I am disturbed by the allegation on the CETA list that I do not exist. Five years ago I argued that existence is not a predicate, but that does not help. Last night I had a dream. I was shown a book published just before Y3K by a Professor Joh Saoue of Korean University, Vancouver. The title was The Myth of Robert Brow. With massive footnotes there was the proof that this Brow who was alleged to have lived a thousand years before was a conflation of five very dubious persons.
One Robert Brow (probably Rao) He was an Indian born in Karachi, attended a school in Lahore (when those cities were still part of India), was an officer for five years in the Indian Army, was married and his four children were born in the State of Uttar Pradesh, and taught in Hindi for eight years in Allahabad. Another was clearly Belgian. His grandparents and his mother all lived in Brussels, his first schooling was Rue Faider, he spoke and taught in French, he was a witness at two weddings, and there is correspondence with the family business, Franchomme & Cie.
There was a very British Robert Brow, whose genealogy goes back to the Brows of Dumfries, Scotland, and attended schools in Kent and Buckingham. He was a private in the Yorkshire and Lancashire Regiment during the war, is on the list of graduates both of Cambridge and London Universities, married a woman from Sutton, Surrey, and was still being paid a British pension in 1999.
A fourth Brow later in that century was an American. His mother played tennis for the Forest Hills Tennis Club, his sister lived in White Plains, then in Old Lyme Connecticut, where the name Robert Brow appears several years in the Rocky Neck State Park fees. He studied theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Professor Ward Gasque also records he heard this Brow speak at Fuller Theological Seminary in October 1963.
The Brow, who is usually claimed as the original Canadian gadfly, once tried to sell Volkswagen cars (totally unsuccessfully), was an Anglican minister in the Dioceses of Toronto and Ontario, and retired either near the village of Battersea, or at 116 Rideau Street, Kingston. He was thought to be alive just before Y2K, but this was disproved on the Canadian Evangelical Theological Association List (the earliest example of discussion on the Internet) on March 31, 1999.
PS All the above facts are recorded in a book called Autobio
2000, which Professor Joh Saoue obviously plagiarized just before
Y3K without mentioning it in his footnotes.