[ithkuil]

I guess the connection is that when you're far away from home you can project an aura of confidence/respectability that you may not have at home where people know you since the days you were not yet an expert.

Of course people can't be born experts and for every expert there must be a prior step in their personal growth when they were less expert. But that doesn't prevent people from using an imperfect heuristic for judging whether you can trust someone's expertise.

[throwaway314155]

Perhaps it's possible that it's just not a reference to the bible in the first place?

[ithkuil]

It's possible. I don't know. Sometimes people just come up with the same ideas over and over.

Classic example is the pyramid structures around the world. The fact that people found that it's easy to pile rocks that way in order to build tall stable structures doesn't mean that there was a single culture that span the entire globe.