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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."
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.
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.
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
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
Epicurus put it this way:
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
. Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
. Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
. Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
. Then why call him God?"
--Epicurus (341 - 270 BCE)
I think I like how Epicurus asked his question.
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...
Because releasing damaging information about current religious denominations is dangerous not only to the releasers but also to the psyche of their followers.
Israeli Jewish culture is mostly secular -- about 80% of Israeli Jews. There is a lot of conflict between the secularists and the 20% or so of the religious minority. The academics are usually from the secular side. If the concern were about upsetting religious folks, the secularist majority would not have had a problem with releasing the material.
A lot of folks think that the delay for currently unpublished scrolls is academics wanting to be the first to be able to publish papers based on the material. I'm in this camp. Greed makes a lot more sense to me than a vast conspiracy.
2000 years ago or so, "gospel" was an extremely popular form of political essay and very important genre of the time. There were probably new forged gospels popping up all the time. The first Nicene Council is attributed as having attempted to filter out the ones of the political genre, the forgeries, and keep the "real" ones, the literature that came from oral tradition, for the canon, in order to standardize the literature of the different ministries, temples and churches, though it, the creation of the standarized canon, probably didn't take place then. The canon was lists of books made by the early Church Fathers.
Prior to lists made by Irenaeous and other Church Fathers, there was no canon... every ministry/church had their saint and a gospel attributed to that saint. There were many different versions of some of the same gospels (which is proven by the existence of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls).
They did a great job of excising the obvious forgeries, but the Fathers made mistakes. A few of Paul's Letters could not have been written by Paul, but were surely forgeries written long after his death. Also, the author of the Gospel of Thomas (very interesting read, btw) which was indeed very early second century gospel, had a very distinct gnostic agenda that promoted the idea that we are all gods, or that in the same way that Jesus was God, every person had the divine within them: we are all God. The Gospel of John was a very specific reaction to the Gospel of Thomas, an attempt to squash this notion to maintain the divinity of Jesus. So John's Gospel was necessary to the early Church in order to help standardize what it meant to be Christian, to help lay out what the Christian beliefs actually were which was quite different from what the Gnostics believed. John very clearly elevates Jesus to the divine in a way no other gospel does.
Point is, the creation of the canon didn't really take place over the next 2000 years... for the most part it pretty much happened within a couple centuries. And it was more about revealing the Christian identity and removing the obvious forgeries than anything else. If you read about the people involved, they were not attempting anything nefarious by creating the standardized canon. They were actually trying to find legitimate testimony, but also standardizing who they were in the same way any organized group of people do, whether Americans, or Hell's Angels or some little league team.
The existence of these other, non-canonical gospels does not mean what you seem to insinuate. Nearly all of the non-canonical gospels are quite obvious forgeries. Most of the literature that made it in the canon is just as likely forged as not, and there are very few books that we know are legitimate (most of Paul's letters). But the Fathers earnestly attempted to chose books whose authors recorded the oral traditions of (who were believed to have been) the original legitimate witnesses.
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