[...] If the name "Colenso" is vaguely familiar today, it is probably from Lewis Carroll. Before becoming a bishop, Colenso had written a popular set of books on mathematics. If you look at Holiday's original illustration to "The Beaver's Lesson", chapter five of The Hunting of the Snark (p. [49] in Carroll/Gardner), you will observe that one of the books shown there is Colenso's Arithmetic.
Once he became a Bishop, Colenso turned the analytical skills which he had previously used for mathematics to examining the Bible. One of his missions was to the Zulus, whose language he learned (a very unusual act for an Englishman of the time); he published a grammar and dictionary of the language, and began to translate the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer into Zulu.
This proved rather embarassing, because the Zulus had a lot of tricky questions about his teaching (Carroll/Gardner, p. [47]). He began to analyze the Old Testament in mathematical and scientific terms (Ellis, p. 218). His results were published in The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined (completed 1879, according to LarousseDict, p. 329). Carroll/Gardner, p. [47], says that Colenso "reduced to absurdity the literal interpretation of the Bible." Among his calculations was an estimate that, to make the Bible literally true, six men would have had a combined 2748 sons, and that priests would have been forced to consume 88 pigeons daily (Green, p. 281). [...]
Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle: The Ballad Index (2015)
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The Banker in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark would be capable of such number crunching. In the illustration below he is weighting (but also losing) his coins. In the Snark, he is one of the two victims in Carroll's tragedy. Also he is an important figure in Henry Holiday's illustrations.
... The origins of that Anglican Communion as we have come to know it can be found in two legal battles and a doctrinal dispute that rocked the Anglican churches in the 1850s and 1860s. The first of these legal battles became known as the Eton College Case. In 1857, the courts ruled that the established Church of England could not exist in those colonies where there was a local legislature.
A year earlier, the Bishop of Cape Town, Robert Gray, called a diocesan synod in 1856 – a synod that preceded by 12 years the first diocesan synod in the Church of England, which was held in the Diocese of Lichfield in 1868.
A few years after his synod in Cape Town, Gray – by now accepted as Archbishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan – attempted to depose the Bishop of Natal, John Colenso, for heresy in 1863. Colenso appealed to the Privy Council in London, which ruled in March 1865 that Gray and his synod could only exercise authority over those who voluntarily accepted it. It also held that the letters patent issued to the bishop were invalid because the Cape Colony had its own legislature.
By the time the judgment was issued, Gray had tried Colenso on the grounds that Colenso had sworn canonical obedience to him as metropolitan, thus voluntarily accepting his jurisdiction. The rulings from Gray and the Privy Council left a complete mess. The letters patent were invalid, bishops had been appointed by patents issued in London and yet there was no established church for them to serve in because the colony had its own legislature. ...
4 comments
Götz Kluge said:
In that image is a reference to Colenso.
See also: www.academia.edu/9856809/The_Beavers_Lesson
Götz Kluge said:
[...] If the name "Colenso" is vaguely familiar today, it is probably from Lewis Carroll. Before becoming a bishop, Colenso had written a popular set of books on mathematics. If you look at Holiday's original illustration to "The Beaver's Lesson", chapter five of The Hunting of the Snark (p. [49] in Carroll/Gardner), you will observe that one of the books shown there is Colenso's Arithmetic.
Once he became a Bishop, Colenso turned the analytical skills which he had previously used for mathematics to examining the Bible. One of his missions was to the Zulus, whose language he learned (a very unusual act for an Englishman of the time); he published a grammar and dictionary of the language, and began to translate the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer into Zulu.
This proved rather embarassing, because the Zulus had a lot of tricky questions about his teaching (Carroll/Gardner, p. [47]). He began to analyze the Old Testament in mathematical and scientific terms (Ellis, p. 218). His results were published in The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined (completed 1879, according to LarousseDict, p. 329). Carroll/Gardner, p. [47], says that Colenso "reduced to absurdity the literal interpretation of the Bible." Among his calculations was an estimate that, to make the Bible literally true, six men would have had a combined 2748 sons, and that priests would have been forced to consume 88 pigeons daily (Green, p. 281). [...]
Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle: The Ballad Index (2015)
·
The Banker in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark would be capable of such number crunching. In the illustration below he is weighting (but also losing) his coins. In the Snark, he is one of the two victims in Carroll's tragedy. Also he is an important figure in Henry Holiday's illustrations.
Götz Kluge said:
A year earlier, the Bishop of Cape Town, Robert Gray, called a diocesan synod in 1856 – a synod that preceded by 12 years the first diocesan synod in the Church of England, which was held in the Diocese of Lichfield in 1868.
A few years after his synod in Cape Town, Gray – by now accepted as Archbishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan – attempted to depose the Bishop of Natal, John Colenso, for heresy in 1863. Colenso appealed to the Privy Council in London, which ruled in March 1865 that Gray and his synod could only exercise authority over those who voluntarily accepted it. It also held that the letters patent issued to the bishop were invalid because the Cape Colony had its own legislature.
By the time the judgment was issued, Gray had tried Colenso on the grounds that Colenso had sworn canonical obedience to him as metropolitan, thus voluntarily accepting his jurisdiction. The rulings from Gray and the Privy Council left a complete mess. The letters patent were invalid, bishops had been appointed by patents issued in London and yet there was no established church for them to serve in because the colony had its own legislature. ...
Patrick Comerford, www.patrickcomerford.com/2014_03_11_archive.html
Götz Kluge said:
See also: www.academia.edu/11013010/The_Trial_of_Bishop_John_William_Colenso