The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (full text)

Discussion about the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, Talmud, Dead Sea Scrolls, archaeology, etc.
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Joseph_Abbott
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The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (full text)

Post by Joseph_Abbott »

This fascinating book is available in full online and is really worth the read.

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/scrol ... m#contents
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stephan happy huller
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (full text)

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Dumbest book of all time. Makes Joe Atwill read like Shakespeare.
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spin
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (full text)

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stephan happy huller wrote:Dumbest book of all time. Makes Joe Atwill read like Shakespeare.
I wouldn't be so harsh. It was a contributor to the liberation of the scrolls. :mrgreen:
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (full text)

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Thank you Joseph, for this link to a valuable resource. I find it both instructive, and interesting. Well done!
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh wrote:8 - The Dilemma for Christian Orthodoxy

There is virtually unanimous agreement among all the concerned parties - apart, of course, from the international team themselves and the Ecole Biblique - that the history of Dead Sea Scroll scholarship does constitute a 'scandal'. And there would seem to be little doubt that something irregular - licit, perhaps, but without moral or academic sanction - lurks behind the delays, the procrastinations, the equivocation, the restrictions on material.

To some extent, of course, this irregularity may indeed stem simply from venal motives - from academic jealousy and rivalry, and from the protection of vested interests. Reputations do, after all, stand to be made or broken, and there is no higher currency in the academic world than reputation. The stakes, therefore, at least for those 'on the inside', are high.

They would be high, however, in any sphere where a lack of reliable first-hand testimony had to be redressed by historical and archaeological research. They would be high if, for example, a corpus of documents pertaining to Arthurian Britain were suddenly to come to light.
But would there be the same suppression of material as there is in connection with the Dead Sea Scrolls?
And would one find, looming as a supreme arbiter in the background, the shadowy presence of an ecclesiastical institution such as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith?
The Nag Hammadi Scrolls are a case in point. Certainly, they afforded ample opportunity for venal motives to come into play. Such motives, to one or another degree, may indeed have done so. But the Church had no opportunity to establish control over the texts found at Nag Hammadi. And, venal motives notwithstanding, the entire corpus of Nag Hammadi material found its way quickly into print and the public domain.
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (full text)

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stephan happy huller wrote:Dumbest book of all time. Makes Joe Atwill read like Shakespeare.
I don't think the book is stupid at all. Its a great summary of the suppression of the scrolls by the Catholics. It actually isn't as harsh as it could be. It doesnt mention the fact the the Catholic scholars smoked around the scrolls and taped them together using regular scotch tape, causing extensive damage to the scrolls.

The author's little theory tacked on to the end of the book about Jesus being a Zealot, is of course stupid, but I can see why they wanted to try to introduce some controversy - it sells books. And at least they preceded Reza Aslan by 20 years. (I'm not sure how Aslan made a fortune rehashing that old idea).
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (full text)

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Joseph_Abbott wrote:
stephan happy huller wrote:Dumbest book of all time. Makes Joe Atwill read like Shakespeare.
I don't think the book is stupid at all. Its a great summary of the suppression of the scrolls by the Catholics. It actually isn't as harsh as it could be. It doesnt mention the fact the the Catholic scholars smoked around the scrolls and taped them together using regular scotch tape, causing extensive damage to the scrolls.
Sadly, the book is utterly incompetent. The notion of the suppression of the scrolls by the Catholics is silly, but the sort of speculation one can expect when people who don't know what they are talking about sound off. The Texts were under the control of possessive scholars who were poorly funded and whose major income came from the scrolls. They had the misguided thought that they had to protect the scrolls from the sorts of lunacies that inspired Baigent and Leigh, who obviously turned to the more speculative pundits. (And Eisenman is a closet nutter, who can't accommodate himself to the fact that his imaginative scenario has been falsified by the C14 dating of the scrolls.)

While there has been a lot of nonsense written about the scrolls from the establishment, all the Essene speculation, speculation that "Damascus" was Qumran or similar, that the Copper Scroll was a work of fantasy, etc., most of the alternative writings up to the time of Baigent and Leigh were further of the perch. The conspiracy theory of Catholic suppression certainly fed a conspiracy hungry audience but like all conspiracy theories had not a scrap of evidence to sustain it.
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (full text)

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spin wrote:Sadly, the book is utterly in competent.
Well, I know you have worked at Qumran, so you are light years ahead of me, but, in my view, traveling in my one oared rowboat, their claims of Catholic interference ring true, when comparing, as they have pointed out, the prompt release of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, in their entirety, shortly upon discovery.

With respect to the claims and counter claims, that kind of bickering goes on, in academia, all the time. I am genuinely disinterested in that aspect of their book, but nevertheless find their book very instructive, because of the elaboration of who did what, when, in attempting to sort out, the reasons for the multi-decade long delay in publication of the scrolls. What your succinct rejoinder has omitted, in my opinion, spin, is a link to some other resource, which presents an alternative view, i.e. bypassing the "nutter" stuff, and elaborating on this "possessive scholars" bit. To me, writing "possessive scholars" as an alternative explanation for a forty year hiatus, doesn't quite cut it, but I would profit from reading a reference if you have one.

You mentioned 14Carbon studies, again sans link, and without explaining how possession of that (supposedly useful) information is related to the fundamental issue of identifying who had been responsible for delay of the game? What is there about achieving a supposedly more accurate date for the purported creation of the Qumran manuscripts, that justifies delaying their publication? I don't object to your claiming that these two guys are buffoons, but I do object to suggesting that their fundamental contribution (elaborating a "conspiracy" theory to explain why the manuscripts from the caves had not been published) has been "falsified", for that word, in English, implies FRAUD. There may well have been fraud committed, but if so, it was enacted by the Catholics supervising this endeavor, not these two guys, or the other "nutters", who preceded them. You may wish to elaborate in a sentence or two, just how the evidence from radiocarbon dating justified withholding publication by the "possessive scholars". In my opinion, the radiocarbon dating is a simple distraction, unrelated to any delay in publication. I certainly don't understand what you mean, when you suggest that someone's hypothesis had been repudiated ("falsified"), by this 14C data.
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (full text)

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who had been responsible for delay of the game
Again avi you have an amazing way of getting off on tangents that mean nothing. Don't you know any scholars? You really should get to know some of these people. I have a long to them as friends on Facebook and the other day I realized why they are so mean to amateur scholars. Being a real scholar sucks nowadays. It's a lot of preparation for little pay and little prestige. In the old days, by knowing about the Bible you had broad social influence. People actually cared about this stuff. Now these people have shrinking classrooms and the field isn't treated with the respect that it used to.

The scholars who handled the scrolls initially were from the old days. They didn't answer to anyone. They saw themselves as an elite group and they didn't care about the rest of us. That's all.
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (full text)

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stephan happy huller wrote:The scholars who handled the scrolls initially were from the old days. They didn't answer to anyone. They saw themselves as an elite group and they didn't care about the rest of us. That's all.
It's a bit more than that. They were also timid and slow. And they had the spectacle of the nitwit theories, such as christianity stemming from Qumran, flying around, so they wanted to limit the damage, but, by restricting the information, they fanned the nitwittery, as seen with Baigent and Leigh for example, and prevented real scholars from doing their jobs. Allegro was right to get the stuff into the purview of academia. It's better to get it out than to get the apparatus wonderful and error-free and take twenty or thirty years to do so. Hopeless Strugnell got it right when he started farming out the stuff he had to other scholars, such as Qimron and the Eshels. That started the wall coming down.
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Roger Pearse
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (full text)

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avi wrote:... in my view ... their claims of Catholic interference ring true, when comparing, as they have pointed out, the prompt release of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, in their entirety, shortly upon discovery.
Erm, I don't think the Nag Hammadi texts were published "shortly" after discovery. Precisely the same problem occurred with these.

The Nag Hammadi discovery occurred in December 1945, when a couple of Egyptian peasants digging for fertiliser found a buried jar, and, hoping for gold, smashed it open. I digested some notes on the find here. Publication was only in 1972-84, and then only because James M. Robinson became interested in the question in the 60's, and was able to leverage his contacts with UNESCO to force publication. The scholars who divided the mss up among themselves were in no hurry whatever to publish, and some of them -- such as Rudolph Kasser -- never forgave Robinson.

Indeed it is going on now. The ps.Gospel of Judas was sold to a dealer together with 3 other manuscripts. One of these was a Greek mathematical treatise. This was dismembered by the dealer, but the bits came into the hands of a wealthy collector who agreed with two senior scholars to publish it. These have failed to do so. One of them, whom I wrote to a few years ago, said that he thought it was a boring discovery and had "other things" to do.

My own experience of papyrologists is that they are a funny lot, and very difficult to deal with. We owe an immense debt to James M. Robinson. (He also got the Manichaean texts from Medinet Madu published).

All the best,

Roger Pearse
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