11 April 2010

As scripture saith ....

'What book in the New Testament?' 'The book of Parables.'
Huh?
And so begins a riff on biblical quotations which succeeds in making one smile by the way that out-of-context phrases can end up saying something different, in effect, to what they seemed to mean in their original context. I'd come across this a number of years ago under the title 'A Southern Baptist Sermon' and I particularly remember this bunch of quotes offering a real feast of humourous intertextuality:
"and he saw Queen Jezebel sitting high up in a window. When she saw him she laughed. And he said, "Throw her down out of there," and they threw her down. And he said, "Throw her down again," and they threw her down seventy times seven times, and of the fragments they then picked up twelve baskets full."
Try to hear it, as I tend to in my mind's ear, with a southern USAmerican accent ...
Interview of Candidate for Church Membership

Of course, anything like this tends to get partially memorised and then embroidered and reconstructed and sometimes even improved. So here, we find another variant, not very different but a few refinements.

1 comment:

Battersea Boy said...

Excellent.

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