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."
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
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.
The Admin and the Engineer