Carol_White

You should have stuck with The Clash, you could have avoided this whole tragedy.

It's interesting that Japanese seems to do just fine without the equivalent of upside-down question marks. Often there's no way to tell if a Japanese sentence is a statement or a question until the very last word. Even in spoken Japanese, there's nothing you can do with your voice to indicate if it's a statement or a question.

Doesn't the name "Mattathias" have more syllables than necessary? Is this a typo?

I have. He was the keynote speaker at a university graduation ceremony.