Jacob Neusner RIP

Discussion about the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, Talmud, Dead Sea Scrolls, archaeology, etc.
StephenGoranson
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Re: Jacob Neusner RIP

Post by StephenGoranson »

1) Is there good reason to think that C14 dating had advanced enough in 1958 to be able to date as small a sample as a scraping of ink?
2) Is there good reason to indicate in his own words in his papers in the Smith College Archives that Quentin Quesnell changed his mind about the Mar Saba ms?
Secret Alias
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Re: Jacob Neusner RIP

Post by Secret Alias »

1) I don't know if Smith knew about the advances in carbon 14 dating until it was common knowledge among scholars. When it was common knowledge is up for debate
2) Quesnell continued to suspect it was a forgery until his dying day.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: Jacob Neusner RIP

Post by Secret Alias »

I've always read what Wikipedia reports on carbon-dating:
The method was developed by Willard Libby in the late 1940s and soon became a standard tool for archaeologists. Libby received the Nobel Prize for his work in 1960.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Joined: Sun Apr 19, 2015 8:47 am

Re: Jacob Neusner RIP

Post by Secret Alias »

As a voracious reader of the NY Times (demonstrated by his frequent appearance in the letters to the editor and personal anecdotes of colleagues) it is hard to believe - no IMPOSSIBLE to believe - that he didn't know about the advances and their application in archaeology. A recent NY Times article on the subject notes that the paper was reporting on the technology and Willard Libby as early as 1949 and as the article goes on to note anyone reading about archaeology in the 1950s would stumbled across frequent mention of the application of the technology:
The discovery of the principle behind carbon dating was reported in The New York Times two years before its remarkable implications were widely understood.

On Dec. 28, 1947, in a roundup of the year’s events in atomic physics, Waldemar Kaempffert wrote that “Prof. Willard F. Libby and his colleagues discovered that radioactive carbon 14 is produced by cosmic rays and that there is enough of it in all living matter to constitute one of the most important sources of radiation to which the human body is exposed.”

Two years later, the importance of the discovery had become clear. “Scientist Stumbles Upon Method to Fix Age of Earth’s Material” read the headline of an unsigned article on Page 29 of The Times on Sept. 6, 1949, marking the first time that readers learned of radiocarbon dating.

The article said that Dr. Libby, a 40-year-old chemistry professor at the University of Chicago, “stumbled on the technique two years ago when studying cosmic ray action on the atmosphere.” Then it offered a brief explanation of the method, saying that living materials contain radioactive carbon that decays after death at a known rate, and that this rate can be used to determine with great accuracy when a plant or animal died.

“We have reason to believe that ages up to 15,000 to 20,000 years can be measured with some accuracy,” Dr. Libby told The Times.

On Dec. 31, 1951, the newspaper reported that J. Laurence Kulp had improved the technique, so that it could be used to date materials as old as 30,000 years. Two years later, The Times reported that Canadian researchers were able to extend the range to 40,000 years with “liquid scintillation,” still used to test the radioactivity of low-energy isotopes.

Through the 1950s, The Times reported on the use of radiocarbon dating to discover the age of the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico, the wood in a 4,600-year-old Egyptian coffin, sandals found in a cave in Oregon and the wooden floor of an ancient Syrian palace.

Today, the technique continues to be refined, and dates of prehistoric objects and events are sometimes modified. As recently as last summer, Kenneth Chang reported that the newest techniques and equipment had been used to revise the dates of the period that Neanderthals and modern humans lived together in Europe.

But all of this depends on the principle that Dr. Libby was the first to elucidate, and his contribution did not go unnoticed. As The Times reported on Nov. 6, 1960, Dr. Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Nobel Committee cited him “for his method to use carbon 14 for age determination in archaeology, geology, geophysics and other branches of science.” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/scien ... ating.html
This Carlson-based theory is undoubtedly the single stupidest thing produced by and believed by brilliant minds in the history of scholarship. As many of my girlfriends said of me "how can someone so smart be so stupid ..." It requires us to believe (because of the evidence) that Smith went ahead with a stupid plan to gain notoriety just as he made it as a scholar and leaving the evidence which could be carbon 14-dated on a shelf at the monastery.

The theory might have worked at the time Quesnell was originally writing (in the 1970s) because he himself often voiced doubt that the MS even existed ('all we have is these bad photographs without even so much as the edges of the book visible'). Quesnell's original work was focused on the fact that we didn't know the MS was real because it was 'over there' presumably at Mar Saba. But once he went there and saw it, he didn't publish anything because (as he himself admits) it looked exactly as a Byzantine text from that time period was supposed to look.

Yes he wanted the police to carbon date it. He went to the police station and didn't get any help from the Jerusalem Patriarchate. But his failure to publish his experiences and his data is a much greater crime than anything Smith can be accused of. He had an obligation to publish his photos.
Last edited by Secret Alias on Tue Oct 25, 2016 6:49 am, edited 1 time in total.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Joined: Sun Apr 19, 2015 8:47 am

Re: Jacob Neusner RIP

Post by Secret Alias »

Here is an overview of Smith's conclusions about the document. Hardly things that he needed the document to prove:
Primitive Source

The secret Gospel recounts a story Professor Smith sees as almost identical with the account that John expanded into the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead. “It helps us complete a long line of parallels between Mark and John, filling the gap that existed,” Professor Smith suggested. “The parallelism now continues from the sixth chapter of both Mark and John until the account of the Crucifixion.”

Stylistically, the secret Gospel is close to the Bible's Gospel according to Mark, and Professor Smith suggests there was a primitive gospel from which the books of Mark and John were both drawn.

“This would take us back well before the year 70,” he suggested. “It would give us a notion of the Gospel circulating at or before the time of Paul, who is our earliest source for Christianity, and could thus be much closer to the time of Jesus than the canonical Gospels. This is not an outlandish possibility. Most scholars agree that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are both taken from Mark.”

Professor Smith credits Prof. Cyril C. Richardson, dean of graduate studies at Union Theological Seminary, with the breakthrough leading to the remaining conclusions. What Professor Richardson suggested was that Mark 10:13 to 10:45 closely reflects the content of an early baptismal service. (These passages deal with Jesus's blessing children, a rich, young ruler, rewards, Jesus's foretelling death and resurrection and responding to requests of James and John.)

“Professor Richardson's suggestion enables us to understand the nature of the initiation rite that the secret Gospel reports,” Professor Smith said. “We now see that ‘the mystery of the kingdom of God’ is the content of baptism. The canonical Gospel's story [Mark 14:51‐52] of a young man apprehended at night alone with Jesus at the time of Jesus's arrest (a story which scholars have puzzled over for 1,800 years) is now un derstandable as an account of a baptismal rite conducted by Jesus in which the believer united with Jesus and was possessed by his spirit.

“Once we have this report that Jesus administered a nocturnal, secret initiation, we naturally ask, ‘Why nocturnal? Why secret? Particularly if this was only a baptism? What was going on?”

Schisms Noted

Professor Smith suggested that the answers could be determined from a consideration of the splits in early Christianity. Some Christians, he said, insisted on strict obedience to Jewish law, others argued for selective obedience, a third group declared itself emancipated from Jewish law and dedicated to guidance by the spirit and a fourth group was blatantly libertine.

Jesus himself violated Jewish law: he did not observe the Sabbath, he consorted with publicans and sinners, he did not fast, or wash his hands before eating. But at times he urged observance of the law.

Some scholars said that Jesus's words should be taken figuratively, others argued that the libertine texts were exaggerated or misunderstood and still others maintained that Jesus taught that moral law was binding, ritual law not.

Professor Smith argued that Jesus distinguished between levels of his following: For those already in the kingdom of heaven (thanks to secret baptism), the law was not ‐binding. But Jesus urged others to respect the law.

How did Jesus persuade his intimates of his special position and of their membership in the heavenlyelect? Professor Smith replied: “I believe the answer is that Jesus had a way with schizophrenics, and that he practiced some sort of hypnotic or suggestive discipline embodied in rituals derived from ancient magic.

“If you take as your task the problem of finding what social type Jesus is, in the gallery of figures provided by the Greco‐Roman period, the best answer is the mirecle‐working magician.”

Magical Practices

Professor Smith compiled a long list of practices associated with magicians of antiquity and ascribed by the New Testament to Jesus—“the power to make anyone he wanted follow him, exorcism (even at a distance), remote control of spirits, giving disciples power over demons, miraculous cures of hysterical conditions including fever, paralysis, hemorrhage, deafness, blindness, loss of speech, raising the dead, stilling storms, walking on water, miraculously providing food, miraculous escapes, making himself invisible, foreknowledge, mindreading, claiming to be a god or son of god or in image of god.”

“All these claims and stories and rites are those of a magician, not of a rabbi or a Messiah,” Professor Smith, notes in “The Secret Gospel.” “Who ever heard of the Messiah's being an exorcist, let alone being eaten?”

Professor Smith noted that many of the powers claimed are paralleled’ by practices described in the so‐called magical papyri—documents discovered in Egypt that report pagan practices. The magical papyrus most closely associated with a eucharistlike practice deals with erotic magic. And the magical papyri as well as Jewish handbooks purport to explain the hypnotic technique allowing men to enjoy and transmit the illusion of ascent into heaven. “The stories of Jesus's resurrection seem distorted versions of such an illusory ascent,” Professor Smith suggested.

A Time of Danger

“The spirit was at first the spirit of Jesus, then gradually became independent of him and was eventually located in the Trinity,” he went on, noting: “When the spirit went public, the Aposties lost much of their control of the company and came into danger of displacement.”

“If the Christians were an innocent sect practicing pure benevolence, why did the Romans make such strenu ous efforts to stamp them out?” Professor Smith asked rhetorically, and replied: “It was because the Christians engaged in magical practices, and magic was a criminal act.”

Professor Smith expects lively controversy about his findings, less from documents than from people. “I'm reconciled to the attacks,” he said. “Thank God I have tenure!”


A version of this archives appears in print on May 29, 1973, on page 39 of the New York edition with the headline: A Scholar Infers Jesus Practiced Magic. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
It has always been my contention that there is a huge chasm between what the MS actually says about Jesus and Morton Smith's interests and pet theories (= magic, Judaism, Hebrew gospel). If, as many claim, Smith invented the text to further his own beliefs, practices, you simply can't get to Jesus the magician from this text. You can't prove that there was a Hebrew gospel before Mark from this text. It's stupid.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
StephenGoranson
Posts: 2312
Joined: Thu Apr 02, 2015 2:10 am

Re: Jacob Neusner RIP

Post by StephenGoranson »

Here's a book review by A. I Baumgarten of a biography of Jacob Neusner, Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast by A. W. Hughes (2016) that I consider well-done:
http://enochseminar.org/review/12805
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