The first time was a few years after the scrolls were discovered when, contrary to nitwits like Baigent and Leigh (“The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception”), the scrolls began to be published. (For an account of the publishing history of the scrolls — other than simply looking at the copyright dates in the DJD series [Discoveries in the Judaean Desert], see VanderKam’s book for non-specialists, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today, pp. 187-193 of the first edition). So much for the conspiracy. Wow, that took a lot of research.
Anyway, the conspiracy died again, when the Qumran scrolls went digital. I had access to them in grad school.
Now, the scrolls are all going online. ! GASP ! WHAT ARE THEY THINKING !!! HOW DID THEY GET THIS PAST THE VATICAN?!? WHAT WILL THE ILLUMINATI DO NEXT!?! I’m on the edge of my seat.
Granted, it will take a while to put everything up online in high resolution, but before you think that’ll give the insiders a chance to obscure the damning truths in them that will overturn all that we think about the church (despite them being published since the fifties) you should realize that high resolution, scalable photographs of the scrolls have been available for years. I remember seeing the set made by BYU at least ten years ago, but I didn’t have a few thousand dollars (or that much interest) to purchase a set. Glad I waited.
I get questions now and again (on this blog or The Naked Bible) about ancient manuscripts of the New Testament and textual criticism. Personally, this is a favorite topic. I thought I’d post something about resources in that area (all of the titles below lead to digital versions — superior since they can be searched — but if you want to read the books in their entirety, you can find them on Amazon):
Encountering New Testament Manuscripts by Jack Finegan (good intro)
Manuscripts and the Text of the New Testament by Keith Elliot and Ian Moir
New Testament Textual Criticism: A Concise Guide by David Alan Black (good for beginners)
Studies in the Theory and Method of New Testament Textual Criticism Eldon J. Epp and Gordon D. Fee, editors
The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, editors (more advanced)
Just when you were almost convinced that the Vatican wasn’t asleep at the switch in its herculean effort to keep its ancient manuscripts secret. Bummer. You can read about the initiative here.
Oh, wait . . . I’ll bet that all these years they’ve been busy pulling out all the manuscripts they want to hide from public just so they can appear to be open now . . . that’s it.
We’ve seen before how entertaining (and irritating) it can be when journalists venture to comment on archaeology. This article is no exception. Here are the first two paragraphs — see if you can spot the oafish (likely not intentional) double entendre (calling Jay Leno!):
Jesus Christ did not live with the ancient people from the settlement near caves in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, even though some scholars have argued the contrary, an archaeologist said Thursday in a presentation sponsored by the Brite Divinity School.
Jodi Magness, an endowed archaeology professor from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, focused on the Essenes, an apocalyptic group that lived in Qumran, near the 11 caves in which more than 900 scrolls were discovered. She said that one-fourth of the scrolls represent all but one of the books of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, all of which have at least one copy.
First, I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard anyone (not even Dan Brown!) suggest that Jesus lived at Qumran. The C-14 dating of the scrolls and the resulting chronology is about 150 years off for that — something our journalist could have learned via Wikipedia.
Second, I wonder if Jodi Magness is really endowed – I’ve never met her, so I can’t comment.
You can read the short post on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog here. I recommend clicking through to the links, especially to April DeConick’s blog. April, as readers may recall, is strongly opposed (for very coherent reasons) to the notion that the Gospel of Judas presents Judas a hero.
Looks like Stephen Carlson was right.[Carlson has also charged that a text known as "Secret Mark" is a forgery - see here.] From this article:
The Divinity School’s Margaret M. Mitchell, together with experts in micro-chemical analysis and medieval bookmaking, has concluded that one of the University Library’s most enigmatic possessions is a forgery.
I thought some academic relief from the paleobabble might be in order. As a brief respite from the nonsense, check out the Virtual Manuscript Room at Münster. You can view ancient papyri and other manuscripts of the New Testament on the site (nice high resolution pics).
I discovered this morning that there is a new blog online that takes on the “King James Only” nonsense). For those of you who don’t know what that is, the KJV-only idea is that the KJV itself is the result of a 17th century act of divine inspiration–it is God’s own translation of the original manuscripts of the Bible for English readers. All other English translations are either inferior or products of satanic activity (since they are based on “Alexandrian” manuscripts from that pagan hell-hole, Egypt). Many who hold to KJV-only also believe that the manuscript traditions upon which the English KJV is based are complete and inerrant representations of the original documents of the Bible. PaleoBabble readers got a little taste of this silliness with the “666 in the NIV” post I did a little while back.
This is paleobabble, of course, to anyone who knows anything about the transmission of the biblical texts or who cares about logic. It’s an interesting idea to devote a whole blog to this subject, and the contirbutors are apparently former KJV-only adherents.
My thanks to Mark Goodacre for both the link and this follow-up to the nutty “666 in the NIV.” Turns out that there’s not even 666 verses in the NIV if you actually look at the certain versification items — the NIV doesn’t include other verses in Mark, so it cannot have 666. Bummer.
Just when you think preaching can’t get any more insipid, you find yet another logic-defying sermon out there on the web. “Thanks” to the person who sent this to me.
Some surface observations on the problems with this “Bible lesson”:
1. Since the NIV *printed* the longer ending of Mark, isn’t it true that there are in fact 678 verses in Mark? Didn’t he just count them for us?
2. As educated students of the textual history of the Bible (any Bible) know (guess that excludes this pastor), verses were not original to the text of either testament. That means that versification is artificial from the get-go, so any numerical “truth” derived from counting them is, well, paleobabble. Chapter divisions were added in the 13th century. During that century, Stephen Langton (ca. 1227), a professor at the University of Paris, and Cardinal Hugo de Sancta Cara (ca. 1244-1248) pioneered the chapter divisions. (One wonders how this preacher might react to catholics being the source of the chapter divisions). Much earlier than this, the NT was divided into sections ca. the Council of Nicea, and before that the Hebrew Masoretes divided their canonical texts into section, paragraph, and phrasal divisions using accenting traditions. These divisions (oh, horror!) do not coincide with the KJV divisions or those used by other modern English translations. It is not known exactly when versification was added, but the oldest such scheme seems to be Italian Dominican biblical scholar Santi Pagnini (1470–1541; another catholic!), though his system was not popularly adopted. As Christopher Smith notes in an article produced for a magazine I edit, “Robert Estienne created an alternate numbering in his 1551 edition of the Greek New Testament.”1The first English New Testament to use the verse divisions was a 1557 translation by William Whittingham (c. 1524-1579).
None of this probably matters to the speaker, though, since he appears to be a King James only adherent. That brings me to the next problem.
My point here is that this view is completely on the fringe — and there are real reasons why it is. Frankly, the KJV debate is really a debate about the NT. None of its arguments work with respect to the Hebrew Bible (they don’t work on the NT, either, but applying them to the Hebrew text is where it really gets laughable).
4. My King James Bible says that 666 is “the number of a man” (Rev. 13:18) not the number of a manuscript tradition or publisher or versification scheme.
5. Jesus (I assume that’s who he means by the video title – the greatest preacher) didn’t assign verses to the Bible, nor does he ever reference them. Nor did he write Mark (or any other NT book). If the preacher is talking about himself, then substitute his name for Jesus accordingly.
I’ll fly my flag at half mast again tonight, not for Ted Kennedy, but for the state of the American pulpit.
