Toto

I was just providing Amazon links to books that had been mentioned in the previous posts, not recommendations. If you will provide more complete references to the works you mention, I will link them to Amazon.

The BC&H Reommended Reading has a few references to translations of the Scrolls, but not the works you mention.

I gather that one is The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls : Their Significance For Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity by James VanderKam and Peter Flint.

Celsus

The discussion on the various introductions to the DSS and the art of writing history have been moved here. Discussions about John Allegro and the DSS team remain here.

Joel

Rick Sumner

Are you insane? I already cited a scholar who helped revise DJD V--Fitzmyer. Who contends, quite adamantly, that Allegro's handling was incompetent.

Perhaps you're aware of someone who has come to his defense on the matter? I'm certainly not, it is generally held that DJD V is by far the most incompetently handled volume in the series.


He did more than "make mistakes." He wasa mistaken on virtually *everything.*


"So what?" So virtually *everything* he put out had to be corrected by peer analysis. If I write a book, and then everything in that book is subsequently corrected, my book was incompetent.

Agreed. Do you know of anyone who has responded to Strugnell?

It has nothing to do with who wrote it, it's the layout of the DJD volumes. Have you never seen one? Have you never seen the Revue Qumran? The former used a *massive* Hebrew font, which often accorded a mere 10 lines to a page, with an additional line below them for translation. The Revue Qumran doesn't.

I'd be interested in seeing statistics to that effect.

The charge that they were laying in wait for Allegro in a "planned attack" is exactly what I condemned above. Let's see some evidence to that effect.

I haven't stated that Strugnell shouldn't have published earlier. That's a separate issue from whether or not Allegro published competently. It's not enough to simply show the texts off, when you are charged with publishing a translation.


So have Baigent and Leigh. You'll forgive me if I don't find that persuasive testimony. Why have neither Eisenman nor Wise offered any defense for the mishandling of DJD V? Why is the only defense to be raised in favor of Allegro's competence that he published earlier than most?

Publishing earlier and publishing well are two entirely different phenomena.

Shanks trashed Strugnell for being anti-Semitic, not for being incompetent. Indeed, just last year he observed that Strugnell is "as sharp as ever."

Indeed. He was probably wrong. That's an interpretation, not a translation, not a rendering of the texts, and thus not analogous. The issue is whether or not Allegro was "the best qualified" or, for that matter, qualified at all to handle the translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. You've suggested, thus far, that because he published early it is inherent in this that he is competent. This is nothing more than a fantastic leap of an active imagination.

We're discussing competence in handling the texts.

Cross' system remains the basis for paleographic analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is, as Vermes, Fitzmyer and Abegg note, a little too rigid, but for all intents and purposes, it remains the system used to date. One that was verified not once but twice by radio-carbon testing. Perhaps you could show me what the problem with this is?

Irrelevant. We aren't discussing what has been published, we are discussing what was preformed in a competent manner. I never cited either of them as competent.


I grow weary of repeating this, so won't anymore. Publishing texts and being competent are not the same thing. You'll observe the standard outlined above for competence--Scholar X did Y and Y was regarded as competent handling.


Really? Like they sued Cross, Shanks, Strugnell, or Fitzmyer? Oh right, they didn't. Yet they've all called him a liar, in print.

Let me know when you have something, other than "Well he published faster than almost everybody else" to show that he was competent.

Let's pretend, for example, that today I find a new species of bug. Let's pretend that tomorrow I publish on this new species, I identify it as a wolf, state that it has 16 legs, and that it prefers to eat McDonald's wrappers.

Am I competent because I published quickly? Of course not. My handling of my discovery would be *grossly* incompetent.

Regards,
Rick

Rick Sumner

Huh? The Shanks book was published after the Cross book, (while the Cross book isn't about the Dead Sea Scrolls, per se--it certainly wouldn't fall under the category of "introductory works" on the matter), and was heralded by Evans as the "best of its genre" in 2001.

Two years ago Evans thought it was the best there is, now we're apologizing for how old and outdated it is? Wow. Times change fast.

http://bookreviews.org/pdf/244_317.pdf

Regards,
Rick

spin

I was referring to the bulk of Cross's stuff on the scrolls, including is articles on palaeography, his qumran library book (in its various editions) and his weird approach (now widely abandoned) about the ostracon he claimed mentioned the yachad. My comments were based on his track record, not a specific book.

Evans is welcome to his opinions.


spin

Rick Sumner

You just stated:

Those "texts" were a specific list of books. You were, rather explicitly, speaking of a specific book.

Regards,
Rick

spin

Are you blatantly rude?

The official revision of DJD5 was recently done in Copenhagen.

Please deal with what he wrote, not what you'ver gleaned from others.

Crap.

Why not get down to examples from is text rather than pissing on about what the international team believed.

I use them quite frequently. You should try it yourself. But I get the idea that the whole original comment of yours was irrelevant to your tirade.

This was word of mouth.

Given Strugnell's official publishing record, nothing in two decades, do you think he alone wrote his corrections?

We were dealing with Allegro's performance as a scholar. His attitude to publication is an example.


Don't be silly.

You are claiming mishandling. I think you are plain wrong. He made errors as I pointed out others did as well and as there were no others to follow in the field, errors are to be expected. However, much of the Strugnell stuff was correction of readings and he made just as many errors as Allegro.

Not publishing and not publishing well is another matter I guess.

Selective reading of the trashing.

If you can find Baumgartner's analysis of Milik on the copper scroll, you'll get some idea of his incompetence.

For a short response, look at the palaeographic analysis of 4Q448, a text its editors are convinced was written during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus, for obvious internal evidence. Then look at the palaeographic evidence which says that the font has "Herodian" features, ie it looks like a text of sixty years later. When a font didn't suit Cross, he redated it arbitrarily, like the Gezer boundary markers, yet he based some of his fixed points in his sequence on arbitrary decisions de Vaux made in his archaeological analysis. If de Vaux is wrong, so is Cross. We don't know de Vaux is wrong, so we don't know if Cross is right. This is witchcraft.

And that's correct.

Fine. You miss the point. You wrongfully attacked Allegro, throwing everything you could at him, citing people like Shanks, Cross and Strugnell, as though they were glowing specimens. Publishing in the context was an admirable action of a serious scholar. The international team members you love to cite all show their lack of seriousness by not publishing. Obviously they are going to attack Allegro, but their motives were never altruistic. Allegro didn't kowtow to the blathering conceptions they strained the scrolls through (he had his own blathering conceptions), so there was conflict from relatively early on. Their lack of publishing official texts shows their basic incompetence and any attacks they made on ALlegro must be read in that light.

You are incompetent if you can't publish. Why did Qimron have to do all the work on MMT? All Strugnell did was put his name to it.

Allegro did his work, the rest vainly criticised. I would have preferred that they followed suit and left the world's scholars do the criticism. But the lack of publication is the whole story here. The incompetents didn't publish because they couldn't. Allegro did. Eat crow.

You have avoided getting to the nitty gritty of Allegro's work. Why not try something short. Look at one of his scholarly publications in PEQ and tell me what exactly you don't like about the specifically philological effort. I think you should at least do this rather than slagging the guy because of what others say about him. In short do your own work. I'll await it eagerly.


spin

Toto

<mod had on>
Please keep the scatological references and imputations of mental derangement to an absolute minimum.

Thank you.

Toto
mod BCH

spin

I was actually headhunting, not book-attacking.

I wouldn't tend to read such books as those because of who wrote them. (Alright, I was forced to read Cross, because I needed to deal with the palaeography and various other issues, as every tom, dick and harry was citing the stuff.


spin