be done. It certainly could not be done by committee, because early on I ascertained that for this translation method to work, one corpus of text or speech must be linked to one human brain in both digital and semantic ways, akin to a child learning language though both auditory and contextual means. I think it is something like Steve Jobs was trying to articulate when he said in a 1980 talk, “There’s something very special and very historically different that takes place when you have one computer and one person — very different than if you have 10 people and one computer.” Which is not to say I think that other people cannot help with a translation according to this method, only that there must be one human consciousness on intimate terms with the whole text.
The parsings were the real guides to knowing if the word had been accurately translated in each of its occurrences. Of course, I had to take into account that each Greek word probably had more than one meaning - literal, figurative, idiomatic, Hebraic meanings were all possibilities for many Greek words, along with possible extra middle and passive meanings for verbs. But it wasn't too difficult to cull unnecessary meanings in the lexicon definitions, especially since secondary meanings were generally accompanied by grammatical indicators.
Green light!
All that was not enough, though. I still needed the Lord's "go ahead." The green light turned out to be a dream, what The TENT Lexicon calls a "guiding dream" (Strong's #NT3677). Many years previously, I had written down a dream, not knowing what it meant at the time. Being a pack-rat, I kept it. Then, quite a few years later, when I was ready to seriously ask the Lord Yeshua if He wanted me to begin this project, He answered before I called. I suddenly remembered the dream and at that instant I understood it. This floored me.
I had dreamed that in my childhood's backyard I had found on a white table-clothed table under one of our two sycamore trees, an intricately and beautifully decorated plate about 35 cm. in diameter. But the plate had been broken into countless pieces and glued back together in a terrible looking way, with fissures and gaps and rough edges sticking out. Looking at it, I was appalled. Immediately I knew that I had to re-break it (I know it sounds stupid) and put it back together the right way. I woke up and began to write down this dream, not because I wrote down my dreams, but because it was that kind of dream, one you know you need to remember.
At the very point I needed to remember it, I remembered it. I asked,"Lord, what should I do?" I wasn't journaling so it could have been moments or days later that I realized I needed to make a new lexicon. Then information theory kicked in. Ok, I thought, I need to translate each biblical Greek word so that it makes sense in all its grammatical forms and in all of its scriptural contexts. But what if it only occurs once in the NT? How do I know I have the right meaning? Then the redundancy LED came on. I had to translate the words in the order of how many times they occur in the NT, tackling the "biggest" ones first then working my way down. The multitude of contexts for a word occurring thousands of times would enable me to pinpoint its meaning(s). And the great number of times they occurred would then increase the probability of accurately translating, eventually, the words surrounding them in each of their own contexts.
So I began, and all along, the Lord was my help, encourager and problem solver. He suggested that I start inserting each newly translated word into all of its occurrences in a NT template having Strong's and Tense-Voice-Mood numbers, using a global search and replace function. I was on my way, or was I? It was scary and I still had doubts, until one day I determined that I should "set out a fleece" like Gideon did. Let's see, I thought, what would be a good fleece? Gathering my courage, I asked the Lord that if I was supposed to do this, that He would let me find something new and encouraging in the very first verse of the New Testament. To see if He did, click the link box below to "First Miracle of the Fleece" .
__________________________________
1. Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life, Jeremy Campbell, Simon & Schuster Inc., 1982, p. 68
2. ibid., p. 69
3. Teaching Writing as a Second Language by Alice S. Horning (partly funded by the Conference on College Composition and Communication of the National Council of Teachers of English), SIU Press, 1987 , pp.17-18
4. ibid., p.19