What you get from Google and Amazon

If it weren't for Google and Amazon and my own self-absorbtion, there's all sorts of things I'd have never learned. For instance, that there is a village in Holland called Nettelhorst. I assume that's where my ancestors came from, especially since my family's last name was originally von Nettelhorst.

Or that there's an elementary school in Chicago named after a relative of mine, Louis Nettelhorst.

I also found out that I've been quoted on occasion. In fact, most commentaries on Matthew or Luke since about 1990 have mentioned my theory for reconciling the genealogies of Jesus that I proposed in an article that appeared in 1988 in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (JETS). For instance, Raymond Brown footnoted that article in his book, The Birth of the Messiah. Last Saturday, as I was googling and trying to discover which translations of my book have appeared in print (at least 10 out of the 13 projected), I stumbled upon the fact (via Google, which has been digitizing every book in the world) that Josh McDowell actually quotes a full paragraph from the same article Raymond Brown only footnoted. It appears in his book, New Evidence That Demands a Verdict. So far Google has only scanned in the Spanish edition of that book, but you can see it here:

New Evidence That Demands a Verdict (Spanish)

UPDATE (Saturday November 22)

I picked up a copy of the English language version of New Evidence That Demands a Verdict at Barnes and Noble today. The quotation is of two paragraphs from the article and it appears on pages 297-298; I'm also listed in the index and the bibliography. The book was published back in 1999. I didn't find out I was in it until last Saturday.