Slashdot Mirror
Vatican/HP To Put Library Online
darkuncle writes "I first read it in the LA Times print edition this morning, but the story is also available on several websites via news.google.com. Apparently the Vatican has enlisted Hewlett-Packard in an effort to put the contents of the Vatican Library online, including many rare Bible texts and previously unavailable manuscripts, including handwritten notes by the likes of Martin Luther and Michelangelo."
We can finally see if Samuel Jackson was actually quoting the bible in Pulp Fiction, or if he was just making shit up...
...to Slashdot the Vatican? I guess we just might find out!
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
It will be interesting to see if this stuff is public domain (you would think), or does the Vatican claim copyright ownership, in the manner of Scientology?
Unfortunately the DMCA forbids them from putting any of Leonardo's work on the Web, since he used a simple encryptation system and didn't write them an access license.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I mean there are documents going back to the Roman Empire. Could you imagine if it all was available online? And searchable? The man-hours to do it would be incredible.
I mean, there are rumors of intelligence reports from Pontius Pilate being archived there. Watch all the Bible geeks have a field day.
Plus I imagine, a copy of every forbidden book written since then. Kept around, just as evidence.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There's a "Holy See Plus Plus" joke here somewhere.
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
Just as a correction, they are releasing their WWII era documents. And try to refrain from making wildly opinionated and unsupported comments about something as sensitive as religion...any religion.
1. Nail decree on church door
2. ???
3. Prophet!!!
For instance, only one page from the rare "B" version of the "Codex Vaticanus" Bible is available online.
Coming soon: The Holy Bible - Special Edition
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Nope. This handwritten note from Michaelangelo is as close as it gets:
Note to self: put big schlong on new statue.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Considering all the brainpower that seems to be concentrated(?) at the /.-ers PCs when it comes to more or less mindless trivia like asteroids threatening Earth, new ways to make ultra-thin condoms or whatever, it's rather scary to see all the glibness and plain ignorance at a moment like this.
The fact that a tremendous lot of historical data will be acessible is, in it self, fantastic news.
Of course, it will be selected and skewed, and no, the p)0(rn will not be there, but that's not the point. It will be THERE, to help all those interested to learn more. Like any great museum, if you will.
I'm not a Catholic, I'm not a bit religious, but I think things like this make the Net something great!
"Not to mention, it would bring out a lot of texts that would show just how modern Christianity and Catholicism was practically invented by Roman Councils picking, choosing, and editing text as they pleased, and how all the text of the Bible either came from oral history or history written 70 years after Jesus' death, of which none of the original texts still exist."
Yeah, whatever. You obviously know absolutely nothing about Historical Criticism. Your bias against Christianity has scewed your view of New Testament development so severely that you lack any objectivity. Though, IMHO, traditional authorship (as claimed by Christians) of NT texts has a tendency to be incorrect, save for Paul's writings (and even some of those are up for contention), it's a stetch to say "modern Christianity and Catholicism was practically invented by Roman Councils picking, choosing, and editing text as they pleased" and "written 70 years after Jesus' death". There are some that argue (including myself) that Mark and "Q" predate the revolt/Temple destruction and 'Luke'/'Mat.' reliance on said texts shows a level of care in constructing their gospels that sceptics don't want to admit.
I'm probabally wasting my time...
Learn some Biblical history and take your anti-Christian bias out of the picture, it makes you look immature, even to non-Christians (like myself).
Burn Hollywood Burn
Well, they're putting the notes of Martin Luther online. If you don't know the relation of Martin Luther to the Catholic church, then you might need spend some time with the Googline Oracle.
All in all, that's not very favorable material to the Catholic Church considering what the movement he started was and why he started it.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"And try to refrain from making wildly opinionated and unsupported comments about something as sensitive as religion...any religion."
While I agree it's never good to make "wildly opinionated and unsupported comments", I don't think that's the case here. After spending all my years in schooling up 'til college in either Sunday school (first 4 years) or a Catholic school (the rest), I learned a great deal about the Catholic Church and its history. And you know what? (S)He's right. The statements made aren't supported by links etc., but generally speaking, facts stand on their own. If you would like to debate anything that was said, feel free. I'm more than willing to find a plethoria of evidence to support each and every claim made in that post.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
The posters here criticizing the Catholic Church have for the most part no clue what they're talking about. Anyone who thinks they can define the actions of billions of people in dozens of countries across 2000 years of history that simply has a screw loose.
In my experience the people who criticize the Catholic Church the most know the least about it (blah blah they only want money blah blah).
Anti-Catholicism doesn't bother me; I personally have a lot of problems with the Church both as a political as well as theological entity, and have no problem criticizing them (I'm not a practicing Catholic because of some of these reasons). Ignorance, however, DOES bother me, and these inane blanket comments about what the Church is about just reek of profound ignorance.
Esther is in my Bible, as well as Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. There are some books the Roman Catholic Church considers to be Scripture such as Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, the Maccabees books, III and IV Esdras (I think?), etc., that most Protestants do not.
Not sure where the poster above got the idea that Esther was omitted in Catholic or Protestant Bibles...
I figure I'm capable of examining each book myself on its merits and deciding if it is Scripture or not myself. People were doing so long before any councils decided what was canon and what was not.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
"Rare texts" are rare, because it's easy to use them agains (sic)Catholic Church. I think they'll stay "rare".
No, rare texts are rare because few copies exist. Why not? For one thing, many of the books and manuscripts that we're talking about predate the printing press. No need to come up with conspiracy theories to explain it.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
LOL.. this reminds me of my trip to Rome and the Vaticam museum. there was this one Roman era statue that has some nude guy holding a bowl of fruit in front of his groin. What strunk me as odd was the this really goofy smile on his face. Upon closer inspection, the large fruit in the front of the bowl was the tip of his dick. Looking underneath the bowl shows his shaft going into the fruit. Needless to say we all laughed our asses off.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
As soon as there is a post that mentions religion, the trolls come out of the wood work to flame and run. The really sad part is that this posting is of much more significance than religion. Some of those manuscripts may contain clues to unlock mysteries in history. A lot have nothing more that just historical significance, but that's enough. We should all be happy that more information is being put into the mainstream, not flaming it because we just don't like the people it's coming from.
When the Bible was first assembled from the Gospels, Acts, Revelations, and the various letters of the apostiles to the early churches, there was much debate as to which versions of various books to include. Most of the books of the Bible had various differences as they were copied by various scribes attempting to preserve them before the first collections of them were gathered. Here's a good timeline of the history of the Good Book.
Furthermore, there's the Pseudepigrapha. These are rejected books of the Bible that scholars of various times either considered falsified or otherwise not worthy to include in the Bible. Usually, they purport to be written by a Biblical figure, but were generally not believed to have actually been written by them at the time of the Council of Laodicea. Then you have the books where are in the Catholic Old Testament but not in the Protestant Old Testament. These are the books most commonly labelled as Apocrypha.
Here's some more info on early church texts.
Here's a FAQ on the history of the Bible.
You can find a lot of this on Google if you know what to look for, but I've been nice and included links without bizarre obscurist religious or UFO ranting. The "lost" books of the Bible are a rich source of material for people with fringe beliefs that are looking to justify them or people who have an axe to grind with mainstream Christianity.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Inclusion of text into the bible was not arbitrary. Texts were chosen based upon a set of fairly clear criteria that became established over centuries of debate. Not everyone agrees with the final decision, but that hardly makes it arbitrary.
Additionally, BS Catholic conspiracies aside, they have no earthly reason to hide works that they disagreee with. In fact the works they are putting onine were already available to visiting scholars and practically anyone with an interest. I, for instance, have the full text on the 20-something different Gospels we have discovered to date at home on my shelf...and if you read them all, you'd see pretty quick why some were excluded. I also have the many of the other non-canonical texts. No great hidden secret. Just order them from Amazon like I did.
There is no great scholastic coverup to keep the juicy religious bits away from the masses.
Disclaimer: I am not Catholic, but I do have a degree in Religious Studies.
-Tom
What, then, is the Church about?
I know you weren't asking me, but I couldn't resist. In a word: Christ.
In your opinion, should I expect to find the known-to-exist-but-tightly-guarded material regarding Hitler's final solution online? Should I expect to see everything the Vatican has about the Dead Sea Scrolls online?
Again, I know you weren't asking me, but...
It's tough to say whether documents noone has ever seen but "know to exist" will show up online. There's really not a whole lot of secrecy involved in the modern Vatican. It's possible that we'll see some suprising things turn up online, but chances are, nothing very scandelous, because, chances are, these documents don't actually exist. Either they never did, or they were so "earthshattering" that they have already been destroyed. The Pope and those near him with unrestricted daily access to the Library are pretty dedicated to the Church (obviously). Don't you think they'd be a little shaken in their faith if documents proving the fallacy of their belief systems were kept in their basement? Most of the great Chruch thinkers have had easy access, both chronologicallly (lived near the times in question), or physically (lived in/near the Vatican) to such works, and yet were very faithful men. Take that for what it's worth.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
First off all the King James Version is protestant not catholic. You want something like the Saint Jerome Bible for a Catholic bible. Second the inclusion list for the Kind James isn't arbitrary its following the organization from Martin Luther's Geneva Bible.
e =UTF-8 &oe=UTF-8&selm=4ne7kh%24qq6%40geneva.rutgers.e du
Anyway here is an old list with pretty good information about what got included when
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&i
Are they simply exerting copyright over the photograph of the document, and not on the contents of the document itself? Is that okay, even?
Yep. And yep.
Their copyright is over the photograph of the document that they took. They are allowed to do that because the original document is not under copyright. Had it been under copyright they would have to get permission from the copyright holder before distributing their content based on that material. The copyright on the photograph means that you are not allowed to distribute the photograph they took without their permission. It doesn't prevent you from taking your own photographs of the original work (which is not under copyright) or even from quoting it verbatim.
It's just like some photographic agency had a copyright on some pictures of Marilyn Monroe. That doesn't mean they owned her or that you couldn't take your own pictures of her - just that those particular photographs were covered by copyright.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Couple of points:
(1) Esther is in both. The books that are not in both include Tobit (an excellent novel, worth reading, and amusing at some points. Did you know you get cataracts from sleeping outdoors with your eyes open? Birds poop in them, you see...), Maccabbees (an excellent documentary), Daniel and Susannah, maybe Wisdom.
(2) Martin Luther, if I understand correctly, picked the Hebrew Bible because he liked the feeling he got that he'd understand things better in the original Hebrew. The RC Church picked the Septuagint, which was archived in Greek in the Library of Alexandria, because this was archived *before* the time of Christ, and was generally accepted as scripture at the time of Christ. The Hebrew Bible was written by Sadducees after Masada, and does include some significant changes. Sadducces did not believe in the Resurrection, for example, and thus did not include books that pointed heavily towards the Resurrection. Also, "virgin" was changed to "maid" (neanis) at the part where the prophet says to the king "is it not enough that you should weary the ears of men? Must you weary God as well? But since you do not ask for a sign, this shall be a sign unto you: a virgin shall concieve, and shall bear a son..." One can only guess the reason for such a change.
There is something to be said for both sides. I prefer the RC side, though.
(3) Then you get to books like the Gospel of Thomas. This is a case where you especially have to look at the source. The paper is quite old, and indeed would be one of the earliest gospels based upon the age of the paper. However, the ink dates back to the time of the Saracen invasion of Spain, and the pollens in the ink seem to place the writing in Italy. So it would appear, especially since that book supports Islam more than Christianity, that it was a work of fiction written at that time. Perhaps it was written on very old paper to try to support Islam -- perhaps not.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
What, then, is the Church about?
It's about a lot of things.
In your opinion, should I expect to find the known-to-exist-but-tightly-guarded material regarding Hitler's final solution online? Should I expect to see everything the Vatican has about the Dead Sea Scrolls online?
The Vatican's behavior during the Holocaust does bear scrutiny, but I don't think they deserve all of the bad press they had. There were two options Pope Pius had; protest Hitler's actions and bring the Church openly against him, or maintain diplomatic relations publicly while privately trying to help Jews behind the scenes. The Church chose the latter, and managed to smuggle several thousand Jews out of Germany and provide a safe haven (many ended up in the Swiss Guard). I think it was probably a mistake, considering the horrific loss of life that took place, and that they should have come out publicly against Germany. I think it would probably have saved more lives in the long run by publicizing the plight of Jewish Holocaust victims, but I don't think they were complicit in the deaths as some people feel.
I'm not sure what you mean by the Dead Sea Scrolls; I don't pretend to know everything, or even that much about the Church, so perhaps you can enlighten me. As far as I know the Scrolls are held by the Israel Antiquities Authority, and any information the Vatican has would have had been from the same sources as any scholar; a reading of the scrolls themselves.
But I think that's pretty unlikely. I will be mightily impressed if the Vatican DOES fully disclose all of these secrets. What do you think? What is the Church about and why do you think they will publish everything?
Of course they won't publish everything, but they're not saying they will. The article I read explicitly said "selected".
Besides, every book in the Vatican != every book in the Vatican library. The real secret stuff I'm sure is kept somewhere else.
Don't use python, and don't work on an Apple, and everything will be fine.
Actually the Vatican approached us when I was working at a consultancy (not IBM) to do this project. "Mmm, cool," thought I. "They have loadsa money."
Ah, but not so, grasshopper. We met with their librarians and "IT" people and when it came to money, not only did they try and make us feel guilty about charging the Church (I'm Jewish..that didn't work on me) but they wanted us to PAY for the privilege. Yes, we would eat all production costs, hardware, hosting, travel costs, encoding, delivery, etc...AND we were expected to make a "sizable honorarium" to the RCC for the privilege of being permitted to work on the project. (Picture: Ellen Feiss going "nnnnggggh?")
"Hmm, well they have lots of money...they'll pay us for the next project," thought I.
Ah, not so. When I asked as to $$ arrangements for future work we were told that if they liked the library project, we could expect more work, but each project would require an additional honorarium.
"Wow, look at the time, I gotta run," said I. We never even considered doing the work.
Looks like HP got the same treatment, as evidenced by this line in the press release:
"HP's contribution included technical consulting along with donated computer servers, scanners and other hardware items.
Didier Philippe, HP's director of strategy and development in Europe, said the motivation for the donation had more to do with history and art than with business.
But he recognized that the Catholic Church could be a huge buyer."
So they are HOPING the RCC buys some hardware in the future, after they already gave them a couple mil worth of free stuff. Great business sense, eh?
I'm calling my broker now.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."