Talk:Mess of pottage

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The entry on Esau uses the phrase "mess of pottage" (and defines it). This illustrates something interesting about the phrase: it is not actually a Biblical phrase, but it is widely thought to be. It further adds some information about the production of the King James translation, i.e., that it incorporates material from the earlier Geneva Bible, and, as an aside, that doing so went beyond the translators' mandate.

This article seems (to me) to be more like the "better" articles than the "questionable" articles in Writing your first article.

Luke 23:04, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Surely Nevill Coghill is the professor referred to here.

JB Piggin 21:19, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Two of the main points made by the original article, namely that the phrase first appears in the Geneva Bible and that its use in the KJV preface indicates dependence on the Geneva Bible, appear both to be incorrect. The phrase appears, and appears connected to Esau, several times before the Geneva Bible (1560), as early as the mid fifteenth century; and though the KJV did indeed draw from Geneva, among other translations, its use of this phrase cannot be regarded as evidence of this. I will try to correct the facts while leaving as much as possible intact.

PFSchaffner (talk) 15:24, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

Examples of usage
Why these particular examples of usage? The phrase is used thousands of times. Do we have any reliable sources showing that Jonathan Swift's or Thoreau's or Savarkar's or James Weldon Johnson's usage of it is famous or noteworthy?

I also question the length of the Thoreau quote. It tells us a lot about Thoreau, but not much about the phrase "a mess of pottage", which is, after all, the topic of this article. --Macrakis (talk) 21:45, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

Karl Marx
It does not make any sense at all to state that Karl Marx used this phrase and then to add in a footnote that "the original German text has ein Gericht Linsen, which literally means "a lentil dish". It is obviously not Karl Marx who used the phrase but rather his translator who chose to translate it this way.

Unfortunately, the reference in the footnote is very incomplete. In this case, the translator should absolutely be explicitly named. --91.34.34.79 (talk) 06:37, 25 September 2018 (UTC)