Should Gmirkin be compared to Galileo?

[Peter Kirby]

Just to be very clear, at no point in my original posting did I compare myself to Galileo. Rather, the comparison—which I consider quite apt—was that of Stephen Goranson to the opponents of Galileo:

“Stephen Goranson’s approach to my research is highly reminiscent, in my opinion, of contemporary responses to Galileo’s research in the early 1600s…

This does read like ad hominem against people who debate, disagree, and point out various issues.

[Russell Gmirkin]

I could have fun and compare this thread to the Inquisition, but I don’t take this forum that seriously. There are a number of people on this forum who are genuinely interested in ideas and evidence, and who are willing to look through the telescope, which is why I like to occasionally drop in. And there are others who never saw a new idea they didn’t want to kill, who often make this forum a miserable reading experience, but whom I choose mostly to ignore.

This is a really healthy attitude.

I'm impressed and will volunteer here the fact that you earned my respect with this response.

Thanks.

[Russell Gmirkin]

Just to be very clear, at no point in my original posting did I compare myself to Galileo. Rather, the comparison—which I consider quite apt—was that of Stephen Goranson to the opponents of Galileo:

“Stephen Goranson’s approach to my research is highly reminiscent, in my opinion, of contemporary responses to Galileo’s research in the early 1600s…

This does read like ad hominem against people who debate, disagree, and point out various issues.

No, I have no problem with debate or disagreement. Debate is a healthy part of academic life, and it is always possible for two people to honestly appraise the same evidence and disagree with its significance.

Rather, I was making a very specific point about Stephen Goranson, who has made a lifelong hobby of criticizing my research, from the early 2000s (on the Dead Sea Scrolls discussion group Orion) to the present, but has quite famously (as documented on this list) not read my recent 2017 or 2022 books (among others) whose research he nevertheless feels entitled to attack. It is in this very specific respect that I made a comparison to those in Galileo's day:

One can thus trace exactly how Galileo’s opponents, including prominent academics of his day, were able to maintain their opposition to his paradigm-changing views: by refusing to view the evidence. And rejecting his dangerous theories on that basis.

I really don't want to beat up on Stephen Goranson, who is an adequate scholar and not a terrible person. He's published a few decent articles on the Dead Sea Scrolls and other topics. I'm not sure what his obsession is with me, or why, as a PhD and former academic library employee, he doesn't read the very books he critiques, contrary to academic norms. But let's give him a break and not make him a focus of this thread.

[Leucius Charinus]

Another remarkable set of posts. I wouldn't believe it unless I read it.

<<Nothing worth quoting>>

Here's the "Nothing worth quoting":

It is a useful question (above, SA, Monday).
To rephrase: How many Hebrew copies of the Torah existed before someone, or some group, somewhere, decided to translate it into Greek for the first time? (And was that then the whole current five-book Torah, or a portion of it?)

In my view, there were numerous Hebrew copies, and not all of them were identical.

You are entitled to your view. But everyone is entitled to ask for the evidence supporting it so that they can independently decide whether your view is confirmed or disconfirmed by the evidence that you may adduce. What evidence would you adduce for the existence of numerous Hebrew copies prior to (say for example) c.273 BCE?

In the REG view there was only one Hebrew copy, the one first made, in, of all places, Alexandria, Egypt, not a center of Hebrew learning, then or now. Though there was at some time started a taboo about writing one Hebrew name, there was no taboo about writing Torah. To declare that no Hebrew copy existed before 273--how convenient for the REG scenario, and how blatantly improbable!

Does RG make a declaration without a treatment of the evidence? Have you looked through and analysed RG's treatment of the evidence?

Then, in the REG assertion, the same folks who created the Hebrew copy in Alexandria also came up with the Greek translation. How convenient for the REG scenario.

Does RG make an assertion without a treatment of the evidence? Is this the actual scenario?

And how evidence-free (despite oddly both actually using and yet simultaneously rejecting the Aristeas Letter; as if.) Then--though the Library of Alexandria may not be known for the, say, Alan Lomax type of collecting of folk songs in the 20th century for the Library of Congress--this REG-imagined project resulted in the putative loss of that particular Hebrew text type, but the "Alexandria Library" Greek version more or less survived. How "convenient."

What do the DSS have to say about the evidence (and its chronology) for the preservation of the Hebrew and Greek text types? IDK. I am asking a question.

And while in the mode of asking questions I have often wondered whether the earliest and latest dates proposed for the Letter of Aristeas imply a range of dates (earliest and latest) for the assembly of the Hebrew Bible which match this date range. IDK the answer to this question.

The above scenario is already a dead letter, apart from with REG and a few pals. Ask the Hebrew Torah scholar that you most respect. The claim has been published and plainly known amongst relevant academics since at least 2006, and who has agreed?

This is like saying here is a possible new paradigm from first principles and asking an expert on the old paradigm to weigh in. The weighing in cannot be to dismiss the new paradigm on the basis that the old paradigm is correct. The weighing in of contrary opinion about the new paradigm must be conducted from first principles and include an objective assessment of all the surviving evidence in the time period being investigated.

There is also the analogy between the introduction of new information by means of asking the question whether the field should include looking to that part of the sky which includes a Torah composition date within the Hellenistic period. This involves new analysis of a new way of looking at new evidence. A new tool to examine the field. Much like a telescope. If the paradigm does not admit the use of the new tool what does this imply for the advancement (or if you prefer "fine-tuning") of the field? If the highly respected Hebrew Torah scholar is unwilling to examine the possibility that the Torah appeared as late as the Hellenistic period, and simply rejects the proposition, then what does that say about open minds and current methodologies?

In addition to saying so, to avoid some pursuing of a dead end, REG clearly has the talent to present good research, if he can allow himself to move on from this.

//

To repeat, REG surely has the ability to present good research, if he can let this one go. Of course, he's free to insist and to invest even more time in this model. And I'm not betting a suggestion from me would amount to a turning point. That's up to him.

This to me looks very much like SG giving RG a chance to recant. No offence SG.

Can I ask SG in summary:

"Do you think it is possible or impossible that the Torah was first produced as late as the Hellenistic period, and if it is impossible then what evidence would you adduce to disconfirm (or refute) such an hypothesis?"

Thanks.

[andrewcriddle]

The story about Cremonini refusing to look through Galileo's telescope is formally quite true, but possibly misleading. See refusing to look

Andrew Criddle

[StephenGoranson]

I have tried to focus on the c. 273-272 proposal rather than on personalities.
By Gmirkin casting me as an anti-scientific Galileo-dismisser type,
and yet, somehow, denying presenting himself as a Galileo type
may be either oblivious or an intended deflection.
Am I to defend myself by saying e.g. I went to Israel seven times and participated in archaeology in Galilee (coincidentally Galileo name related)?
Was that me being anti-scientific?
I have read much REG has written.
To be brief, so far, imo, iiuc, Torah-writing began before 273, and editions continued after.
And, so far, I'm unaware of any evidence Torah was composed in Alexandria.
And I look forward to reading the new Plato biography tomorrow, which may or may not help clarify proposed claims about prescribed dishonesty.

[Secret Alias]

Galileo based his understanding on observable phenomena. As all the evidence suggests a Greek translation of the Pentateuch was established c 270 BCE, Gmirkin is unlike Galileo. At best he's more like a famous mystic (take your pick) who "unlocks" truths through penetrating secrets, meta-connections etc. I don't see how you resolve (a) the 250 BCE MT fragment of Exodus at Qumran and (b) a 270 BCE creation of a Hebrew text resembling the LXX in Alexandria. Yes, there's a plus or minus beside the Qumran fragment. But why not also the LXX? Why isn't that 270 BCE plus or minus whatever? It's hard to get over Philo's "Pharos festival" as a reminiscence of the TRANSLATION of the Pentateuch. Surely the introduction of the date of the Pentateuch would have been known by Greek-speaking Alexandrian Jews if there had been no Pentateuch before 270 BCE. It wouldn't have been mistaken for a translation. It also goes against the appeal to Adler. If there wasn't widespread adherence to Jewish rituals and practices described in the Pentateuch then what were the Jews celebrating at Pharos? It would suggest that the Pentateuch could be accepted by Jews while adherence to "Jewish law" (the specific regulations of Moses in Leviticus and elsewhere) was ignored. Philo's Jewish community doesn't seem to be "very Jewish." Nevertheless it venerated the Pentateuch. Surely we're not going to pull a mountainman here and claim that Philo was "fake." Where are the mikva'ot in Alexandria?

[billd89]

Peter, is your point that the history of Galileo has no relevance to changes in mainstream paradigms --- per Kuhn -- today? Are you saying Kuhn was wrong to refer to the reactions to Galileo's work?

Nope. I guess my point is -- is everyone to be exalted to being a new Galileo just because they have a new and different idea?

Oh dear, PK, even you surely know that that is an indecent disrepresentation fo the comparison by Kuhn just about anyone else who has made this common comparison.

I ask you to identify for us all actual evidence that ""exaltation" is the point of the comparison -- and not that it is the reaction to new ideas and theories. Surely even you have read Kuhn.

Or once again will you evade the challenge to support your assertions with evidence --- your mind-reading of attitudes and motives really doesn't cut it.

If there is no such point, then I have again misfired. Sorry.

I'm going to resurrect this thread. And trash it. And exalt it. All at once.

Here is Thomas Kuhn, interviewing Ludwig Edelstein several years after Emma's death, and 3 yrs before Ludwig passed. According to his own recollection, Berlin-raised Edelstein was then 19yo, interested in advanced/debated scientific theory and perhaps already philosophically inclined. Incidentally, Kuhn (who cites Edelstein's friend and Hopkins colleague A.O. Lovejoy as the most profound influence) had recently completed The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was being published around that month of the interview. Prof. Einstein had died 7 years earlier -- I think there was a strong impulse to record aged witnesses before they croaked. Of course, we may readily infer from this interview that Edelstein knew something of Kurt Gödel and the Logical Positivists too -- by the mid 1930s, too. I wonder how familiar Edelstein was w/ Gödel's Incompleteness theorems c.1938, though, and what he made of that.

Edelstein studied philosophy under German Existentialists Karl Jaspers and Erich Frank, but I have elsewhere cited at least one personal acquaintance who claimed Edelstein's outlook was "religious".

It probably was in 1920. As I told you I had started school, but I happened to be in Bad (Nauheim) then. The meeting of the Deutsche Naturforscher-Gesellschaft was taking place. Einstein’s theory of relativity was discussed — it seems to me for the first time at a public meeting. I am really not sure. By some device I was able to get into the morning session. It started rather early in the morning. Practically everybody I had ever heard of in physics was there; Planck, Debye, Nernst, a number of other people. The discussion went on and on, and I did not understand anything at all, naturally. But I remember very much that after two hours or so Mr. Lenard got up and attacked Einstein quite violently.
...
And there was silence for a moment, and finally Einstein said in a very low voice, “May I point out to my colleague Lenard that common sense is something very relative.” As far as I can recall the words, he said in German “Darf ich dem Herrn Kollegen Lenard sagen, dass der gesunde Menschenverstand etwas sehr relativitischist.” Laughter is not the adequate word to describe the reaction. Nobody could say anything, and people went home. It was also near lunchtime, I think. But it was more, I feel, that was said at the argument between Lenard and Einstein. You see I at that time didn’t know anything about the debate that had gone on behind the scenes, so my impression as I have remembered it through all these years was really, I think, the impression I had at that moment. I did not even know about the controversy, and the tension between Jewish physics and German physics…Later on it was quite clear, you see. I came as a student to Heidelberg in 1925, and by that time I knew. As a matter of fact I went to one of the lectures of Lenard, a general lecture in physics.

Curious. Where Edelstein indicates belief in a "Jewish Physics" (i.e. "Jewish" science), so a "Jewish philosophy" and certainly a "Jewish spirituality" are certainly acceptable and readily inferred.

1938: "I was to test my thinking by the new God-consciousness within. Common sense would thus become uncommon sense. I was to sit quietly when in doubt, asking only for direction and strength to meet my problems as He would have me."

Also, this bit, after the 'Prosaic Steel Girder' and 'Whirling Electrons' (I'm citing the Edelsteins' 1938 manuscript):

On one proposition, however, these men and women are strikingly agreed. Everyone of them has gained access to, and believes in a Power greater than himself. This Power has in each case accomplished the miraculous, the humanly impossible. As a celebrated American statesman {Al Smith didn't say it!} puts it, "Let's look at the record."

Here are one hundred men and women, worldly and sophisticated indeed. They flatly declare to you that since they have come to believe in a Power greater than themselves, to take a certain attitude toward that Power, and to do certain simple things, there has been a revolutionary change in their way of living and thinking. They tell you that in the face of collapse and despair, in the face of the total failure of their human resources, that a new Power, peace, happiness, and sense of direction has flowed into them. This happened soon after they whole-heartedly met a few simple requirements. Once confused and baffled by the seeming futility of existence they will show you the underlying reasons why they were making heavy going of life. Leaving aside the drink question, they tell why living was so unsatisfactory. They will show you how the change came over them. When one hundred people, much like you, are able to say that consciousness of The Presence of God is today the most important fact of their lives, they present a powerful reason why you too should have faith.

This world of ours has made more material progress in the last century than in all the millenniums which sent before. Almost everyone knows the reason. Students of ancient history tell us that the intellect of men in those days was equal to the best of today. Yet in ancient times material progress was painfully slow. The spirit of modern scientific inquiry, research and invention was almost unknown. In the realm of the material, men's minds were fettered by superstition, tradition, and all sorts of fixed ideas. The contemporaries of Columbus thought a round earth preposterous. Others like them came near putting Galileo to death for his astronomical heresies.

But ask yourself this: are not some of us just as biased and unreasonable about the realm of the spirit as were the ancients about the realm of the material?

In 1938, the Anonymous Authors outlined a Therapeutic Program for exaltation, the anagogy of Alexandrian A. A.s. presented to average Americans, sick ones (i.e. gentiles). The Edelsteins have re-imagined or re-constructed a Jewish metaphyics alluded to in such diverse sources as Philo Judaeus, the NT and heresiologist Church Fathers. Divinization or glorification by a ritualistic Judeo-Hermetic 'Jacob's Ladder' is not something most people easily grasp, however. Oh well. That cryptic, occult foundation was buried & lost...

[StephenGoranson]

Russell Gmirkin wrote, above, Sat Apr 29, 2023 4:39 pm, in part:
“Stephen Goranson’s approach to my research is highly reminiscent, in my opinion, of contemporary responses to Galileo’s research in the early 1600s…"
By comparing me to Galileo's critics, Gmirkin in effect compared his research to Galileo's research.

[Secret Alias]

Everyone should feel that they are like Galileo. I don't see that as a bad thing. We should all feel we are budding Supermen and Superwomen. The problem is, as I said when I used to play football, life is a game where there is only one ball. Football is about limited resources. Not everyone scores, not everyone wins. Just a fact of life. In the same way, maybe each one of us is a Galileo. Just not this week with this theory.