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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."
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/
The reason for this is quite simple... Jesus was just another of the many prophets who existed in this era of Israel, an era of great political uncertainty in which the Judean countryside with filled with all sorts of roving bandits and revolutionaries (read Josephus for all the background). People who fit the general profile of Jesus were literally dime-a-dozen at that time, and public executions of these sorts of people was a pretty regular occurrence. The historians from that period and region were focused on the greater discourse of the time, namely the tenuous nature of the Roman vichy government that existed at the time, and the growing discontent and militancy of the Jews against oppressive Roman rule.
That being said, the Dead Sea Scrolls consist of material that is either older (the Torah) or more obscure than the mainstream events of the time, such as the documents related to the hermetical Essene sect of Jews (or some group similar to the Essenes).
In short, you're looking for historical evidence of Jesus' existence in a totally unrelated place. There isn't much direct evidence, really, except for his most immediate followers and the tradition that followed them. However, given what we do know about Jesus, one wouldn't expect historians from his time to mention him. Christianity, his teachings, and his death only became historically important much later on.
Jesus wasn't born until 70+ years AFTER these scrolls were written, so of course you wont find any references to Jesus in these texts.
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
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.
And that guy grew up to be the programmer who write the time estimation code for Windows' copy function.
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'
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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