“In Bible Times They’d Break a Lamb’s Leg–”

Developing a Historical Sense of Smell with One of the Biggest Bible Turkeys

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

At Caesarea Philippi, pagans would sacrifice their kids to Pan. Jesus chose Caesarea Philippi to be the site of his announcement he was the messiah because the place was known as the “gates of Hades.” The “eye of a needle” that a camel can’t pass through is actually a very small gate that a camel must either kneel to enter, or be unloaded to pass through. Jesus’s swaddling clothes were actually from a priestly vestment, or alternatively, the rags you’d wrap your lamb in before you sacrificed it. Christians used to pray in catacombs because that was the only place Romans couldn’t find them. And you always anoint a Passover lamb on its feet six days before the sacrifice, just like Mary of Bethany did to Jesus.

Are these things true? No. But you’ve heard someone say they are.

I’ve gotten in the inexplicable habit of calling these ersatz factoids “Bible turkeys,” probably (if I can hunt my own traditions here) because of the idiom “turkey shoot” for a one-sided fight. Basically, by this I mean that a “Bible turkey” is a claim about the Bible that is clearly false or unsupported, and is pretty easy to show is unsupported or unfounded. 

One of the turkeys that I didn’t grow up with, but I’ve heard from a lot of my readers, is the story of the shepherd who breaks a sheep’s leg because the sheep continuously goes astray. After the shepherd breaks the sheep’s leg, the sheep is unable to run away, and so the shepherd spends a period of time carrying the sheep, bringing it food, and paying special attention to it as it heals. After this period where the sheep is immobilized and accepts this treatment, the sheep learns to stay close to the shepherd. The moral of the story is that sometimes God disciplines us – or our parents discipline us – in ways that seem harsh, but it is through this discipline that we learn to trust them. Depending on the version of the story you heard, this may be one illustrative example of one shepherd, or a story about how shepherds generally dealt with unruly sheep.

The single instance story is, admittedly, hard to disprove. There may be some stupid leg-breaking shepherd out there who really did try to tame his sheep through a club to the femur one time. Then he got spotted by some deranged pastor who reported it to his congregation, and, before you know it, the story was off to the races faster than an angry three-legged sheep trying to run away from his stupid shepherd. It’s possible this happened one time, strictly speaking.

But what’s a lot harder to demonstrate is that this is a known practice that would be widely represented among shepherds. This is what elevates the story from “anecdote” to “Bible turkey” – the story becomes a claim about the biblical image of God/Jesus as a shepherd, or good shepherd. The claim becomes that we should not necessarily expect a good shepherd to be gentle. Rather, sometimes even extreme physical violence against sheep is part of the job.

Today, if you look for a contemporary example of this myth, you’ll see more “debunking” of this myth than you’ll see of credulous repetition of it (though it does show up as late as 2023).  In addition to being thoroughly debunked, this is also a myth whose origins seem to be accounted for. People have already done the (unbroken) legwork to figure out where this story came from, and frankly, I haven’t been able to really add much from the academic side here. With what I’ve been able to find and confirm with the help of the Internet Archive, the origins of this story seem to go back to Presbyterian minister Robert Boyd Munger, author of bestselling book My Heart, Christ’s Home. This specific story is from his 1955 book What Jesus Says.

According to Robert Munger, a shepherd would break at least one leg of a sheep that repeatedly strayed. Then he’d set the bones and carry it around and feed it until the sheep learned to trust them. Munger claims to have heard this story from a tourist in Syria, who saw that a shepherd had done this. This story also spread through revivalist pastor William Branham in 1957, and Paul Lee Tan 1979 Encyclopedia of 7700 Sermon Illustrations.  

So debunking this myth is actually not particularly fun. The work of chasing down the origins of this story looks pretty complete to me – I wasn’t able to find further resources in my library databases that suggest these stories are older than the 1950s, and if the origins of the story are 1955, then the widespread theory that Munger is the earliest accessible source is probably accurate. 

What is a little more interesting is the question of whether this myth arises from an incident of bungling or mishearing information, rather than outright making it up. In 2006 on the message board Christian Forums, Nathan Griffith, then-editor of Sheep! Magazine (which I’m including here just because I love the fact that Sheep! Magazine exists) proposed that the origins of this story may be from a misunderstanding of the use of a “leg brake,” or a weight attached to a sheep that keeps sheep from moving too quickly before they learn to stay with the flock.

“Covergirl! Put that baaaaaaaass in your walk!”

But maybe this is actually a more interesting tack to take with this – not that the “biblical shepherds breaking sheep legs” story is a load of rubbish (it very obviously is, and there’s little more to say about it), but that so many people remembered hearing this story and investigated it because it sounded like a load of rubbish. 

So what does it mean for something to sound like rubbish? Basically, what I mean is that there’s just something about the claim that makes it sound kind of stupid. Something about the story just seems wrong. Now, lots of claims that get made about the Bible every day are wrong, but they sound plausible to a lot of people who hear them and make them. But is there a way we can get a better ear for what sounds wrong? In this case, the story of the shepherd breaking his sheep’s leg sounds wrong because it sounds like foolish behavior and is inconsistent with what we think of as the foundation of a trusting relationship – yes to care and protection, no to physical violence.

The best way to develop a stronger sense of what is plausible and what might not be is simply to just read more history. The more you know about the ancient world, the more you’ll have a sense for how ancient people thought and behaved. But until you do that, I’d like to introduce you to what I think of as some good “historical smell tests” that can clue you in when something might need some more investigation.

Now, let me be really clear about something: none of the below “tests” are actually tests for historicity. The validity or plausibility of any historical claim must be tested against historical evidence – literature, epigraphs, archeology, etc. The fact that something doesn’t pass one of the below tests is not in itself evidence that the claim is not true. Nor does passing the below tests mean that the claim is necessarily accurate and founded. Every historical claim needs to be defended with evidence, and the only way to verify it is to look at the sources yourself.

My goal here is not to teach you how to determine if a historical claim is true or false at a snap judgment – as though this could be done for many claims even after exhaustive investigation (many, many questions in history remain open to debate and may remain open to debate indefinitely). My goal is rather to help you develop what we might think of as a “historical sense of smell,” primarily in popular settings. Does the claim “smell off?” Does it seem plausible? Where would you look to verify it? Does it seem like someone might have a good reason to make it up? And if you don’t know those things, should the claim be repeated? Perhaps even confronted?

The Verisimilitude Test: Does It Make Visual Sense?

The “verisimilitude test” is, basically, the judgment of whether or not a claim that a pastor or writer makes about history sounds like something a person would do. Often, bogus claims like “shepherds would break the legs of sheep to make them pliant” depend on the audience responding to the story as though historical people were completely unlike us and would not behave in ways we would expect. In some cases, that’s true – you at home may have never deliberately harmed a large mammal because we live in a culture that sentimentalizes (some) critters and keeps meat-eating off stage. But in other ways it’s not true – people in the ancient world were not significantly bigger and stronger than we are, and therefore were not more willing than we might be to carry hundreds of pounds of sheep on their backs.

So this is the verisimilitude test: Play out the claim in your head. Does the image make sense? Can you picture it in your mind’s eye? Does it sound like something people would do without finding a better way? 

Of course, this can be tricky because in many ways the ancient world is nothing like ours. For example, clothes and food were scarce in a way that, for many of us, they aren’t now. People had different ideas about gods, how many there were, and how to relate to them. They didn’t think of themselves as living on a heliocentric orb, but on a flat surface. They probably thought about the weather more than you do. So the “verisimilitude test” is not waterproof, and it becomes more reliable the more you read about history. For example, if you knew nothing about the ancient world, it might strain your credulity that a significant number of ancient people enjoyed watching gladiators fight with weapons in an arena, because we find such entertainment repellent and our sports are not nearly as violent. However, once you learn more about the Roman world and how this entertainment was culturally justified, it becomes more plausible. 

But in many ways, ancient people weren’t completely unlike us. Wherever you go, humans are social creatures that live in groups and depend on regular access to food, water, clothing, shelter, and community. In this respect, ancient people weren’t any different. They cared about their family members, they liked to be warm and safe, they worked and used ingenuity to solve practical problems and meet their needs, they didn’t want to be embarrassed or degraded, and they got tired and older and sick just like you do.

So when you hear a claim like “At Caesarea Philippi, most people would sacrifice their kids to Pan,” we can already hear some verisimilitude problems. We can hear points on both sides. On the whole, most people don’t kill their kids, and most people don’t participate in religions that require them to kill their kids. Also, people who lived in rural areas often had lots of children for the purpose of producing more farm labor, and with infant mortality rates being what they were, sacrificing kids who otherwise might live would be counterproductive. Especially if you’re in a monogamous family, a wife can only have so many babies. But, on the other hand, life was hard in the ancient world and children did die often. Even killing your children wasn’t completely unheard of. Infant exposure was common in the ancient world as a means to control family size. But perhaps this is an illustrative example. What we don’t have extended records of is people beheading their own kids to limit family size. What we have instead is evidence that parents would leave their children in public areas with the (perhaps unfounded) hope that the child might live, but as a slave. So that tells us something. On one hand, yes, the ancient world was very different in that people knew that losing children was a real risk and the birth of too many children could compromise the survival of the family. On the other hand, they didn’t relish it or seek out opportunities to do it. Putting a child outside in the hope that he’d live in someone else’s home as a slave was far more common.

The sheep in Robert Munger’s story is a runaway sheep who won’t stay with the flock. So how did this shepherd get close enough to the sheep to break its leg? Did he wait until it was sleeping and then attack it with a hammer? Did he get a rifle and shoot it in the leg? Did he run after it and tackle it? Did one person hold the sheep down while the other stomped on it? Did they use a block or fulcrum to snap it? How big was the shepherd? How big was the sheep? 

The Awassi sheep in Syria is the only indigenous sheep to Israel. An Awassi ram is between 60-90 kg/132-190 lbs, and a ewe is between 30-50 kg/66-110 lbs. These are pretty big animals, which means that like any large hoofed, horned animal, the risk of injury to oneself in the process of fighting the sheep is pretty severe. In most situations, we’re imagining a long, drawn-out brawl between man and sheep, in which the shepherd would be pretty lucky not to break some bones of his own (even if you break one of a sheep’s legs while it’s asleep, it’ll wake up and still have three legs).

Then there’s the question of keeping the sheep alive with a broken leg. A lamb bone is pretty big. Any attempt to break the leg of the sheep is going to take a significant amount of external force. Whether you use your foot, a rock, or a club, the injury is likely to abraid the skin, which introduces significant risk of infection. This is even more true in the case of a compound fracture, in which the broken bone itself breaks the skin and is exposed to air. In these cases, euthanasia or amputation are today recommended among veterinarians. So unless you can break the leg of the sheep with surgical precision to prevent that, and unless your sheep first-aid skills are top of the line, your sheep is probably not going to survive this process.

Then there’s transport. Keeping the sheep down with one broken leg is already going to be a challenge. In this account from a farmer, a sheep with a broken leg was able to limp and move around with three legs. So it’s not even clear that breaking the sheep’s leg would successfully immobilize it. If you’ve ever seen a three-legged dog or cat you know that they actually can walk. (My former colleague Ameliah Leondhardt at Duke actually has a three-legged dog, and he’s quite spirited!) So once you’ve splinted the animal’s leg (which you’ll have to do, to prevent further injury), your sheep probably can still stray, and won’t just lie down and be passive. In fact, it’ll have more motivation than ever to run from you, given that you recently attacked it with a hammer.

Sheep aren’t the smartest animals in the world but they still have memories. If you’ve ever met a dog that hated men in hats, or had your cat sulk for days after you stepped on its paw, you know that animals have a pretty good sense for who they trust and who they don’t. When I was a little girl, I watched our neighbor’s sheep get sheared, and they absolutely knew what the sheering truck looked like and ran away from it. So the idea that the sheep would be more pliant after getting jumped by its shepherd seems unlikely to me.

But even if you do have a now-dormant sheep, you have to move it around. If you’re moving from pasture to pasture, a fully grown sheep is going to be difficult to carry for a sustained period of time. Luke has a shepherd carrying a sheep back on his shoulders. Fitzmyer (Luke, 2:409) argues that this image is probably intended to portray the passivity of the sheep – all the effort belongs to the shepherd who does the exhausting work of going to find a sheep and bring it the whole way home. This verse doesn’t suggest that this was a normal way for a sheep to get around. To carry an adult sheep for several weeks, one would likely need a cart.

So given the difficulty and danger of attacking the sheep, the unreliability of medical care for the sheep, and the physical limitations inherent in transporting the sheep, there’s a fairly obvious question to ask here about shepherds and stray sheep. If the sheep is this much trouble, why not just kill the sheep? Sure, you can’t get milk or wool from it anymore, but you still get lamb chops. Given that the sheep is unlikely to survive the broken leg – and that even today people generally kill sheep with broken legs – why not simplify the process and simply eat your most troublesome sheep? This applies just as well to the case of a hired hand versus the actual owner of the sheep, given that in both cases the sheep with a broken leg is likely to die. If the sheep truly can’t be saved from itself, and needs its legs broken to be stopped, no matter what the owner is still down a sheep. Just eat the wooly bastard.

Or, as our friends at Sheep! Magazine remind us, you can hobble the sheep by putting a leg brake on it.

The Source Test: Where Would This Be Recorded?

Traditions survive because someone writes them down, and writes them down again, and writes them down again, and one of those texts actually survives to the present day. So with something like the New Testament, it’s easy to see why these texts survived – people thought of them as scripture. But while people kept and copied Paul’s letters, they didn’t keep and copy every letter that was ever written in the Roman Empire. So that means our records are limited.

This means that a good question to ask of any claimed Bible story is “how did this information survive?” If it’s the kind of thing that would get carved on a statue (the name of an emperor, for instance) it’s pretty reliable. But if it’s a detail about how ordinary people lived their lives, that’s trickier. It could be derived from archeology (of houses, towns, etc), or from literature that preserved details of ordinary people’s lives (like the New Testament). But there aren’t as many places to look. So how would the custom of breaking your sheep’s legs survive?

There’s records of rural law and agriculture in the first century, but it’s hard to see why these texts would say anything about breaking your own sheep’s leg. Legally, it’s hard to imagine that before the advent of animal cruelty laws and the animal rights movement that anyone would have passed laws that prevent a person from hurting his or her own animal. There’s Cato the Elder’s book on farming, but that doesn’t really cover nomadic sheep herding. There’s a fair amount on agriculture and animal husbandry in rabbinic literature, but whether this dates back to the time of the Bible is still tricky, and of course you could simply just check the literature and see if this practice is ever described in the Talmud or other central rabbinic texts (it isn’t). In fact, 

Bava Metzia 32b articulates the principal of tzaar bali chayim, or the necessity of the prevention of suffering of animals. Presumably, breaking an animal’s leg is not preventing the suffering of animals. You can actually read here about an 18th century discussion about whether or not a zookeeper could break the wings of exotic birds to keep them from flying away – a near analogy to breaking the leg of a sheep to prevent it from escaping.

But on the whole, records of daily life in the ancient world are often difficult to come by. The kinds of people who would have been keeping sheep were, on the whole, not literate. Even then writing material like papyri and parchment is famously fragile and often needs to be carefully preserved or repeatedly copied to survive long enough for a historian to use it. 

So when you hear a claim about the history behind the Bible, consider carefully what kind of records would need to survive in order for us to know about it. Is the idea depicted in a novel? If so, is it supposed to be realistic? Or in an ancient history text? How reliable is that historian? Perhaps it might be on a mosaic or an engraving of some kind. If so, is there more than one way to interpret the image?

In light of this, we can see how the “breaking a leg’s lamb” tale fails this test. It is not plausible that shepherds left extensive literary records of their dealings, nor that secondary sources would have recorded them as well. In the few accounts we have that engage the practical matter of how to take care of a sheep, there’s no reference to this practice. 

The Bullshitter Test: Does Someone Have a Reason to Lie About This?

The Bullshitter’s Test is whether the claim has a sense of “made-upness” because some person, either ancient or modern, has a plausible motivation to lie or misrepresent something. 

In the case of ancient people, the Bullshitter’s Test applies to a claim that someone makes on behalf of someone else for some kind of propagandistic reason: does the claim sound as though someone may be making it up, or repeating it, to make another person, nation, or culture sound monstrous, exotic, strange, or bizarre? (Remember that ancient people were bullshitters, too.) In the case of modern people, the argument tends to favor things that have an apologetic edge. In both cases, the Bullshitter’s Test is ultimately the same - who looks good from this story? Who looks bad? Is there a reason to invent it?

A good example of this might be the often repeated story that Nero used Christians as human torches at his garden parties. Now, here’s the thing. The evidence that Christians were scapegoated for the fire at Rome actually is plausibly attested. Reference to Nero persecuting Christians is in Suetonius and Tertulllian. The Suetonius reference is not particularly friendly to Christians, saying that they were targeted because of their “new and mischievous” superstition. But the specific story of Nero scapegoating them for the Fire of Rome comes from Tacitus, who says this:

But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called "Chrestians" by the populace.

Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular.

Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.

(Fun fact, this is the first pagan literary reference to Jesus’s crucifixion.)

So, here’s the thing. A lot of this is very plausible. We know that Romans punished arson with burning alive. We also know that scapegoating Christians in Rome has a ring of plausibility, on the grounds that they were unpopular. But we also need to remember that Tacitus hated Nero. He was an extremely aggressive critic of him. 

Tacitus says that these executions were held on Nero’s own property, but that Nero’s attempt to scapegoat Christians ultimately backfired:

Nero had offered his Gardens for the spectacle, and gave an exhibition in his Circus, mixing with the crowd in the habit of a charioteer, or mounted on his car. Hence, in spite of a guilt which had earned the most exemplary punishment, there arose a sentiment of pity, due to the impression that they were being sacrificed not for the welfare of the state but to the ferocity of a single man.

Given how Tacitus feels about Nero, there’s a real possibility here that he might be gilding the lily a bit – insisting that as unpopular as Christians were, Nero was so much worse that people started to feel sorry for them. Again, this doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. But this story is doing some heavy lifting for Tactitus’s portrayal of Nero – Nero was so vicious and so determined to scapegoat someone for the fire that people started to feel bad for even these weirdos. What’s most plausible is that Nero did persecute Christians and they were perceived as being opponents of Rome. What’s less plausible is that he did it so spectacularly that people started feeling sorry for them. Once we add on the idea that Nero used Christians as human torches for his garden parties, that Nero burned Christians not only in staged executions (as was Roman custom) but semi-regularly at public events, the claim becomes even more tenuous.

Another good example might be the idea that worshippers would have sex with goats at the temple of Pan. Is there a reason why people might repeat this uncritically, ancient or modern? In the ancient world it adds a sense of the bizarre and exotic when an author makes a claim about another country – “over there, they do this!” This is, as we’ve seen, exactly the places where we have seen these claims. For modern people, it creates a dramatic foil for Jesus and his followers — pagans were disgusting, Jesus was dignified. (This one also intersects nicely with the “verisimilitude” claim. Have you ever heard of a society where people were genial to the idea of people having sex with animals? In a society as honor-driven as the ancient Mediterranean, does it seem likely that men would want to be seen by their associates and clients as a man who has sex with a goat?)

Another example of this might be positive propaganda for the claimant: does this make their case look better? This often applies in the case of Christian typologies that assign a parallel between Jesus and supposed Hebrew Bible/early Jewish religious practices that make extra obvious Jesus is a foretold messiah. The idea that Jesus was wrapped in a way that visually recalled a Passover lamb (which is historically implausible) fills this role nicely.

So does the story that Isaiah 53 is a “forbidden chapter” of the Bible for Jews, or that there’s some conspiracy to keep it out of synagogues. This probably comes from a misconstrual of the Haftara, or the portion of the prophets that is read in synagogues and does not include Isaiah 53, or a bunch of other prophetic texts. It happens in Christianity as well that not every single passage from a canon is included in lectionary public readings – for instance, the lectionary my church uses doesn’t include Judges 19 or Jude. So, just because a text is not part of an order of reading does not mean it is censored or forbidden. 

In reality, Jews are welcome to read Isaiah 53. It’s quoted in the Talmud. It’s in the critical edition of the Jewish Study Bible. And, it still doesn’t produce mass converts. Jews just just read Isaiah 53. differently than Christians do, and have a different concept of a messiah.

However, from the Christian point of view, the idea that Isaiah 53 so obviously predicts Jesus, so much so that no one could possibly read it and fail to become a Christian, is a very comforting belief for Christians. Isaiah 53 predicts Jesus, therefore Christianity is true. The spoiler for this belief is the fact that there’s a whole other religion out there – Judaism – that treats Isaiah 53 as canon. So, it must be true that Jews simply don’t read it. But in fact, they absolutely can read it, just like a Christian can read 2 John even though it’s not in the lectionary.

The Bullshitter’s Test when applied to the story of the shepherd breaking the sheep’s leg works pretty well on two fronts as positive propaganda. First, it provides an illustration that is favorable to Christian theodicy. Why does God allow bad things to happen? Well, because he’s the good shepherd, and good shepherds break legs. It also does double duty as a kind of “King David” defense for harsh or authoritarian patterns in pastoring or parenting. A pastor is supposed to be the shepherd of his flock – but if he hurts someone, that’s not terribly surprising, because that’s what shepherds do. 

Conclusion

The idea that ancient shepherds would break the legs of their sheep is completely unattested in ancient literature. The origins of this claim seem to be in the 20th century. However, it’s far from the only ridiculous claim about Bible history out there, as my readers no doubt know by now. 

The Turkey Tests are not a replacement for historical investigation, and they’re not failsafe. But I hope that by providing some ideas for how to think about claims, you might be inspired to do some investigating of your own. Just because someone says it happened 2000 years ago doesn’t mean it did. 

And please continue to send me your favorite Bible turkeys. These are fun to look up.