Declaration

For nearly two decades, we have written this blog. We are approaching two thousand published posts. This sustained testimony bears witness to how deeply these teachings have affected us—not as distant observers, but as people who have been wounded over time.

As members of Bible-Presbyterian churches in Singapore, we have lived under the weight of this false doctrine. It has fractured congregations, divided families, and distorted our relationship with Christ. What should have been a place of spiritual nourishment became a site of confusion, fear, and coercion.

We write from pain.

We have been told that "only" the King James Version is the true Word of God.

We have seen deceptive doctrines promoted under the banner of “Verbal Plenary Preservation.”

We have watched the Textus Receptus declared flawless and untouchable, beyond historical inquiry or faithful scholarship.

We have endured harassment and condemnation simply for reading the ESV, CUV, NIV, and other faithful translations of Scripture.

These teachers do not merely argue their position; they enforce it. Their conduct has often been harsh, uncharitable, and spiritually abusive. Instead of shepherding consciences, they wound them. Instead of defending truth, they weaponize it.

We do not write out of spite, but out of sorrow and moral urgency. The suffering caused by these teachings must not be ignored, minimized, or repeated. Those who teach falsely will one day be accountable—not only for the doctrines they promote, but for the lives they damage in the process.

This is our witness.

This is our lament.

And this is our call for truth, repentance, and healing.

What’s the Difference Between Catholic, Protestant & Orthodox Bibles?

There is no single “real” Bible in the sense of one perfect, uniform manuscript dropped from heaven. What we have instead is something more historically grounded and, frankly, more interesting — a family of faithfully transmitted texts, preserved in different Christian communities, shaped by language, geography, and liturgical life.

Now let’s unpack that with Alexandrian, Byzantine, and Western manuscripts in view.

The Alexandrian textual tradition (think Egypt: Alexandria, Oxyrhynchus) is represented by very early witnesses — papyri like P52, P66, P75, and great codices like Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. These manuscripts are prized because they are early and relatively concise. Modern critical editions of the Greek New Testament (NA28, UBS5) lean heavily Alexandrian, not because it is “theologically superior,” but because earlier texts are statistically closer to the source. Most modern Protestant Bibles follow this critical text.

The Byzantine tradition emerges later as the dominant text of the Greek-speaking church. It is smoother, more harmonized, often slightly longer. This is the text behind the Textus Receptus, which shaped the King James Version and remains foundational for the Eastern Orthodox Church. Byzantines didn’t invent a new Bible; they standardized what had been read, prayed, and preached for centuries in the liturgy. The Orthodox Bible reflects a church that says, “The text lives in worship, not just in manuscripts.”

The Western tradition is more diverse and messy. It includes Old Latin manuscripts and, eventually, Jerome’s Vulgate. The Roman Catholic Church canonized the Vulgate’s influence at Trent, not because it was text-critically perfect, but because it was ecclesially authoritative and pastorally stable. Catholic Bibles also include the Deuterocanonical books, reflecting the Septuagint tradition rather than the later rabbinic Hebrew canon.

So we end up with:

Orthodox Bibles shaped by Byzantine Greek + Septuagint

Protestant Bibles shaped by critical Greek texts + Hebrew Masoretic Text

Catholic Bibles shaped by Vulgate + Septuagint + critical texts

Here’s the crucial scholarly point:

None of these traditions can claim exclusive ownership of the “real” Bible without flattening history.

Textual Study shows us something humbling and beautiful. Across Alexandrian, Byzantine, and Western witnesses, no core Christian doctrine is at stake. Variants exist — endings of Mark, Pericope Adulterae, wording differences — but the narrative of Christ, the resurrection, the Trinity, salvation, and the moral vision of the faith remain intact. The differences are real, but they are not catastrophic.

So what is the “real” Bible?

Historically speaking, the real Bible is:

The Scriptures as received, preserved, and proclaimed by the Church across time

A text stabilized not by one manuscript family, but by convergence across many

A witness to Christ that survives copying errors, theological tensions, and human hands

The “real” Bible is not one edition versus another. It is the apostolic witness refracted through history, languages, and communities — sometimes messy, often debated, but remarkably coherent.

In other words, Christianity did not begin with a leather-bound book.

It began with a risen Christ, preached, remembered, written, copied, argued over, prayed, and lived.

Textual plurality is not a weakness of the Bible.

It is evidence that the Bible was never controlled by one group, and that, from a scholarly standpoint, is one of the strongest arguments for its historical credibility.

That tension — between divine message and human transmission — is not a problem to be solved. It is the terrain on which serious theology actually lives.

The Myth of the "Pure" Byzantine Text

The core of the KJV-Only and VPP arguments rests on the "Byzantine Priority" or "Majority Text" theory, which claims the Byzantine text-type represents the pure, original stream of scripture preserved by the church.

Early Church Fathers and Non-Byzantine Readings

Contrary to the claim of a monolithic Byzantine preservation, the earliest Church Fathers (pre-4th century) frequently quoted from text types that align more closely with the Alexandrian or Western traditions rather than the later Byzantine standard.

Concrete Proof: The Papyri

Until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, scholars lacked manuscripts from before the 4th century. The discovery of the Bodmer Papyri (P66, P75) and Chester Beatty Papyri (P45, P46) provided a "time machine" to the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

• P75 (c. 175–225 AD): This papyrus contains large portions of Luke and John. It shows a near-identical match to Codex Vaticanus (B), a 4th-century Alexandrian manuscript that KJV-Onlyists often call "corrupt." This proves that the Alexandrian text-type is not a late invention but was the standard in the earliest centuries.

• P46 (c. 200 AD): The oldest collection of Paul's epistles. It lacks several "Byzantine" expansions and liturgical additions found in the Textus Receptus.

Conclusion: A Baseless Foundation

The scholarship of the 21st century has only deepened the evidence against KJV-Onlyism. The "Perfect TR" is a 16th-century composite of late manuscripts that fails to account for the thousands of earlier witnesses discovered since 1850.

Churches that double down on these views are not defending "the faith once delivered," but rather a 17th-century tradition. By cutting themselves off from the historical reality of the manuscript record and the broader Body of Christ, they transition from a biblical church into a heretical movement centered on a linguistic and textual idol rather than the Living Word.

Reliability of the Nicene Creed Manuscript Evidence

The Nicene Creed is often spoken of in a way that makes it sound like a single, clearly documented text, but there are two creedal formulations central to this topic.

The original creed composed at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, and the later Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (often just called “the Nicene Creed” in liturgical use), traditionally dated to the First Council of Constantinople in 381 CE. What we recite in most Christian traditions today is the second, longer version, which clarifies the Holy Spirit, the Church, baptism, and the life to come. 

The shift from the 325 text to the 381 text is not simply an editorial update: modern scholarship suggests the 381 text may be an independent creed, probably rooted in pre-existing baptismal formulas, rather than a direct expansion of the 325 text. There is still debate on exactly how and when it was first promulgated.

At the First Council of Nicaea (June 325 CE), bishops gathered primarily to address the Arian controversy—disputes about the relationship of the Son to the Father. They produced a creed that affirmed the Son as “of the same substance” (homoousios) with the Father, countering Arian theology. This creed ended with a series of anathemas against specific Arian formulations. 

While later generations assumed that the expanded creed used in the East and West was simply a revision of the 325 text, twentieth-century research revealed a more complex development. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381) is likely to have emerged out of a broader baptismal tradition and formalized at Constantinople, even though the earliest surviving reference to this version in council records does not appear until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE. 

Both councils took place in Greek-speaking regions of the Eastern Roman Empire—Nicaea in what is now northwest Turkey, and Constantinople (modern Istanbul) as the imperial capital. Greek was the lingua franca of theological discourse and creedal formulation in this era.

Unlike the New Testament, where thousands of manuscripts enable detailed textual criticism, the creeds are not preserved in the same type of textual corpus. There is no huge family of creed manuscripts that can be easily categorized by text-type (such as Alexandrian, Western, or Byzantine) like we do with the Bible. Instead, the textual witnesses for the creed consist of:

A. Early Greek fragments of creed texts in liturgical or other Christian documents. The earliest known physical manuscript that includes portions of the Nicene Creed dates to the sixth century on papyrus. The papyrus is fragmentary and damaged, but it is widely regarded as the oldest surviving written copy. 

B. Later medieval manuscripts (from the 9th–13th centuries and beyond) in Greek and Latin that transmit the Niceno-Constantinopolitan text in a variety of liturgical books. These show small variations but mostly preserve the creed’s wording as used in worship. 

C. Patristic quotations in the writings of early church fathers like Eusebius, Athanasius, and Epiphanius, who quote or allude to the creed or related creedal formulas. These quotations help reconstruct the earlier forms before we have manuscript copies. For the original 325 creed, texts preserved in fourth-century church histories and letters serve as de facto textual evidence. 

Because the textual tradition for the creed is patchy and indirect—relying partly on quotations in other works and partly on later liturgical manuscript copies—it's not accurate to speak in the same terms used for New Testament text-types. There simply aren’t enough parallel manuscripts of the creed itself to divide them into Byzantine, Alexandrian, or Western types in the standard scholarly sense.

The early physical evidence (like the 6th-century papyrus) is fragmentary, but it corroborates what we already know from patristic writings: that the Nicene formulations were stable and widely disseminated soon after they were composed. Because creeds were authoritative statements of belief rather than scriptures, scribes tended to preserve their text faithfully once the formulation was fixed in church usage.

Patristic quotations of the 325 creed appear in multiple independent sources that agree closely in substance, which strengthens confidence in reconstructing the original text. For example, Eusebius’s letter and Athanasius’s account of the council align in their presentation of the 325 creed’s wording. 

By themselves, the manuscript witnesses we possess do not rival the quantity of evidence behind New Testament books. But for the purposes of historical theology—understanding what the councils intended and how the creed was received—they provide consistent and sufficient evidence. The existence of the 6th-century papyrus confirms the creed’s text was in written circulation by that time, and patristic citations reach back significantly earlier.

Variants in the Nicene Creed

Because the creed exists in multiple layers of development and translation, variants do occur. These fall into a few broad categories:

• Versional Variation between 325 and 381: The original 325 text is shorter and concentrates on the Father and Son, with minimal treatment of the Holy Spirit. The later 381 text expands sections on the Spirit, the Church, baptism, and eschatology. These differences are structural and theological, not accidental scribal errors. 

• Filioque: One of the most famous variants is the Western addition of filioque (“and the Son”) to the description of the Holy Spirit’s procession. This phrase does not occur in the original Greek creed and was added centuries later in the Latin tradition, becoming a major theological dispute between East and West. 

• Minor verbal differences: Liturgical manuscripts differ slightly—for instance, the Greek tradition retains the plural “we believe” while some Latin traditions use the singular “I believe,” and there are small lexical shifts (e.g., word order, case endings). These are typical in transmission and do not alter core meaning. 

Because there is no large critical-edition apparatus for the creed comparable to that for the New Testament, our knowledge of variants is pieced together from manuscript collations and patristic quotations rather than systematic unearthing of dozens of manuscript families. But what we do have shows a stable transmission with a few significant theological and liturgical variants that reflect the history of Christian worship and doctrinal emphasis rather than random corruption.

What This Means for Theology and History

The Nicene Creed’s creation was a historically situated act of theological definition, emerging from intense debates in the early fourth century and solidifying in the broader consensus by the late fourth century. We reconstruct its earliest forms from a mix of patristic quotations and later manuscript copies—a testament to how ancient doctrinal texts were preserved outside of a continuous formal manuscript tradition.

The creed’s manuscript evidence is not “weak” so much as fragmentary and indirect compared to canonical scriptures. Its reliability rests on multiple, independent early attestations that converge on the same core confession of faith. Variants exist, but they are explainable within the context of the creed’s transmission through different linguistic, theological, and liturgical traditions, and they rarely affect the central theological declarations about the Trinity and Christ’s divinity.

Are 4th century manuscripts reliable?

4th-century witnesses are reliable for the Nicene Creed, but not in the same way New Testament manuscripts are reliable. The reliability is real, but it rests on a different kind of evidence. Let’s be precise and honest, not pious or defensive.

First, an important clarification.

We do not possess a complete, standalone 4th-century manuscript copy of the Nicene Creed the way we possess 4th-century codices of the New Testament (like Vaticanus or Sinaiticus). That absence sometimes gets exaggerated into suspicion. It shouldn’t.

What we do have from the 4th century is something arguably just as strong for historical theology: multiple independent, near-contemporary witnesses that converge on the same text and theology.

The core 325 Nicene Creed is preserved through documentary transmission, not continuous manuscript copying. The most important witnesses are:

• Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 325–330), who reproduces the creed in his letter to his church immediately after the council

• Athanasius (mid-4th century), who cites and paraphrases the creed repeatedly while defending Nicene orthodoxy

• Council records and synodal letters, embedded in later ecclesiastical histories

• Anti-Arian polemical works, which quote the creed precisely because its wording mattered

These sources are independent, sometimes hostile to each other, and geographically diverse. That matters. When opponents argue fiercely over one word (homoousios), they are not paraphrasing loosely. They are quoting carefully. Polemics are accidental allies of textual reliability.

By historical standards, this is excellent evidence.

For many classical works, scholars are satisfied with manuscripts copied 800–1,000 years later, often from a single textual line. Here, for the Nicene Creed, we have witnesses within decades of composition, written by participants or near-participants, whose arguments collapse if the wording is wrong. That’s not weak evidence; that’s strong evidence of a fixed text.

So, are 4th-century witnesses reliable?

Historically: yes

Textually: yes, within their genre

Theologically: remarkably so

The Nicene Creed is not reliable because we have many manuscripts.

It is reliable because we have early, hostile, independent, and converging witnesses, and because the creed functioned as a boundary marker where wording mattered intensely.

Please stop using 16th century TR and KJV to correct second century manuscripts

Grace and peace to you. 

In the spirit of the season, when we celebrate the Word becoming flesh, it is only right that we honor the physical history of how that Word was preserved for us. To address this pastorally, we must move from "stupidity" to stewardship. We are stewards of the evidence God has allowed to be unearthed.

Here is a pastoral perspective on why we should prioritize our earliest witnesses over later compilations.

1. The Gift of Proximity

In theology, we often talk about getting closer to the source. The Textus Receptus (TR), compiled by Erasmus in the 16th century, was a monumental achievement for its time. However, Erasmus had access to only a handful of late medieval manuscripts (mostly from the 12th century or later).

By contrast, the 19th and 20th centuries gifted the Church with "time machines":

• P66 & P75 (c. 200 AD): These papyri take us back to within a century or so of the original autographs.

• Codex Sinaiticus & Vaticanus (4th Century): These represent the first "Great Bibles," providing a complete look at the New Testament long before centuries of scribal "smoothing" or accidental additions took place.

2. Correcting the "Correction"

The pastoral concern here is one of authority. When a teacher uses the KJV (a translation of a 16th-century compilation) to "correct" P66 or Sinaiticus, they are essentially saying that a stream becomes purer the further it flows from the spring.

In any other field—history, law, or genealogy—the closer the document is to the event, the more weight it carries. To ignore the second-century witnesses is to ignore the voices of the persecuted early Church in favor of the ecclesiastical comfort of the 1500s.

3. The Burden of "Additions"

One of the hardest pastoral truths to convey is that many beloved verses in the TR/KJV (like the Comma Johanneum in 1 John 5:7-8) simply do not exist in the earliest Greek manuscripts.

• The Goal: We want the Apostolic word, not the Scribal expansion.

• The Heart: We do not lose anything of the Gospel by following the older manuscripts; rather, we gain confidence that we are reading what John or Paul actually wrote, stripped of later liturgical flourishes.

A Pastoral Summary

We must treat the Bible with enough respect to look at the evidence God has preserved in the sands of Egypt and the libraries of old. To cling to a 16th-century text as the "standard" over the 2nd-century text is to mistake a specific translation's legacy for the Holy Spirit’s original breath.

This Christmas, let us pray for a spirit of humility among teachers—that they would love the Truth more than the "authorized" tradition.

Merry Christmas.

Where is the Christmas in NT manuscripts?

This Christmas season, we turn to one of the earliest witnesses to the incarnation, Papyrus 66 (𝔓66). Copied around the late 2nd or early 3rd century, 𝔓66 preserves much of the Gospel of John, including 

John 1:14:
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth."

These ancient words, written nearly two millennia ago, remind us that the message of the Incarnation has been faithfully passed down through generations. As we celebrate Christmas, we give thanks for the men and women who preserved this good news so that we too may behold the Word made flesh.

Explore more images here: https://buff.ly/9Tm4zjB

The Incarnation in Papyrus 66 and Papyrus 75

The Incarnation in Papyrus 66 and Papyrus 75

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between the earliest witnesses to the New Testament—specifically Papyrus 66 (𝔓66) and Papyrus 75 (𝔓75)—and the theological development of the "Christmas" narrative. While Papyrus 66 (𝔓66) preserves the Johannine Prologue’s high Christology of the Logos becoming flesh, and Papyrus 75 (𝔓75) provides a critical textual link to the Lukan birth narrative. By examining these late 2nd to early 3rd-century codices, we can observe how the early Church synthesized the mystical "Incarnation" of John with the historical "Nativity" of Luke to form the foundational "Christmas" theology.

Papyrus 66 (𝔓66) and Papyrus 75 (𝔓75) are among the earliest extant witnesses to the Gospel of John and Luke respectively, dating to the late second and early third centuries. Neither manuscript preserves a narrative of Jesus’ birth in the conventional sense associated with Christmas liturgy. Yet both are profoundly relevant to Christmas theology. This paper argues that 𝔓66 and 𝔓75 together testify to an early Christian understanding of the Incarnation that precedes and undergirds later nativity traditions. Christmas, as revealed through these papyri, is not primarily a story of shepherds and angels but a metaphysical claim about divine embodiment, historical time, and salvific presence.

I. Introduction: The Textual Origins of Christmas

Christmas, as a feast, emerges centuries after the composition of the New Testament texts. To read Christmas back into early manuscripts risks anachronism. Yet the theological core of Christmas—the claim that God entered history as a human being—is embedded deeply in the earliest strata of Christian scripture. Papyrus 66 and Papyrus 75, though fragmentary and devoid of festive narrative, preserve precisely this claim in its most austere and radical form. These papyri represent a Christianity still thinking through the shock of incarnation rather than celebrating it ritually.

The modern celebration of Christmas is a liturgical harmonization of two distinct biblical traditions: the historical infancy narrative found in the Gospel of Luke and the cosmic pre-existence of Christ described in the Gospel of John. To understand the earliest physical evidence of these traditions, scholars turn to the Bodmer Papyri.

Papyrus 66 (𝔓66) (Bodmer II): Dated c. 200 CE, it is a near-complete codex of the Gospel of John.

Papyrus 75 (𝔓75) (Bodmer XIV-XV): Dated c. 175–225 CE, it contains substantial portions of Luke and John.

II. Papyrus 66: The "Cosmic Christmas"

Papyrus 66, containing large portions of the Gospel of John, is particularly significant for Christmas theology because John offers no infancy narrative. Instead, John opens with a cosmological overture: the Logos existing “in the beginning,” through whom all things came to be. The crucial Christmas moment in John is not a birth scene but the declaration that “the Word became flesh.”

In 𝔓66, this claim appears without doctrinal softening. The text emphasizes sarx (flesh), not merely humanity in the abstract. This is incarnation at its most scandalous: the eternal Logos takes on perishable matter. Christmas here is not pastoral but ontological. There is no stable, no mother’s song—only the staggering assertion that divine transcendence has collapsed into biological vulnerability.

The early date of 𝔓66 suggests that this high Christology was not a late theological embellishment but foundational. Christmas theology, in this light, begins not with sentiment but with metaphysics. God does not merely visit humanity; God becomes materially present within it.

While John’s Gospel contains no manger, no shepherds, and no Magi, Papyrus 66 (𝔓66) provides the earliest substantial witness to the Prologue (John 1:1–18), which serves as the theological bedrock for Christmas.

In Papyrus 66 (𝔓66), we find the definitive statement of the Incarnation:

καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν

(And the Word became flesh and dwelt [tabernacled] among us — John 1:14)

The presence of this text in a professional codex from the year 200 CE confirms that the "high Christology" of the Incarnation—the idea that the baby in the manger was the eternal Logos—was firmly established in the early Christian consciousness long before the formalization of the Christmas feast in the 4th century.

III. Papyrus 75: The Historical Witness to the Birth

Papyrus 75 preserves significant portions of Luke and is notable for its textual closeness to Codex Vaticanus. Luke, unlike John, contains a detailed infancy narrative. Yet the surviving sections of 𝔓75 do not emphasize the nativity scenes. Instead, they foreground Jesus’ identity, authority, and relationship to God within history.

What 𝔓75 contributes to Christmas theology is historical anchoring. Luke insists that salvation unfolds within verifiable time—under governors, emperors, and political systems. Even when the nativity narrative is absent from the preserved text, the theological trajectory remains: the incarnation is not mythic timelessness but an event embedded in human chronology.

Christmas, as implied by 𝔓75, is the moment eternity submits to history’s constraints. God enters census records, travel fatigue, and geopolitical reality. The absence of explicit Christmas imagery in the papyrus paradoxically sharpens this point: incarnation is not dependent on pageantry to be real.

Papyrus 75 (𝔓75) is monumental because it is the earliest manuscript to show the Gospels of Luke and John bound together in a single volume. This physical joining reflects a "theological joining" of their two different "birth" stories.

The Lukan Link: Papyrus 75 (𝔓75) contains much of Luke, though the very first chapters (the Nativity) are fragmentary. However, its close textual affinity with Codex Vaticanus suggests it was part of a tradition that meticulously preserved the Lukan infancy narrative.7

Harmonization: By placing Luke (the "Human" birth) and John (the "Divine" origin) side-by-side Papyrus 75 (𝔓75) allowed early readers to see the Nativity as the fulfillment of the Logos becoming flesh.

 

Feature	Papyrus 66 (John)	Papyrus 75 (Luke/John)
Approx. Date	200 CE	175–225 CE
Christmas Focus	Theological (Incarnation)	Structural (Joining Luke & John)
Key Verse	John 1:14 (Word became flesh)	Luke 2 (Contextual proximity)

 

IV. Synthesis: From Papyrus to Liturgy

Read together, 𝔓66 and 𝔓75 offer a bifocal vision of Christmas. John, preserved in 𝔓66, frames incarnation from above: the descent of the Logos into flesh. Luke, preserved in 𝔓75, frames incarnation from within history: the arrival of salvation amid human institutions and suffering.

Christmas theology emerges at the intersection of these perspectives. It is neither pure myth nor mere biography. It is the claim that the infinite enters the finite without ceasing to be infinite, and that this entry occurs at a specific moment in time. The papyri reveal that early Christians were less concerned with celebrating Jesus’ birth than with grappling with its implications.

The relationship between these two papyri reveals that the "Christmas" story was not a later legendary accretion but was deeply rooted in the earliest textual traditions.

Papyrus 66 (𝔓66) ensured the baby was seen as God.

Papyrus 75 (𝔓75) ensured the God-man was seen as a Historical Person born in Bethlehem.8

Together, these manuscripts represent the "Dual Nature" of Christ (Human and Divine) that defines the Christmas season.

Conclusion

Papyrus 66 and Papyrus 75 remind us that Christmas was a doctrine before it was a holiday. The earliest witnesses to the gospel texts preserve a raw and unsettling idea: God has a body, and history is forever altered by that fact. Long before trees, hymns, or dates on a calendar, Christmas existed as a theological rupture.

In these papyri, Christmas is quiet, almost hidden, but intellectually explosive. The absence of festive detail is not a deficit but a clue. Early Christianity was still stunned by the incarnation. Celebration would come later. First came the text.

Papyrus 66 (𝔓66) and Papyrus 75 (𝔓75) serve as the silent witnesses to the birth of Christian dogma. They prove that by the end of the second century, the Church already possessed the full "script" of Christmas—the historical details of a Judean birth and the profound mystery of the eternal Logos entering time.

The Legend of Three Stooges

Long ago, before maps learned to sit still, there lived three fat stooges whose names history mercifully forgot. What people remembered instead was their appetite—for certainty, for control, and for being right louder than everyone else.

They owned a thin donkey named VPP. The donkey was frail, ribs like parentheses, but endlessly patient. He carried more weight than he was built for and never complained. They also kept a small mule called KJV, stubborn but familiar, and a fat chicken named TR, pampered, noisy, and convinced it was royalty.

The stooges announced one morning that they would climb the sacred mountain called TT, the Mountain of Total Truth. No one had ever reached its summit, but the stooges declared they already knew what was at the top.

They piled themselves onto the thin donkey.

The donkey staggered but walked.

To prove their seriousness, they brought along the mule and the chicken, and three maidservants—Clement, Lin Kang, and Nyuen—quiet figures who had walked long roads and carried old wisdom in their bones. The stooges did not ask their counsel. They only demanded their labor.

As the journey began, the road rose and narrowed. The mountain grew steep and slick with loose stones. The donkey’s legs trembled. He slowed. The stooges beat him and shouted, accusing him of weakness, of betrayal, of not being “pure” enough for the climb.

At the sharpest slope, VPP collapsed and died.

The stooges did not mourn. They argued over who to blame, then shrugged. Hungry from the climb, they slaughtered the mule and the chicken, roasted them over a fire, and congratulated themselves on their wisdom.

“See?” they said, licking grease from their fingers. “We never needed them anyway.”

Now with no animals left, they turned to the maidservants.

“Carry us,” the stooges commanded.

Clement protested quietly. Lin Kang warned them of the road ahead. Nyuen looked to the horizon and said the mountain was not what they thought it was.

The stooges laughed.

They climbed on the backs of those who had tried to help them, digging in their heels, demanding speed. And somehow—through endurance that did not belong to the stooges—they reached the mountaintop of TT.

But there was nothing there.
No throne.
No banner.
No final answer carved in stone.

Only wind.

Embarrassed and angry, they pushed onward and descended into a place called the Valley of Death, where the light bent strangely and every echo sounded like certainty. There the paths split endlessly, and every sign contradicted the last.

The stooges got lost.

They argued louder, blamed harder, and rode their servants until strength ran out. Clement fell. Ling Kang vanished into the fog. Nyuen simply lay down and would not move again.
At last, when the stooges were alone and terrified, sunlight broke through the valley, revealing a long road leading east. They stumbled forward until they reached the distant Kingdom of Batam, a place famous not for wisdom, but for echo chambers where voices only heard themselves.

There, the three fat stooges died arguing, still insisting they had been right all along.

No one buried them.

The lesson the old storytellers passed down was simple and sharp:

Cruelty always disguises itself as conviction.
Those who bully others in the name of truth end up devouring their own tools, riding the backs of the faithful, and mistaking noise for light. Truth is not carried by force, nor preserved by hunger for dominance.

If you must climb, lighten the load.
If you must teach, do not trample.
And if someone weaker is carrying you, remember—you are already lost.

That is why elders tell children this legend, and why adults grow quiet when they hear it.