Slashdot Mirror
The Dead Sea Scrolls and Information Paranoia
jfruhlinger writes "Today Google and the Israel Museum have made the famed Dead Sea Scrolls available for online viewing. This is a great step forward for scholars and those curious about the oldest known copies of many biblical texts. But why has it taken nearly 50 years for the contents of this material to be made fully public? Blogger Kevin Fogarty thinks the saga of the scrolls since their discovery — along with the history of religious texts in general — is a good example of how people seek to gain power by hoarding information. In that regard, it holds some important lessons for the many modern debates about information security and control."
Obviously to track and identify those with an interest in this material so they can sell that information, complete with maps and street view, to ancient aliens intent on probing and implanting their mind control chips. Don't be evil! What a joke.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
to make the articles fit, please save yourself the effort
Because releasing damaging information about current religious denominations is dangerous not only to the releasers but also to the psyche of their followers. Many preconceptions and interpretations about the original biblical text will have to be changed.
Same problem with proof of aliens and disproving gods. If you can prove we weren't the "chosen ones" or you can ultimately prove what actually created the universe and create life from nothing in a scientific way, a LOT of religious people will be disappointed.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Call me when they release the Flying Spaghetti Monster texts. Those, I might be interested in.
Nice!
http://www.gibby.net.au
It's worth noting that the Scrolls are the original pieces of paper, penned by Jews living in Jerusalem before, during, and after the time that Jesus is said to have done all those amazing things.
Yet you won't find even a hint of an oblique reference to anything that could possibly be mistraken for Jesus or the events of the Gospels.
Nor will you find anything in the collected works of Philo. Philo was the brother-in-law of King Herod Agrippa, who was king during Jesus's alleged ministry. Philo was the Jewish philosopher who first integrated the Hellenistic Logos into Judaism -- that would be the "Word" of John 1:1. He was a prolific author who mentioned a great many of his contemporaries. His last work was his first-hand account of his participation in an embassy to Rome to petition Caligula about the mistreatment of Jews at the hands of the Romans; this was in the mid 40s, well after the latest possible date for the Crucifixion.
Also silent are all other contemporaries, including Pliny the Elder (who was fascinated with all things supernatural) and the Roman Satirists (whose stock in trade was the humiliation Jesus was said to have heaped upon the Roman and Jewish authorities in Jerusalem).
Indeed, the oldest record of Jesus comes from the author of the Pauline epistles, writing decades after the "fact," and who made a point to record that all his experiences of Jesus were spiritual and that he never saw Jesus in the flesh. Those responsible for the Crucifixion were "the Princes of that age." And that's the closest record we have of Jesus.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
by keeping a lot of information secret. Transparency is more powerful than regulation.
Now, I don't have a degree in this stuff, but I've read enough of Paul that it doesn't look like he was arguing only for a spiritual Jesus. He surely knew the Twelve (well, Eleven). I thought the idea that Paul only believed in a spiritual Jesus because he never met the man in person was debunked. Do I believe there was a lot of myth-making around Yeshua bar Yousef? Yes. Progressively-increasing myth-making? Absolutely, see for example the fact that originally Mark ended at 16:9. But don't throw the baby Jesus out with the bathwater.
They had to wait for the copyrights to expire...
From what I could see, that article only had links to other articles that didn't have links to the actual museum website. Its a pretty weak website but still would hav ebeen nice to have a link somewhere.
http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/
I don't know what font they used to print those scrolls, but it's so distorted it doesn't even look like English.
Thou just can't giveth up thy esoterica, canst thou?
Let's try again, shall we? In actual English this time, not Ye Olde Worlde Beardspeake.
"You made the seed grow on the day it was planted, and the next morning made it blossom".
Harder to build a cult around prose, isn't it?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
In other news, Bethesda sues the Jews for use of the word Scrolls in the Dead Sea Scrolls, while the Jews cite prior art and challenge Bethesda to a match of Quake 3 to determine who gets to use the term.
The scrolls were first found in the 1940s, so it's 60+ years.
The primary cause of the delay (as I understand it) is that there is a universal presumption among scholars that whoever is working on it has the right of first publication, and they generally work on it 'till it's done.
However, these scrolls could be considered are world treasure, and the scholars who worked on them weren't the people who actually found them, so it doesn't seem to me to be the same circumstances as (say) waiting for whoever dug up some bones to announce a new hominid species.
And 60+ years seems excessive under any circumstances. Scholars have been born, educated, had their careers, and died while waiting for this stuff to come out.
FWIW...
Back maybe 20 years ago the Biblical Archeology Review (big critics of the delay) published the text of some of the material, which they obtained by reverse engineering a concordance that had been published by the team working on the scrolls.
There's an old photo (which I happened to see in a BAR article) of one of the priests who was working on the scrolls, sitting in front of a pile of small papyrus scraps, holding a lit cigarette in his hand. Makes you wonder how much of the material ended up in the ash bin before it got analyzed.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
being the only authorized spiritual representative?
Finance is one of the main industries known for hoarding information because of its immediate value for trading and analysis. I would suspect the financial industry companies are much more innovative than Google when you consider the analysis and practical applications required to stay afloat. So, yes, Google cares about advertising, but they don't seem to have a successful hedge fund yet.
Primitive humans see animals getting drunk, primitive humans does the same.
Primitive humans is high and is seeing the gods of the forest and the nature, start to make up stories about those trips under subjective changes in perception, thought, emotion and consciousness caused psychedelics, dissociatives, and deliriants.
That is the base of all cults/religions, whatever.
Dead Sea Scrolls are cool, but no differ from the trips written by our ancestors.
John M. Allegro was an adviser on the dead sea scrolls to the jordanian government.
In his book "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East", he points the primitive trips from the dead sea scrolls. He points that christ is a cover up story for the use of Amanita muscaria.
*Entheogen -> psychoactive substances used in a spiritual context.
You don't have to go back to the flippin' Dead Sea Scrolls to see how people try to gain power through hoarding information.
Today I switched doctors.
I have a new Dr. appointment Thursday (relatively soon). Both the destination clinic, and the origin clinic state that it takes 5-7 days to transfer my medical records completely.
I've said that I'd be willing to physically go and pick up my records, and transport them. But I CANNOT.
Oh I can, for a FEE.
It will cost in copying charges around $50 if I want to pick up my records myself. It's done for free if it's being transferred to another clinic.
My records. About me. The accumulation of which were services for which I'm sure I or my insurance company already paid quite handsomely.
And yet this medical clinic clearly has emplaced a fee to discourage people from getting their OWN medical records.
No, it's not the Dead Sea Scrolls but it's power-through-information-hoarding.
Another example?
I was adopted. The agency that holds my adoptive records offers the 'de-identified' record for $50. Fine, it takes some labor to accumulate this. (Never mind that this might contain critical medical information needed by the adoptee.)
However, to advance that, and see if my birth mother is reachable, is $250.
Regardless of effort. If it's a matter of opening the file, finding her name, and calling the number - it's $250.
To me, that's information hoarding. I don't object to paying $50/hour or whatever for research services. I don't object to paying for the labor and legwork involving tracking down and contacting a person in what might be a very delicate situation. I have no issues there. But to have to pony up $250 for what might be 5 minutes' work for no result, from an agency which is the SOLE source of critical information?
-Styopa
No modern has tried to suppress the Dead Sea Scrolls, as the summary might have one believe. Hell, many of these and like texts have been on Ph.D. comprehensive or qualifying exams for years (my own exam had the Nag Hammadi corpus on it which, far from being subject on modern day oppression, is available in multiple translations).
It is certainly true that for part of the past few decades, the scrolls have been in the hands of a few specialists. This is not for the purposes of power in some grand sense, however, but for the sake of publications for those who have control over them. The information wasn't being hoarded so much as disseminated slowly for the benefit of those scholars who work on them. On this note, I might be tempted to join in the rant of the article but that points to a deeper lack of open culture in higher education. Even so, the fact remains that they have been published.
Indeed, they have been subject of more than normal publication (see postscript). The gentleman who wrote this article complains, "why has it taken nearly 50 years for the contents of this material to be made fully public?" He fails to understand the simplest reason: the public doesn't really care enough. That is to say, some members of the public might care enough to read parts of a translation. A few might even now some languages from the period. But how many of the public are going to read it in the original in scanned versions rather than critical editions when even academics like myself only undertake paleography when we are trying to produce something for publication? I cannot therefore fathom a man who is daunted by a little Latin (see quote above) in type complaining that he cannot have the opportunity to practice his Aramaic paleography skills. Yet, in spite of the fact that the general public will not make much use of it, and the fellow who wrote this article certainly won't, Google and the Israel Museum have made high quality scans of them public. I, for one, and more inspired to speak of how great a thing this is; how much the internet has changed things (it takes decades in my field for a scholar to produce a critical edition of a text); and finally how the optimism and kindness (and probably interest in good publicity) of the people involved in this project have made this possible.
p.s.--I say "more than normal publication" because in most pre-modern fields it is extremely rare to find copies of relevant manuscripts online. The only hope typically is a) to use critical editions, b) to order microfilm, though many places will not provide this, or c) to go to the archives which, for an American, generally means thousands of dollars in travel costs. There have, however, been some efforts to make more manuscripts available online and they deserve some praise. The British Library should have a special note in this regard. Quite a few others may be found here. Mr. Fogarty need not visit these sites however. The open access of many of them will spoil his fun and, besides, he shouldn't bother unless he can read Latin and Greek written in a fancy script.
There was no physical evidence for Pontius Pilate for almost 2000 years, leading many biblical scholars to argue that he was a mythical character.
This changed in 1961, when the pilate stone was discovered.
(And Pontius Pilate was way more famous than Jesus in his time.)
Physical evidence for Buddha was not found until 1895.
I'm not sure what your point is. Are you saying that there is a probability of Jesus being a fictional character? That's fine, it's a fair point. There's a non-zero probability that Jesus was a fictional character.
But it's not the important part...
Not to knock Google and the Israeli Museum because the more information the better but wasn't the content (the text) already released some time ago? The scholars who were hoarding the Dead Sea Scrolls for the better part of a CENTURY had been releasing short fragments to the public from time to time a part of their work (gotta keep those research grants flowing). I heard someone wrote a program that took all these fragments together and, using the overlapping words, pieced together a "complete" version.
Sort of like shotgun gene sequencing where you blow apart the DNA with enzymes, sequence the short fragments and then use a computer to put it all together. Except this time the DNA is cultural (shotgun meme sequencing?).
I don't see how these two topics are tied together. The article is full of a few facts and plenty of uninformed opinion. Parts of the scrolls have been displayed in PUBLIC in the past. I've seen them in Milwaukee WI. http://www.mpm.edu/dead-sea-scrolls/
I also personally know scholars who have studied the scrolls. So they finally got around to putting them on the internet. Great. But the author of this article is the paranoid one - we weren't suffering from any type of information paranoia until he showed up.
You do realize that 50 years ago, there wasn't even an 'online'
You do realise that the word 'irony' can be found in most dictionaries? Look it up sometime!
About 18 years ago, I stood in the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem and read from the Dead Sea Scroll copy of Isaiah. I'm no longer a religious individual, but it's still awe inspiring to be able to piece together the familiar words from the ancient, unfamiliar lettering. Now it can be done anywhere, for free, rather than requiring a 15 hour flight.
Thanks, google.
Wow. Just Wow. With a username like "Empiric" you would think I wouldn't be surprised by a such a douchey response but here I am responding to it. Sure you posted a whole TWO sentence refutation to the poster's argument and then followed it up with the tried and true "No one listen to him cause he isn't an expert so he must be a dumbass" deflection tactic. Your debate team coach would be proud. I guess dismissing his argument cause you don't want to hear it is easier than actually disproving it. Empirical evidence my ass. Get a new username. Might I suggest AgendaPushingDick, because you have provided all the "Empirical" evidence in your post that you are indeed an Agenda Pushing Dick. How many symposia on that subject have YOU hosted?
The Pantelgraph, invented in 1865 and commercialized as a telefax service that year, predates even the telephone. I imagine some time in the ensuing century and a half a pack of religious scholars might have gained access to this commercial service if they wanted to.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I recognise the fonts in question they are the same ones that are used by default in GoogleEarth on Linux!
To me, "atheist" is no different than "strong atheist".
Is that because you want to paint atheists into a corner they don't actually occupy? Remember even the particularly virulent band of atheists who surround Dawkins used the slogan "God probably does not exist" on their bus advert, because the "strong atheist" position is evidentially untenable (which is, after all, why those arguing against atheism invented the "strong atheist" concept in the first place).
It's is like saying (without regard for what it is actual Christians believe): "To me a person who does not believe BOTH that plants existed before male and female humans (Gen 1) AND that the male human being existed before plant life (Gen 2:5), is not a Christian." Indeed I often see atheists telling Christians that they aren't really Christians because they don't accept an (ultimately untenable) inerrantist position.
It's ever so much easier to argue against ridiculous position ascribed to an interlocutor than actually to argue against them. This is what the believer who endorses the fiction of "strong atheism" as an intellectually accepted atheist position (of course you will catch people saying "their is no God," as you fill find a "Christian" activist committing mass murder at a youth camp) does, no less than the atheist who thinks they can dictate to any particular believer what it is they must believe.
Agnosticism --which is the position that anything pertaining to the nature of God is inherently unknowable --is not necessarily incommensurate with being an atheist. However it sits uncomfortably with atheism because, after all, claiming God, or even gods, to be inherently beyond human knowledge privileges gods above unicorns;, Santa; the tooth fairy; Skth; or any other things whose claims to existence lack evidential foundation. Most atheist thinkers would instead merely point out that the claim for the "existence" of gods suffers from lack of proof (which is not the agnostic position).
Atheism is simply the non-acceptance of the claim that gods exist. Which is, contra the GP, not a "subtle," but a radically different position from the claim that the attribute of 'non-existence' can positively be predicated to gods.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
http://xkcd.com/612/
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Science changes its views based on what's preserved. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief may be preserved.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U
In both cases, you ultimately wind up taking someone's word for it. However, in the case of science, there is tremendous documentation of rigorous testing having been performed by many separate groups of highly trained researchers, with the possibility that the claims can be tested yet again by future researchers. In the case of faith, you just have stories, written thousands of years ago, about amazing things that nobody seems to be able to do anymore.
When I hear this in the same sentence, I always get a Snow Crash vibe.
That seems impossible to truly do. They are mutually exclusive ...
Why?
Say we take that text of an ancient poem. We can exercise a scientific understanding of it, the various means by which we establish, for instance, its age and authenticity &c ... But science must necessarily be silent as to its poetic meaning. Does this mean a person cannot embrace both science and poetry?
Could a person not entertain an evidence based epistemology in one field of knowledge while relying on, I don't know ... intuition in another?
What is it about a religious world view in general (as opposed to specific explicitly anti-scientific religious positions) that would require of a believer "a sacrifice in understanding" of science?"
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I'm studying ancient Christianity and Judaism at Harvard, have published on one of the Dead Sea Scrolls and work with them regularly (I'm procrastinating on translating a bunch of fragments for my homework right now actually).
It's taken this long partly for bureaucratic reasons, but mostly because there are thousands of fragments that are basically shredded wheat that had to be put back together, reconstructed, translated, categorized, edited, and published. This was also around the time the State of Israel, and the cluster**** that was caused a lot of delays and red tape.They have not been kept secret, they have been steadily published in the DJD series (Discoveries in the Judaean Desert) for the last 50 years as this tremendous task has been accomplished. As someone said above, yes people were not very careful with them by today's standards, people smoked around them, drank coffee, and used the handiest invention that had just come out-"scotch tape"- to piece them together. All that said, with the exception of fragments in private collections, the last of the Dead Sea Scrolls were published in the early 90's.
This is not publishing anything new, or secret. It is being scanned and put online for the public, who doesn't have a clue what to do with them, can look at them. Scholars have known how to look at them, in the DJD, and in a half a dozen other widely available publications that have been around for decades.
Facts the dilettantes have said in these comments that have made me [face_palm]:
The Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS hereafter) were composed in Qumran, not Jerusalem. (some of the stuff is clearly copies of other documents that circulated elsewhere however)
The Qumran community responsible for the scrolls existed between the 2nd century BCE and ca 70CE during the Roman war.
There is nothing in the DSS about Jesus because they probably never heard of him, they probably lived a monastic style life and kept to themselves.
There are, however, certain strong affinities between things we find in the DSS and the New Testament, including the method of scripture interpretation, some apocalyptic ideas, as well as some apparently common expressions like that found in 4Q521 and Acts.
There is nothing damaging or threatening to the modern religions of Judaism and Christianity. To be sure, the DSS are of tremendous importance for contextualizing their origin and telling us what life was like back then, but this is not a conspiracy to keep them hidden.
Anyone that has any questions please feel free to ask me, and stop giving those asshats up there 5 points for 'information'
Using Intel Nehalem processors and Cat bulldozers. Do no evil...
It's taken a while because they were busy adding 'Episode IV: Dead Sea Reloaded' to the front scrolls, then redoing some passages in better, remastered color for increased dramatic historic accuracy. The THX release had many fans mumbling around unsatisfied but the Really Definitive Really-This-Time Unaltered Unfucked-With 8.12 Blue-Dark-Grey Ray Of Death Edition on 72 disks will be released soon now. Also, the original, as-discovered scrolls are believed to be lost forever now but that's how some bearded demi-god understands creativity. Blessings of the state. Blessings of the masses.
The Dead Sea Scrolls don't contain "information", they contain superstitions. There is a difference.
When religion make claims which are not faith based, for example claim of miracle or effect in the real world (as opposed to be wholly in the head) then the scientific method can be applied , and evidence looked at. The only point where you might be right , is when the claim are faith only, without claim of any effect visible in reality, then really, I see no problem to say science has nothing to do with faith, which in this case has nothing to do with reality (otherwise it would leave an evidence which CAN be studied).
The main problem I see with people saying one can be religious and scientist , is that they are compartmentalizing : they use their rationality for science, and leave it outside at the door for religion. *shrug* not my beer, but if one wants to check their brain out, that's their problem.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Maybe you can explain why science without religion is lame.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dating_the_Dead_Sea_Scrolls
That link would make the argument you make possibly valid for
22 T 4Q171 Psalms Commentarya 1944 +/- 23 3-126 CE
23 T 4Q258 Comm. Rule, 1st sample 1823 +/- 24 129-255 or 303-318 CE
The other scrolls appear too old to be of relevance.
I work on a nuclear power station and there are several people who are nearing the age of retirement who are "information hoarders". They have the opinion that the more information that only they know, they more powerful and secure they are. I have come to learn the exact opposite is actually true.
I work in the main control room and frequently have to call the system experts about an alarm or an anomaly and you very quickly figure out who are the more useful and who are the most useless. The useless ones are the ones who restrict the information. I need to speak to people who openly share their knowledge and information. I don't "steal" it, or never need them again. In fact, since I know how useful they are, I tend to deliberately not remember what they say because I know I can just go back to them.
Information shares and people who are happy to help are more useful and more powerful than the latter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitheism
An antitheist is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "One opposed to belief in the existence of a god." The earliest citation given for this meaning is from 1833. An antitheist may be opposed to belief in the existence of any god or gods, and not merely one in particular.
Antitheism has been adopted as a label by those who take the view that theism is dangerous or destructive. One example of this view is demonstrated in Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001), in which Christopher Hitchens writes: "I'm not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful."[1]
Frankly, that is the only moral position you can take once you see priests of major religions blessing tanks and artillery (which you know will be used against civilians), soldiers marching with religious insignia on their uniforms and flags and wars based on religious beliefs.
Not to mention the political disenfranchisement of those who do not belong to major (and ruling) religions. In secular democratic countries no less.
And let's not even start on major religions' position on gay individuals - while they protect child molesters in their own ranks.
That's all besides the fact that in our day and age only two kinds of people (given that they had at least elementary education) can actually preach ANY of that religious claptrap.
Utterly naive and gullible OR completely unscrupulous liars.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
So you don't believe that they actually came from the Temple Library and were buried to protect them from destruction in 70 AD when the Romans burned Jerusalem? I thought the Qumran theory was discredited.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Dennis Ritchie's original notebooks from Telephone Laboratories from 1969-1973 - when will they be put on-line?
Or isn't it? You can't pick and choose, keep moving the goalposts.
Personally, I see it as more evidence that it's just a bunch of stories cobbled together.
They were defined as being arbitrary, capricious, with a capacity to do cruel things to people. Thus when stuff happened, we understood, it was consistent. They also weren't all-powerful, so if they couldn't do something good for us, we understood.
But then this new tribe comes along and defines its god as absolutely benevolent, omniscient and omnipotent, and ensuing generations go crazy trying to reconcile those traits with reality.
And it was mostly achieved. However, the effect is obvious. Christian doctrine was solidified by a couple hundred people at that time. Anything that may have been considered Christian before or even after was invalidated.
It was also lopsided. The Council was in the East, attendees were overwhelmingly from the East, so Eastern thought prevailed. Western ideas, such as those popularized by Arius (Jesus created by God, so the whole "Father" thing makes more sense), didn't really have a chance. He and his ilk were banished, their works burned, possessors subject to execution. Any traces of Arianism were quickly eliminated in the East where it had little support, but it took a few hundred more years before it was mostly crushed in the West.
I think we would have quite a different Bible, and quite a different Christian doctrine, had attendance been equal between West and East.
Gain power by hoarding information ? Drop some Prospero in here.. ;) http://vimeo.com/28884746
Agnostics think they can't prove it (now/ever), but they don't rule existance (because they already acknowledge one can't know, so they place it entirely in the realm of Faith - it exists or it doesn't with equal probability) so it makes as much sense to believe that it makes to not believe.
Being an agnostic in the way you describe is a cop-out. Of course we can't *know* there is no God, but that also means that we can't know that the world wasn't created last Tuesday in situ, or that the FSM didn't actually create the world, or that invisible pink unicorns don't live in my back yard, or that the world wasn't originally shat out the rear-end of a flying cosmic turtle. That way lies *madness*, where anything and everything is possible and unknowable.
You can't say with a straight face that all unknowable questions/ideas have an equal chance of being right, and you *especially* can't say that there is an equal probability of them being true or NOT true. Is there an equal probability that I am the anti-Christ, or not? Or that I am a latent super-hero, or not?
Madness. Absolute madness. You cannot live in a world with no rules where anything, literally *anything*, is possibly true.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
These "Dead Sea Scrolls" appear to be written in some foreign language/alphabet. I thought eveyone knew the Bible was written in English?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Inerrancy has been around for a while, but each proponent usually claims which version is inerrant. You would not base your inerrancy on any Bible version that includes Mark 16:9-20. Others choose differently.
One of the first Christians excommunicated for being logical. A huge number of criticisms of Christianity are instantly solved by Marcionism. Instead today we have logic bent to the breaking point in attempted defenses.
Look, aside from atheists' crazy, paranoid theories about some Vast Judeo-Christian Conspiracy, there is very little to say about historical documents being kept "secret" (trust me, the scholars who wanted to and needed to examine the texts, they have...) The article mentions "control" like a dozen times as a pejorative without once explaining what the problem is - why keeping the Dead Sea Scrolls exclusive to scholars is somehow a nefarious deed. The entire article literally had no point except to iterate over and over some disparaging slant against Judaic history and implicitly suggesting some kind of esoteric, high-powered society of control is involved here.
Do any of you realize how many historical documents are not made public, but are maintained strictly for access by serious scholars? Tens of thousands at least. And dinosaur bones, do you think these are made available to the public? Has this affected you? Do these people participate in some kind of information control for the sake of control? Or considering this practice spans all sorts of cultures and all sorts of historical documents, do you just think it's more reasonable that it's simply the practice of historians, palentologists, etc etc to maintain their historical artifacts in this manner?
That's what I was waiting for. Mark 16:9-20 doesn't really change matters of faith and Christian conduct. With this definition of inerrance it really doesn't matter whether it's included. It matters tremendously for literalists though.
I guess you haven't heard of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. Inerrancy is not as fringe as you portray it to be. And watch out for that term. Many people argue that Christianity itself, or varying degrees of adhering to the Bible, is an indefensible position.
You pick your version, you make your claims on that version. The author obviously picks a different, and widely accepted as authoritative, version of the book than you do. It's as simple as that. Neither of you is more correct than the other.
With just the Masoretic Version of the english translated texts we cannot yet see the original scroll texts if you are not fluet in hebrew.
So we have all reasons to be paranoia about this until we have full and verified translations into at least english for all scrolls.
Ghost Pirate 1: We need that key that starts your boat Mr. Big Stuff, let's have it?
Brock Samson: It's up my ass.
Ghost Pirate 2: Are you serious?
Brock Samson: Why don't you check?
Ghost Pirate 2: Well, check.
Ghost Pirate 1: What if he's lying?
Ghost Pirate 2: If he were telling the truth, that would be better?
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
64 years is a pretty long time for the general public to wait (if they ever even cared), but I seriously doubt it had anything to do with information control. I don't know about the other scrolls, but many ancient manuscripts, both original Hebrew as well as Greek translations, of the book of Isaiah have been available for study since long before the Dead Sea manuscript was found. The DSS only corroborated the manuscripts found earlier. Actually, the fact that there are so many manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts that agree so closely with one another does two things: it helps to validate the accuracy of the completed text, and it effectively eliminates the possibility of any one party controlling the information content of the manuscripts. For those interested, this Wikipedia article has a nice summary of some of the manuscripts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_manuscript
It's all just sum social manipulation scheme of SEELE... Duh
I hope not. I'd like a copy. Wasn't that going to be in commandments 10-15? Got broken or something ...