Spelling error turns Mormons leaders into apostates

Apostles, not apostates: BYU paper’s ungodly typo

PROVO, Utah (AP) — Thousands of issues of Brigham Young University’s student newspaper were pulled from newsstands because a front-page photo caption misidentified leaders of the Mormon church as apostates instead of apostles.
[...]

An apostate is someone who abandons a previous loyalty (to a faith, movement, politcal party, cause, etcetera).

Many Christians — most of whom consider the Mormon Church to be, at best, a cult of Christianity, due to the many ways in which LDS teachings deviate from historical, Biblical Christianity — would consider the mistake to be somewhat of a Freudian slip.

The newspaper staff retrieved as many of the 18,500 copies of the paper as possible and reprinted them with the correction. And it issued an apology to the apostles. The staff also explained how it happened: an error in spell-checking.

It started when a student misspelled the word “apostle” when writing the photo caption. When the caption was put through the editing software’s spell checker, it was flagged, and the editor accidentally clicked the first word that came up on the correct list: “apostate.” The mistake made it past two proofreaders before being sent off to the printing press.

University spokeswoman Carri Jenkins said the typo, which replaced the intended word with a virtual antonym, was an “honest mistake” and that no university or church administrator has sought to punish those responsible for the blunder. She said the problem is being handled internally by newspaper and Department of Communications staff.

Incidentally, even the Bible has seen its share of typos, and Mormons are not the only ones who misquote the book.

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