ASGW Sleepy Hollow (episode 5 - now with screenshots!)

so i was really looking forward to watching sleepy hollow last night and letting my brain turn to mush after a second PhD open house in less than a week.  but it was a rerun of the pilot, bah.

on the other hand, this gives me the chance to catch the blog up since i missed episode 5 last week.

there wasn't really any theology in ep 5, but there was a ton of awful history.  so here we go!

well, ok, first up: the horseman of pestilence.  also conquest because that actually follows the text of Revelation 6.  but why is he dressed as a samurai?

But, the major problem in this episode was historical:  a kid from the colony of Roanoke speaks Middle English. 

um.  no.

as wikipedia helpfully points out, Roanoke was a colony in North Carolina, founded in 1585 and disappeared sometime after the first recorded birth in the colony in 1587.

Middle English started to fade away in 1470.  it was replaced (again, wikipedia) by a dialect from London.  so the colony of Roanoke was founded slightly over 100 years after Middle English started to die out.  Also, let's please note that most of the colonists came from London or the south of England and so were closer to the linguistic shift and even less likely to still speak Middle English.  not only that, but the 1580s were well into the Great Vowel Shift, especially in the south, making Middle English even less likely.

further, Ichabod Crane is an Oxford history professor in this telling (in the original, he's just a schoolmaster).  the chances of a history professor being fluent in Middle English by the late 18th century are slim to none.

a seminary grad watches "sleepy hollow" (ep 1 & 4)

i am watching and loving the new tv show "sleepy hollow," but they are getting just about everything wrong about christianity and a lot wrong about history too.  so since fact-checking is all the rage, i think it's going to be fun to blog through the season (already renewed for a second, woo!) noting all the silliness.  potential spoilers, be warned.

unfortunately, i don't know a whole lot about native american religion, so i'm just assuming they got the Iroquois sandman-dream demon in episode 3 as wrong as they got everything else :)

i posted my initial reaction to the pilot already, but let's flesh it out a bit more. 

the apparently Roman Catholic priest who gets beheaded in the pilot is dressed as a cardinal.  what?

Ichabod reads Rev 6:1 and 6:7 as both referring to the headless horseman, who is identified as "death" (the other 3 are war, pestilence, and famine).  problem #1: 6:1 is talking about war, and 6:7 is talking about death.  problem #2: the series has death as the first horseman, but in Revelation, death is the last (hence 6:7).**

then he appears to keep reading and refers to 2 witnesses.  in Rev 6, there is a multitude, not 2.  so what the heck is going on?

that answer comes out a bit better in ep 4.  Jenny and Abbie were conveniently dragged to bible study as kids and forced to memorize scripture passages.  helpfully, they both memorized Revelation, apparently.  the two witnesses come from Rev 11:3, although the show leaves out the "in sackcloth" part of the quote.

more problems in episode 4:  the final demon summoning takes place in what apparently is a Dutch Reformed church, except the first shot of the church's interior shows a statue of a female saint or the virgin Mary.  not only is the Dutch Reformed tradition exceedingly Protestant so there would definitely be no statue of a saint or Mary, but it's also part of the Prot tradition that removed all art from churches, so there shouldn't be any statue at all (the same goes for the stained glass windows).  another problem is that as far as i could tell, they put the book on what appears to be not a lectern, but a portable baptismal font.  which is fine, except that the demons also come out of a font in the  middle of the room.  what church would have 2 fonts?

the book, referred to as "the lesser key of Solomon" was supposedly written by king Solomon and found during the crusades by the Knights Templar.  problem here:  they say "twelve centuries later" except that Solomon lived closer to 900 BCE, so it should be twenty two centuries later.  and there were no such things a books in 900 BCE; it should be a scroll.  assuming it's the actual parchment that Solomon wrote on, which since it's a book of black magic, i'm willing to suspend disbelief on that one :)  (Solomon gets the tradition of being a magician and sorcerer eventually, so i'm not going to criticize them for picking up on that).  fun thought: if this is the "lesser key of Solomon" is there a greater key out there somewhere?

i just laughed when Ichabod referred to Milton's "Paradise Lost" as a "theological text."  if you want to know who Moloch/Molech is, go read Leviticus, and I and II Kings.  and i'm pretty sure the last shot of the illustration in the book is William Blake (who is my most favourite crazy poet ever).

**in keeping with the series context, i'm giving all links to Bible passages in KJV.