"I can scarcely believe that no one else has ever deduced their presence, but I have never once heard it mentioned before." Me

Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks? 999

Ya, but 999, he was only one thou old, so no connection with the scriptural thing, and he wasn't keeping his age or existence a secret.

I lived in the world of the inerrant Bible for a number of years. Some things like this we rationalized with some remarkable mental gymnastics; other things we just screened out mentally, so the problems didn't exist for us.