Fundamentalist Failures

This post highlights a couple of less well-known fundamentalist groups which failed to make a major impact, but which may nonetheless be of historical interest.

1. Biblical Antipunctuationism

There is no punctuation in either ancient Hebrew or ancient Greek, and thus there is no punctuation in our earliest manuscripts of the Biblical texts. The Biblical Antipunctuationist movement opposed the use of punctuation in Bible translations, and expressed their dissatisfaction by symbolically refusing to use punctuation themselves when writing.

Why they failed

Other fundamentalists accused them of lack of true devotion and passion for their cause, as evidenced by the lack of exclamation marks in their publications.

2. ld tstmnt ntvwlsm

The movement to exclude vowels from translations of the Old Testament arose as a spin-off from the antipunctuationist movement. Since the Hebrew Old Testament has no vowels (apart from the letters yod and waw, which can stand for vowels at times), this group sought the avoidance of vowels in the Old Testament of English Bibles. Their motto was "Ths ss th LRD".

Why they failed

This movement was undermined by factionalism, in particular the "Sometimes Y" movement, which took as its slogan "Ths sys th LRD", and caused such dissention and confustion within the ranks of the ntvwlst movement that they were unable to present a united front for their cause. Some foresee a comeback in the future if the remaining adherents can find ways to use text messaging to communicate their message to a wider audience.

3. Antinecrophiliac Literalists

This movement arose from a literal translation of the Hebrew idiom found in such places as 2 Kings 21:18. All of the kings condemned in this famous work (known as the "Former Prophets" in Jewish tradition, and dubbed the "Deuteronomic History" by scholars) are said at the end of their lives to have "slept with their ancestors" - even king Hezekiah was not blameless in this regard (see 2 Kings 20:21). And so this English-speaking fundamentalist movement concluded that the key sin that brought about the downfall of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah was necrophilia.

Why they failed

Those fundamentalists who scapegoated other ideologies (e.g. "Darwinism", Liberalism) as causes of social ills were more successful. The Antinecrophiliac Literalists found themselves unable to rally believers around this issue or persuade the majority of their congregations that this practice was widespread in their time. When the leaders of the original movement "slept with their ancestors" (to use a Hebrew idiom), the movement itself was laid to "rest in peace", as it were.