It sounds like it has something to do with religion and sci-fi, but it doesn’t.
Today the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog highlighted the indeed very useful Virtual Manuscript Room of the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster, Germany. In the process they referred to documents that are being brought from the vault, scanned and made available as “X-Files.”
Imagine my surprise and disappointment when I clicked the link and found no evidence that the cigarette-smoking man had been around, no signs that Fox Mulder and Dana Scully (or their German equivalents) were investigating.
Then again, that’s the sign of a really good conspiracy: they have made all the evidence for the conspiracy disappear.
Actually, there is one indication of a conspiracy on the site. It is a conspiracy against users of Internet Explorer. The virtual manuscript room web site is not optimized for use with Internet Explorer, although you can just barely make use of the site anyway.
For those who are skeptical of conspiracy theories anyway, the fact that these documents really don’t resemble “The X-Files” may be good news. And for those working on textual criticism, it may in the end turn out that “the truth is in there.”
Meanwhile, I’ve been catching up on watching a series I started to follow when it first came out, but then took a long hiatus from: Fringe. I’m particularly intrigued that it seems to be exploring precisely a scenario I suspected might be in view in that other show created by J. J. Abrams.
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