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Dead Sea Scrolls To Go Digital On Internet
mernil writes to mention that the Dead Sea Scrolls are headed for the internet. The Israel Antiquities Authority, custodians of the scrolls, plan on digitizing the 900 fragments to make them available to the public via the internet. Unfortunately they are claiming the project will take somewhere in the neighborhood of two years to complete.
If they were smart they would have tied this release in with the Evangelion rebuild series.
As a Rational Christian, I am excited about this material being released. Debates will be much more entertaining and edifying, with some good old material to validate certain arguments and invalidate others.
Regardless of your Religious background, the dead sea scrolls are very important and to have them readily available for those who speak the language is exciting for many reasons.
2 Years though, at least this shows you how seriously people take preserving historical documents like this.
My big concern is over the principle that once these are made publicly digitally available, they will be easily tampered with. How are we going to be able to validate the good copies from the publicly tampered ones? From a technical standpoint is there anyway to protect things like this so the average Jo knows which is real and which is not?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
You've waited this long ... what's another two years?
What we need is for Google to develop an actual, physical spider that goes out and searches hard copies of documents for indexing.
TFA did not mention whether or not the scrolls would be translated into other languages, it would be interesting to read them in english.
Procrastinators, Unite Tomorrow!!
Oh, those old things.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
Access to the Dead Sea Scrolls was carefully guarded for decades. Think proprietary database formats.
Back in the '80s or '90s, a scholar published a very detailed index. It was so detailed that other scholars were able to reverse-engineer the text of the scrolls, breaking the data monopoly for those scholars who were only interested in the text on the scrolls rather than the scrolls themselves.
Since then, the keepers of the scrolls have been much more, what is the work I'm looking for, open.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Confucius say "Now we can find out if the People's Front of Judea are a bunch of splitters."
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
will they include the front page?
you know, the bit that goes "to my darking Wendy, all names and places in this book are entirely fictitious and any resemblance to real.."
Not much has gotten published and many of the original scholars have died.
I'm guessing it was more professional jealously rather than some "secret revelation invalidating Christianity or Judiasm" that caused the delay.
Unfortunately they are claiming the project will take somewhere in the neighborhood of two years to complete.
Why will it take two years? Part of the problem is because they aren't made of paper. One of them is made of copper, and most of them are made of parchament, which is much more difficult to work with. Especially considering the age.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Religious text is different from fairy tales. fairy tales could be a subset of the text where say a fictional story is used to illustrate a point. However for the most part most of the religious texts are attempts to keep historical records thousands of years ago.
A large meteor hits and destroys your city, that must be God striking down the sinners. As a guy who was just banished from the city survived and saw the destruction, he gets to make the details.
A merchant dealing with livestock builds himself a boat for easier trading with other cities. Luckally enough survived a food that covered the visible landmass. Whiping out thousands of people. It must of been God flooding the entire earth and his livestock and his wife and kids are whats left of the animal population. He survives so he can make the story.
Religious Texts do offer a good historical perspective if you read them with the fact that they have been translated many times, passed by word of mouth for a longer time. Truth = Beauty Art = Beauty so Artistic alterations have been placed it to make it easier to remember and pass on. Adding a few more lessons here and there... So when reading them many of the facts are right however the moral of the story has been changed.
Fairy tales are ficion just to prove the point. Religious Documents are the best history we have for the time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
'The Romans are bad'
'So are any Jews who don't do what we do'
'We don't like women'
'Why is is so hard to get a damn bath around here'
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
These may be the oldest fairy tales on the net when the project is complete.
You can at least the following genres among the fragments: Poetry, wisdom, legal code, historical narrative, genealogy, myth/fable, prophetic writing, construction schematics, census, apocalypse/vision.
on dvd, I don't understand why it takes two year to put them on the web. Are they adding something? do they need to redo it?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
By restricting access to only those who paid for access with cash, "friendly" academic papers, or reciprocal access arrangements, those who had control stood to gain from their monopoly.
Of course, since science is never for sale *sarcasm*, I wouldn't waste time looking for cash payments. It's much more likely that favorable access was granted to those who were more likely to publish results favorable to those who controlled the access.
This favoritism can even happen unintentionally - it's human nature to favor our friends, and human nature to be friends with those who think like we do.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm convinced all religions are the result of chieftain ancestors who suffered from OCD.
OCD => useless rituals performed to prevent bad things from happening.
Religion => useless rituals performed prevent bad things from happening.
Now.. for the on-topic portion. This has to be a good thing. Access to Earth maps and astronomy images have yielded new discoveries by amateurs. http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/08/07/space.discovery/index.html?eref=ib_topstories The same should happen here.
Camping on quad since 1996.
Almost.
Religious texts have rarely been "translated many times", that I know of. That is, they haven't come down to us through a long sequence of translation from one language to another. (They may have been translated many times in the sense that Harry Potter has been translated many times, of course. The question is whether we still have manuscripts in the original language.)
The manuscripts have, however, often been copied many times, introducing textual variants. Such that if we have few manuscripts, we're less confident in the exact wording of the originals. (And if we only have a small number of manuscripts that were under the control of a central religious authority, then all bets are off.) But then if we have many manuscripts, we can become extremely confident in the original wording, through the wonderful world of textual criticism.
That does leave open the possibility of significant change during times of oral transmission. (Though there are limits there, too. Suppose that we only had orally-transmitted knowledge of the JFK assassination. We couldn't be too confident in some details of the events, but if the story is widely-disseminated & widely-known, that would tend to restrict the changes that would occur.)
I saw them when they were in San Diego, a few months back. They're all musty and falling apart anyway. I say digitize them and then recycle the paper in to something more useful to people today... like a Vista how-to guide. Everyone wins.
Religious Texts do offer a good historical perspective if you read them with the fact that they have been translated many times, passed by word of mouth for a longer time.
As for the older stuff that you mentioned (Creation, Flood, Destruction of Sodom, perhaps), I suppose that these stories would indeed either need to be passed by word of mouth or else given by direct inspiration from God.
Most of the later stuff in the Old Testament (really everything except for Genesis and parts of Exodus), though, was written down from the beginning.
Leviticus, for example, is recorded Ceremonial, Religious, Moral, and even Secular Law. This was VERY highly regarded and as such copied extremely carefully. In other words, when a priest or scribe was charged with copying a scroll, he was not allowed to copy line-by-line or word-by-word. Instead, he was required to copy letter-by-letter. All of the other scrolls were held in the same regard--they all either dealt with essentially History, Prophecy, or Law.
The scribes had some VERY strict laws on how to copy, which means that today, of the stuff that remains, there are fewer discrepancies among texts than with copies of any other ancient text.
I saw statistic once that compared Homer's Odyssey with the Old Testament. The OT is significantly longer and has more copies remaining. Statistically, that would mean there is a higher chance of error while copying as well as a higher chance of discrepancies among the surviving texts. This, however, is not the case. Homer's shorter work actually contains many more errors overall--not just per line, but over the course of a shorter book.
How you choose to interpret the Bible is up to you. But at least let it be said that the Bible was properly copied.
Then I'm willing to bet you don't know what a premise is.
â"verb (used with object) to assume, either explicitly or implicitly, (a proposition) as a premise for a conclusion.
â"verb (used without object) to state or assume a premise.
A premise doesn't have to be accurate. It has to simply be an assumed foundation for an argument.
They can absolutely defend their belief with rock solid premises. For example:
If was assume God exists.
And we assume God smites those who don't believe in him.
(the premise)
Then it makes a lot of sense to believe.
(a very accurate statement IF the assumptions that form the premise are true)
It would be nice if the article also gave the web-link where these will be found as they get them online.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
A few other interesting tidbits on OT scribes:
*If a scribe made an error while copying, he had to completely start over on that page. He was not allowed to blot out a word and rewrite it.
*When a scribe completed a page, it was checked against his original. Every line was counted to ensure that each line had the same number of characters, and each page the same number of lines.
*When a scribe came across the name of God, the vowel symbols were never written, leaving (a transliterated) YHVH.
*Even though the scribe was writing the full name of God, he was still required to ceremonially wash his hands and break his stylus before continuing.
Pretty cool, huh? :)
*ducks* as evangelicals brandish pitch forks and rocks.
Oral traditions are exceedingly reliable historical references. As the clan/tribe/village gathered to hear a story told it would be the same story that they had heard told from birth like their fathers and mothers.
Any error, addition or omission would have been corrected immediately.
If any geek arose to tell the story of Star Wars and claimed that Obi Wan said "Tashi Station, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany" they would be flamed, flogged and their geek card would be confiscated. It was in the writing that things broke down because for most of human history most of the humans couldn't read but they could all talk and listen.
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What's the rationale for atheism?
Inasmuch as the scientific method is concerned, the presumption of a controlling intelligence eliminates the need for some categories of investigation, which ultimately inhibits progress.
For example, if you ask, "why does a person get sick?" and one answers "because God wills it, either as a punishment for sin or as a test of faith." You have eliminated the incentive to investigate into things like bacteria, the immune system, and so on.
By beginning with the premise that there is no controlling intelligence, and that there is some kind of underlying mechanism behind all observable phenomena, you preserve the incentive to formulate hypothesis and test them. Of course, many of the hypotheses will still be wrong, but the process of testing them is what yields the understanding we need to improve our lives.
So, scientifically speaking, atheism is the most useful assumption for maximizing our efforts at perusing knowledge.
On a more personal level, agnosticism is more logically "safe" than atheism. Though many consider that the assertion of the non-existence of an entity for which no demonstrative test can be devised is more well-founded than the assertion of the existence of said entity...logically this is still just a variant of the "ad ignorantium" fallacy. It is clear that where no test can be formulated *either way,* the only warranted conclusion is no conclusion at all. "I don't know if God exists, and I won't know until we can cook up some definitive tests" is the most logically sound response to questions of the ontological status of the divine.
This is a bit off topic, but also a bit on-topic. Can anyone recommend a book or books which tackle the old testament form precisely this point of view? Ie, a scholarly mode of conversation. And very definitely NOT religious. Example: There are books which talk about the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Obviously these are not written by people who believe in said book, or whose faith is ancient Egyptian. They are scholarly pursuits. That's what I'm after. No religious agenda whatsoever; no patina of faith tainting things. Just a discussion of the passages and what they're likely to mean, and their historical context. A pie in the sky book, for me, would be one which focuses on the geographical aspect of the stories in the old testament (yet simultaneously avoids the aforementioned patina of faith), taking the reader from place to place and outlining the probable contemporary locations of events past, whether said events are reckoned to be fact or myth.
Interestingly enough, the Isaiah Scroll from the DSS contains almost all of Isaiah 53. Its consistency with the Masoretic Text (Medieval time period) is amazing, so much so that people have cried "foul"-- there must be some fraud or conspiracy in place to have documents 1000 years apart match that well. No proof of any such hanky panky has ever been produced.
FAIL. There are nine-thousand picky gods. Which do you want to bet on?
Luckally enough survived a food that covered the visible landmass. Whiping out thousands of people.
Holy (pun intended), I wonder if you wrote that Old Testament when drunk?
Beats being the oldest fairy on the net.
We might finally have an opportunity to understand why the catholic church had to kill so many people over the past two millenia ?
---I---CAN'T---WAIT---!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Oral tradition = chinese whispers = kids telephone game = highly distorted.
Debian FTW
Not a book, but the History Channel has several series about the OT, including explanations of miracles and battle tactics. As a logical, somewhat-scientific, forward-thinking Christian, let me say that they are really quite good.
found an Amazon link of the Bible Battles show...it's really really good.
http://www.amazon.com/Bible-Battles-History-Channel/dp/B000T28PHY
Oral tradition != telephone game. The telephone game occurs after just a few minutes with a small group of people. Oral tradition is a large group activity over many generations so your initial comparison is wildly off base. As my Star Wars example indicates, someone will fix a mistake in oral tradition.
Citation
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These are all current rules for Torah scribes.
Blotting out ink on sheepskin parchment really doesn't work. The Torah scrolls are works of art, having messy blots all over would rather ruin that.
All words in the Torah are written without vowels. Hebrew pretty much never uses vowels, except for teaching children. The "name of god" is also written as Yid Yid and "Hashem" (The Name) in various texts, though the Torah mostly uses Yid Hay Vav Hay.
Not a sentence!
"Oral traditions are exceedingly reliable historical references. As the clan/tribe/village gathered to hear a story told it would be the same story that they had heard told from birth like their fathers and mothers.
Any error, addition or omission would have been corrected immediately."
I have to call BS on this. People's memories are not great at remembering if something is EXACTLY the same, even if they hear what should be the same story over and over [other than people with Eidetic memory]. Did the person add a new sentence, forget an old one, or both? Did they use a different noun, verb, adverb, adjective?
And for any significant oral history, it would be told by a village elder [someone 'important' to the tribe/group/village], right? Who is going to put their arm up in the middle of the recitation of one of these tales and say "hey, you forgot this part, or it should be like this"?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
That's not actually how it's used in the Bible.
To quote James 2-19, Demons have this sort of faith but they're not welcomed by God: http://net.bible.org/passage.php?search=Jas%202:18-19&passage=Jas%202:18-19
It's actually not how it's used most often in real life. Simply put, faith means trust.
Let's assume you're married but it could equally be applied in other close relationships.
* Do you have faith in your wife?
* Are you faithful to her?
* If you close your eyes and fall backwards towards you wife, do you have faith that your wife will at least try to stop you from falling?
* If she says or does something that hurt you, do you still have faith in *her* or do you immediately assume the worst about her?
* If your wife were to try something new that she has no experience in, but you've seen that she's fantastic at improvising, so you have faith that she'll succeed?
On the flip side, if your parents tell you "I have faith that you will win the basket ball game" but you see them betting on the other team, do they really trust you?
> So, "faith in God" in the common senses could imply that one believes he exists, as described, without evidence (an arguably irrational position)
True, it is arguable, which in simple terms means, debatable. Ferocious former Atheist, Anthony Flew (credited for the "Invisible Gardener" parable outlining how stupid believers in God were), switched to Deism (the God of Einstein, Spinoza, Plato, Einstein, and Darwin) precisely because he determined that it was a more rational explanation of the universe and all that there is in it than Atheism.
None of these people are stupid. They looked at the evidence....all the evidence. Granted, there isn't a single piece of evidence that shows God's existence, but the bulk of it tells you that he's there.
It's no different in real life. Getting back to the wife analogy, *why* would you have faith in her? If you give any single situation to prove your point, I could just as easily argue that your interpretation is wrong. However, if you give the sum total of all your experiences, you can build a credible case.
Anyway, here's a question to ponder. Assume that the universe and everything in it is pure matter caught in a cause and effect chain. Essentially pure materialism. You are essentially a bag of marbles held together by natural forces caught in a causal chain that fully determines every move you make. A chair or a rock is no different....you're just composed of different atoms and are configured in different ways, but ultimately, everything is just a bag of causal marbles.
If you truly believe in pure materialism, you must accept the following:
a) There is no difference between you and a chair. What you perceive as life is just an illusion.
b) There is no fundamental difference between breaking your legs and breaking a chair's legs or smashing you to death or smashing a chair to pieces. All you're doing is breaking a few bonds and rearranging the configuration of atoms.
c) All atoms in your body get replaced every decade, so there is nothing that defines who you are other than your overall appearance and even that changes with time. Ultimately, *you* don't exist.
c) There is no such thing as free will....just atoms caught in a causal chain. Evangelical Atheists are thus wasting their time trying to convince anyone, but then again they can't help it, so there's no problem.
d) A consequence of all the above is Humanism or other morality has no foundation in pure materialism and it's actually pretty arrogant to be a Humanist because why are human's more valuable than chairs or rats? If you expand goal of humanism to reduce the total amount of suffering in the world (whatever "suffering" means in materialistic terms),wouldn't it make more sense to sterilize all humans so that animals might flourish in a hundred or so years?
e) Knowledge is irrelevant. What is kno
See my other post for one citation. We are not talking about ONE person or even fifty. We're talking about a village or an entire population of an area. Considerably different eh? Star Wars was created over thirty years ago and just like my example SOMEONE would correct it for me because most all of us have seen it and KNOW it. You can call BS until DNF is released but you're still wrong.
It wasn't just the village elder telling the stories at all. It was a group project, usually done with rhythmic devices or mnemonic devices as a group activity. EVERYONE in the village would raise their arm if the story went off.
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I think you've answered your own question:
Leave religion completely aside for a moment and ask yourelf what you meant last time you said you had faith in someone. If you are anything like me, you meant that you trusted them to deliver on what they had promised, and you trusted them to do that because of past personal experience with them, or perhaps a testimonial of them from someone else that you trust. Whatever it was, it almost certainly was based on some reason, and almost certainly was not just a shot in the dark.
For me, this is a pretty good definition of faith when applied to Christianity and God. The problem with this definition is as you say that it doesn't really correspond with the common use of the word when applied to religion, a use which has become completely divorced from the meaning I've described above and has come to mean something blind, irrational.
I'm not sure whether anything can be done about this, apart from patient explanation like I've tried here.
You didn't read my post, did you? I said, "if the story is widely-disseminated & widely-known, that would tend to restrict the changes that would occur." The telephone game is all about the message being passed on from one person to another person, in secret.
Imagine the telephone game where people aren't whispering--where every person in the room can hear every step of the transmission. That would cause the reliability of transmission to skyrocket, don't you think?
Of course, real-life oral transmission would be somewhere between regular Telephone Game and my modified version. There are lots of variables--how widely the story is told, how often, how important it is to the culture, whether they care about faithful transmission or regard it as flexible, etc. And smaller details will be more variable than larger details.
First, you describe telling a story, which is typically a one to many proposition, not some kind of mass chant/recital. I would argue that 'history' would be more likely to be told as a story than as some kind of group song, just because the story told by an individual can be so much longer and detailed than a song [different people forget/misremember different parts that kind of thing].
As for the star-wars geek reference, that is a totally different matter. Taking a relatively small portion of the general popular that is passionate about a specific, limited subject, will of course be more likely to object to a statement made by one of the other members of the group when they speak. But I would say if they were in setting where say, George Lucas was telling a story about the history of Star Wars even to that same population, it would take a very ballsy geek to put their hand up and say "You're wrong."
Now, how likely is it for a group of the same size, with the story told by George Lucas, but with the group being the general population, many of which are not particularly passionate about Star Wars, for someone to object to George if he changes the story slightly.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Telling a story isn't a networking protocol. The listeners are engaged intimately, it's the stories of their families, heroes, fathers etc. The listeners were active in the process and in some cases they (vikings for example) did vocally participate. We're not talking about a bed time tale we're talking about cultures that value their histories and stories highly. I would argue that for something as important as the history of your culture and family you would have incredible pressure to get it right. Hell I can still recite all 16 IRQ's and their devices circa 1998!
As far as Star Wars is concerned it is a perfect example. When a given population (Slashdot) has a story (Star Wars) that is culturally important and valued no matter which person get's it wrong it will get corrected hastily. Slashdot is arguably a very small population somewhat analogous to a village. Look at the flamefest that happens still when someone says that "Greedo shot at Han first!"
It doesn't take anyone balsy to make sure that the story is right. Think like a 4500 year old guy that has an ancestor that did something cool. When someone else is telling that ancestors story and gets it wrong it becomes an issue of family honor.
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It's not about getting the story wrong [x killed y instead of y killed x]. It's nuancing the story slightly differently, either on purpose or unintentionally. Or even village politics, like the current village elder doesn't like one subgroup of the village and doesn't tell the whole story [just leaves out part of it, or minimizes the role a group had in some story]. It's like the telephone game, only over a much longer time span, with a little more overlap [think grandparents recite tales to their children and grandchildren]. Just using words that are nuanced slightly differently [murdered vs killed vs died] can totally throw off the meaning of the story, while being difficult for someone to object to [as mentally, you may mentally transpose the two when you hear the second version].
As for the flamefests, those typically become a "I'm right", "No, I'm right". And that's with two people who actually witnessed the event [seen the movie]. In a tribal group, what do you do, vote on which version is 'correct'?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I think we might be splitting hairs now and that probably isn't going to accomplish anything. I think that we might be throwing the baby out with the bath water. The historical accuracy of the oral tradition was originally where this started and even in your example with changes in nuance the story does essentially bear historical truth.
These people weren't just telling stories but they were expressing their lives and identities, I contend that they did so with the utmost care because those things were important to them. In a tribal group the whole of the group determines the rightness or wrongness of a telling. Given that when two people see an event there is normally a 10% to 12% difference in the story anyway I suppose that there is some sort of amalgam of the two that ends up being cannon. In the end I think that the historical facts of an event would continue to be accurate even with nuances. For those peoples there was just too much at stake to allow for anything less.
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The problem with your example is that the original source still exists. In other words, anyone who doubts the oral tradition can still go back to the movie and see what Obi Wan really said. But, with historical events, that's not really an option, is it? Lets say that all copies of "Star Wars" were destroyed. At this point, a geek could say, "Well, I believe Obi-Wan said, 'Tashi Station...'," and, without access to the original source, the argument would turn into a game of he-said-she-said.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
There's nothing special about Christ's basic message - "be good to people". Plenty of complete Atheists are also decent chaps.
OTOH I never saw a news story about a bunch of Atheists invading a country or The Atheists bombing The Agnostics. The Christians have been doing it as long as they've existed. One of the central themes of America today is righteous Christianity vs. Islam.
I'm firmly with Richard Dawkins on this. Religion is the root of all the big evils in this world. You don't need a fierce god threatening you to behave properly and the world would be a lot better off without it.
No sig today...
The oldest writing comes from the Chinese, followed by the Sumerians and Babylonians.
Bzzt. The advent of a writing system coincides with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to more permanent agrarian encampments when it became necessary to count ones property, whether it be parcels of land, animals or measures of grain or to transfer that property to another individual or another settlement. The first evidence for this is with incised "counting tokens" from about 9,000 years ago in the neolithic fertile crescent.
Around 4100-3800 BCE, the tokens began to be symbols that could be impressed or inscribed in clay to represent a record of land, grain or cattle and a written language was beginning to develop. One of the earliest examples was found in the excavations of Uruk in Mesopotamia at a level representing the time of the crystallization of the Sumerian culture.
What you might be thinking of is the Jiahu symbols, markings on prehistoric artifacts found in Jiahu, a neolithic Peiligang culture site found in Henan, China. Dated to 6600 BC, most doubt that the markings represent systematic writing at all and believe that they were simply used as pictures. The earliest evidence for a corpus of writing in the oracle bone script dates much later to the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600 â" 1046 BC).
It is thought that the first true alphabetic writing appeared around 2000 BC, as a representation of language developed for Semitic slaves in Egypt by Egyptians (see History of the alphabet). Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one innovation, many via the Phoenician alphabet, or were directly inspired by its design.
Whats with the spate of "China did it first" posts around here lately?
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Paul, in his letters to the church in Corinth, made a lengthy argument about faith. He pointed out for example, that some of the opposition were saying (my paraphrase) "You can see how disease, aging and death destroy a person's body, and if they have these soul things you Christians claim, those are destroyed too." Paul said (again paraphrased): "But you have seen counter-examples, known people who suffered from age and disease, but sometimes they showed increasing wisdom, dedication, determination or compassion in the process. You have evidence that the soul can sometimes grow even as the body withers, and because of that evidence, you should keep to your faith.". Anyone is welcome to read that part of the New Testament and see if what I have just said is accurate.
A lot (not all, but a lot) of the New Testament use of the word faith is actually like that. Rather than belief without evidence, or in the face of contrary evidence, it is much more often used to describe sticking to a belief where there is rational evidence, but it may be either ambiguous, or the arguments on both sides are highly emotional and may influence the Christian regardless of their logical foundation. (And I would assure you that most Christians have significant emotive fear of death regardless of their intellectual position, as do most non-Christians). I'm not nearly as up on the Old Testament, so I couldn't say just how the word 'faith' is used there in various books.
Who is John Cabal?
The whole of Russia was adorned with large pictures/statues of the god Lenin, etc.
No sig today...
I think the OP meant copied many times in the sense of the King James bible being an English translation of the Latin bible used by the Vatican, which was itself a translation of documents that were originally written in Greek, some of which were translations of older Hebrew texts. Given his background as a carpenter's son in Galilee, Jesus most likely spoke Aramaic.
His example is valid in that the original would not have to be accessed in order to elicit corrections from those who have already heard, and thus are familiar with, the story.
Your scenario of 'all' copies of Star Wars being destroyed is erroneous in that a movie is not an oral tradition: where multiple generations would hear the same story repeated - with multiple generations being present at once - which would provide for greater accuracy (among cultures that value(d) accuracy).
Yes, that's probably what he meant. It's precisely the myth I was correcting.
The King James wasn't translated from the Latin text (called the Vulgate). It was translated from Greek manuscripts of the New Testament (the compilation is called the Textus Receptus) and from the Hebrew text of the Old Testament (called the Masoretic text). (Note: They also translated the Apocrypha--Jewish literature from between the Old and New Testaments--and those were translated from the Greek translation of the Hebrew (which is called the Septuagint), as you said.
Yes, Jesus most likely spoke Aramaic, at least most of the time. So when the Gospels record the words of Jesus, they are translations of his words. But the apostles spoke Greek, too, and that's what the letters of the New Testament were written in--and that's what the Gospels were written in. (Though I believe there's speculation--speculation, mind you--about an Aramaic original of Matthew.)
So no, the Bible does not come to use through a chain of translation from language to language. We have the Greek & Hebrew.
The original Star Wars vs. the Special Edition Star Wars? A bit of a retelling. Those who saw the original have their whole thing about Han vs. Greedo shooting first. However, those of the younger viewers who have only seen the Special Edition will probably not care that a little bit was changed. And say, perhaps, in 30 years, someone remakes the films again. But they change a little more. Sure, those who saw the Special Edition will object, but those who have only seen the new version, with the latest in special effects, as well as having the latest popular actors and actresses, will probably like the new version, assuming they even watch the originals. Don't believe me? How many have seen the original Ocean's 11? And have many have seen the new Ocean's 11? And so, the story changes. Small changes throughout history can make much more change than a big change at one point in history. Kinda like the boiling frogs argument.
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
The entire Dead sea scroll collection was published several years ago. I have a complete copy of every dead sea scroll, along with photographs of them. There are several such books by various authors.
Your statement is no longer true. While your history is accurate, your here and now knowledge needs work. There was also a lot of incompetence and inability to plan/manage causing issues. It's a fascinating, if sad story.
The problem is that the documents are so fragile they must remain encased in the protective frames they are in and cannot endure any length of time being exposed to light. Copies have been made of all the scrolls and those are probably the ones that will be used in the digitizing.
Some copies are incredibly dark, and difficult to read even by trained expert archaeological specialists.
I further assume they mean digitizing the collection into searchable text and I know of no expert software that can decipher ancient Jewish text written in a hundred separate handwritings and of mostly terrible condition. This is a hugely difficult undertaking. I think they are overly optimistic in what they think they can accomplish. I would say this task may be more on the order of five to ten years, unless they have lots of volunteers helping with the work. But where they are going to get large numbers of human transcribers with intimate knowledge of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic is beyond me.
Although they already "know" what all the texts say and there are numerous copies of the words in PC readable format and all of the documents have had photographs done and are also in PC readable format. So unless they just mean they want to put pictures of the texts up, I'm not sure what they plan to accomplish, nor why it can't be done tomorrow.
Or I could scan in and put on line my copy of
"The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English"
By Geza Vermes,1997 Penguin Books 648pp. Of course, I'd probably get in trouble for that since you know it's gonna be under copyright protection until it's as old as the Dead Sea Scrolls are now (given the current mindset of the corporate sponsored Congress).
Writing was not a necessity of civilization. Take for example Catal Hyuck which was continuously occupied for millenia before a writing system. Many American cultures had no writing systems, and they were'nt all hunter gatherer societies. Who says a writing system has to be alphabetic? Are you saying the current Japanese and Chinese languages don't qualify as written language?
In the Multiverse you keep what you kill.
-Riddick IV:16.11-12
Your trouble is related to the fact that the fanatics get all the bad press... and this leads to you becoming a fanatic yourself:
I guess religious freedom is one step, atleast it doesn't force one religion on everyone, the next step should probably be to forbid all kinds of religion, atleast as long as it tries to control people.
How is this not repeating the very same offense of your targeted enemy?
Writing was not a necessity of civilization. Take for example Catal Hyuck which was continuously occupied for millenia before a writing system. Many American cultures had no writing systems, and they were'nt all hunter gatherer societies. Who says a writing system has to be alphabetic? Are you saying the current Japanese and Chinese languages don't qualify as written language?
Eh I was pointing out that the oldest writing wasn't Chinese, I'm not sure where you are wandering off to, but you seem to be answering a bunch of points I didn't make.
What we have from that era in China doesn't qualify as a written language any more than the counting tokens from 9000 years ago found in the fertile crescent. And while we're on the subject, hieroglyphs aren't alphabetic either, although they certainly count as writing.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Son: Dad, why is the sky blue?
Dad: It's reflecting the ocean.
20 years pass.
Grandson: Dad, why is the sky blue?
Son: A wise man once told me that it is a reflection of the sea.
Religion is an extension of this conversation.
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Oral traditions are exceedingly reliable historical references.
You've got to be kidding me. People lie. They don't see everything that happened. They misremember things. Details are left out. Embellishments occur. Context is missing. Prejudices abound.
Even in the modern era where there are reporters and cameras everywhere, finding out the truth is a shaky proposition. Have you ever read a story in a newspaper that you had inside knowledge of? Was it accurate? Did it tell the whole story?
Now you're going to claim that stories from 1,000s of years ago that were orally handed down before reaching book form are a good historical reference? Absolutely delusional.
Uhmmm yes. That is exactly what I'm claiming. We're not talking about witnesses that happened to think they see a car accident. We're talking about histories that have been repeated very often by many generations simultaneously over the course of many hundreds of years.
By the way the science is in here and THAT is what is backing me up.
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By the way the science is in here and THAT is what is backing me up.
[citation needed]
Right, but my issue still stands - if a "heretic" can claim enough followers, he can start his own competing narrative, distorting the oral tradition.
Lets get beyond hypothetical scenarios. What real oral traditions have been accepted as historical truth? I mean, we don't really believe that Jason planted "dragons teeth" and fought the army that they sprouted into. We don't really believe that Theseus fought a half-man half-bull in a labyrinth. We recognize that these stories are allegories for real events, but, without any sort of written record, we have no idea what those events are. Tell me, is there any oral tradition that can tell us the truth of a historical event?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Wha? Jason didn't... do... that?
I have to admin that that's a good challenge. I hadn't really thought about the content oral traditions seem to deal with. I don't think the veracity of the content changes the model's potential (or known record) for consistency.
It has to be said that Biblical Archeology has been working very hard at finding the factual history of the Bible - which has portions that began as oral traditions.
Take Noah's flood: all oral traditions has a story about a(n important) flood. There is global geological evidence that is attributed to the flood (by those who believe it is historical).
Take the story of Abraham: his story was first passed on orally. Factual? Depends on what you believe. Did Sodom and Gomorrah exist? Inquiring archaeologists want to know.
If one believes the Bible, then yes, there are oral traditions of historical facts.