You, of course, know the phrase “the elephant in the room.” It refers to any problem or obstacle that people refuse to acknowledge or see, even though it is painfully obvious and impossible to hide (“the 800-pound gorilla” means the same thing). Like any good phrase, it had to start somewhere — but where?

            Some say it originated in an 1882 mock-detective story by Mark Twain, titled “The Stolen White Elephant.” In that story, a white elephant, bound from India to England as a gift to Queen Victoria, goes missing and turns up in New Jersey, and a large number of detectives set out to solve the mystery, not noticing that the elephant is in plain sight.

            Others say the phrase originated with the 1814 short story “The Inquisitive Man,” by the Russian writer Ivan Kyrlov, about a man who is so absorbed by the detail in small things on display in a museum that he overlooks an elephant seated among all the displays.

            The Oxford English Dictionary records the first official use of failing to see “the elephant in the room” as by The New York Times on June 20, 1959.

            There’s no reference to an elephant anywhere in scripture, unless you think the behemoth mentioned a few places in the Bible refers to that majestic creature. All the same, there’s an elephant in the room when it comes to biblical history, and it’s a big one. Lots of people who read their Bibles all the way through, from Genesis 1 through Revelation 22, miss it.

Fortunately, the apostle Paul did not, and he sneaks that elep

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