Rug Burn Junky on 2/10/2011 at 19:26
Those of you who remember ancient (TTLG) history may remember some particularly epic conflagrations between myself and the as-yet-skeptical fett on the subject of the bible.
Other than challenging fett's christianism at the time, the big sticking point really ended up being the veracity of the bible itself. I, and Monkeysee I believe, kept hammering on the fact that the literal truth of the stories contained there-in was in question - for a myriad of reasons too numerous to get into now - while fett was hyperfocused on the consistency of the text. That it was well-documented that what we believe them to say now has been verified back to their inception.
That really wasn't inconsistent with what I and Monkey were saying (2,000 years of consistency does not impart truth on a statement), so I've never challenged it.
Nor do I do so now. However, I caught (
http://www.wired.com/cloudline/2011/09/googles-dead-sea-scrolls-project-why-putting-parchment-papyrus-in-the-cloud-matters-to-civilization/) this story and it brought the flashback to the surface for me. I don't expect any sort of smoking gun that would get me to go all (
http://bible.cc/ezekiel/23-20.htm) Ezekiel 23:20 on the subject, but I do find it interesting that original source materials and secondary sources will be subject to this kind of additional scrutiny. All the better for academia.
jay pettitt on 2/10/2011 at 21:09
Is this one of those cleverly disguised birthday threads?
Martin Karne on 2/10/2011 at 22:05
Are you trying to start a holy war? Are you trying to use "walking bombs of faith"?
Xorak on 2/10/2011 at 23:48
I like fett's position on that. I think the consistensy of the documents is more important than the search for a literal truth. Having access to the exact same, unaltered documents that ancient people did is historically more imporant than any inherent 'truth' in those documents. I'm not even sure they looked on religion as absolute and unchangeable, the same way we do. But all our religion has somehow acquired infallibility in the last 1500 years or so.
jay pettitt on 3/10/2011 at 11:04
I can only imagine that there's still oodles of wiggle room when it comes to translating this stuff. Not just because of the language, but also because they're written for a different audience in a different time - lots of the translating will be subjective rather than objective.
And nobody said that the Dead Sea Scrolls were your bona-fide basal original texts - just very old. Folk wanna believe what they wanna believe. Academic study won't change that. I'm pretty sure that the academic take and the popular view on how this stuff came to be and how it fits in with history and such is already miles apart and not about to be getting any closer.
That and, of course, only a couple of them are anything approachable to readable.
If these were Norse texts or something, I'd be really interested from a historical/folklore standpoint. But the fact that 2.2 billion people (+ jews?), still think that this stuff really is the hallowed evidence of a super natural realm inhabited by critters with actual names like Bob, and same folk will get incredibly upset at any critical analysis and are sold on the notion that this provides an actual credible alternative to reality that allows you to ignore stare you in the face obvious truths about life does rather take the shine off it.
Otherwise, sticking it on the Internet seems okay.
Forever420 on 3/10/2011 at 14:00
]
Its all useless because Religion is complete and utter bullshit, steel wool shoved over eyes of masses to make money for an ancient "da man" and keep the lower people in bondage. ALL Religion bullshit, Amitas, Veritas, Pax?
Queue on 3/10/2011 at 15:44
Please die -- and confirm whether or not Heaven exists.
fett on 4/10/2011 at 02:14
Quote Posted by Forever420
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Its all useless because Religion is complete and utter bullshit, steel wool shoved over eyes of masses to make money for an ancient "da man" and keep the lower people in bondage. ALL Religion bullshit, Amitas, Veritas, Pax?
Once again, you've completely missed the point. The article has nothing to do with religion and neither did the thrust of the OP. There is an issue of scholarship in question here. If you're unable to separate the importance of a text as old as the DSS from the religion(s) associated with it in terms of anthropological and linguistic value, you're a fucking retard (as you've amply demonstrated in pretty much every other post of yours since you started here, so really, there was no need for exhibit B).
Dammit RBJ, see what you've turned me in to?
As cool as this is, I don't think we're going to find anything startling. The DSS were picked over years ago by legends like Randall Price and Ben Zion Wacholder's team (read: People Who Know Their Shit). Comparisons of modern transliterations to the OT fragments of the DSS have consistently revealed very few copy errors and those were insignificant AS IT RELATES TO RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY BASED UPON THEM (protip for Forever420 - this is still not about religion).
The win here is that no one has to take Dr. Price and company's word for it anymore - anyone can look at and interact with them, and that type of access was far too long coming. But I suspect they'll find exactly what most DSS scholars have discovered over the years. That there's not very much to criticize - this is the issue that originally drew me to Christianity and still gives me pause in my unbelief. The Bible you can buy at a local Wal-Mart store today (at least the New King James and the New International Version) are scary-as-fuck close to the extant manuscripts and the DSS. It is the most well-preserved document in the history of humanity by all available measure, which alone is enough to warrant our respect if not awe, whether or not you believe anything it says. Which IIRC, RBJ eventually conceded, which means I won at least 50% of that years-long argument. So HA.
fett on 4/10/2011 at 02:29
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
I can only imagine that there's still oodles of wiggle room when it comes to translating this stuff. Not just because of the language, but also because they're written for a different audience in a different time - lots of the translating will be subjective rather than objective.
Not really - the great thing about Hebrew and Greek is that they are very specific languages. There are very few ambiguities and because most of the Biblical texts were written by Jews, there's a very common source even for metaphor and symbolic language over the centuries (i.e. - "dragon" in Revelations in the NT means the same thing as it did in Ezekiel in the OT - an oppressive federal system or more specifically the figurehead of it). Don't buy into this idea that translation/transliteration is "all up to the scholar's interpretation." It's actually easier to understand what the Biblical languages say and mean than even early American writings (English is horrifically ambiguous at almost every point). The overused example of this is the word "love" in English - which implies a myriad of different emotions or actions. Greek on the other hand has 5-6 different words to specify whether the author is speaking of marital love, fucking, appreciation of a material possession, non-physical support of an idea, etc. etc. This specificity added to context allows translators an incredible amount of precision. I also maintain (as always) that there are not as many disagreements about interpretation related to theology as outsiders are led to believe. No "primary" issues are disputed between translations (or denominations, really), and most Christian denominations disagree about secondary and tertiary points, which have more to do with practice than actual theology.
