Dreams Come True - Why Scholars are a Miserable Lot Who Often Only Seek to Make the World as Bleak as Themselves
Posted: Thu Apr 01, 2021 2:46 pm
The argument that Morton Smith discovering a letter which references the Gospel of Mark is 'too good to be true' because 'life never works that way' is only proof of one things - scholars are by and large a miserable lot of people who must as a whole regret their decision to enter the humanities. For I see plenty of examples - hundreds - of people who 'dream things' and then 'make them come true.' I happen to work in a field of people who aren't miserable, so I have a hard time relating to the skepticism of scholars. I must figure that none of the dreams of these people ever came true and life only taught them one thing - not to have dreams.
But then I realize I am a little hasty because there are a lot of scholars who 'dreamed' about discovering something and then set about to 'search' for said thing and - miraculously - discovered what they were looking for. An example from a JSTOR article I am reading:
But then I realize I am a little hasty because there are a lot of scholars who 'dreamed' about discovering something and then set about to 'search' for said thing and - miraculously - discovered what they were looking for. An example from a JSTOR article I am reading:
So of course because he 'hoped' to find the exact thing he found we 'know' that he really forged his discovery. Of course in Smith's case he was not even looking for a fragment of Mark. But the moral is - scholars CAN BE a wretched lot who IN SOME CASES would serve the world by leaving the earth as soon as possible.From the beginning of the great excavations of ostia in 1938 I hoped that perhaps the discovery of new fragments of the Fasti Ostienses would give us new dates for the time of Hadrian as they had done a few years earlier for Trajan. And then an amazing unforeseen thing happened: almost simulataneously was discovered a fragment of the Fasti Ostienses telling us that on January 24, 127 a temple of Serapis was dedicated in Ostia by one Ca[ti]ius (VIII K. Febr.templum Sarapi quod [.] Caltilius P [? --- ]/sua pecunia extruxit dedicatum [es]t) The Serapeum of Ostia and the Brick-Stamps of 123 A. D. A New Landmark in the History of Roman Architecture Herbert Bloch