Single-handedly redating Qumran scrolls?



The Dem-Gaz has turned over several days' worth of its Religion section to Neil Altman, described as "a Philadelphia-based writer who specializes in the Dead Sea Scrolls. [N.B.: He specializes in writing about the Dead Sea Scrolls -- they weren't his academic specialty.] He has done graduate work at Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, Conwell School of Theology and Temple University. He has a master’s degree in the Old Testament from Wheaton Graduate School in Wheaton, Ill., and was an American Studies Fellow at Eastern College" [One wonders what kind of education graduate students in Old Testament at conservative-evangelical Wheaton College receive].

I'm not sure why Neil is hell-bent on showing that the Dead Sea Scrolls are actually medieval productions that originated in a Chinese Christian community.* He makes much of a marginal symbol that looks like this , which, in 1990, Victor Mair, a scholar of Chinese at the University of Philadelphia, said could be related to "ti", Chinese for "king" or "emperor". (Some rather enthusiastic folks latching onto this claimed that the symbol meant "god who died and came back to life," the better to connect it with Christ, you know.) Here's a brief e-mail establishing the exact scope of what Mair argued, including his response to Altman's eagerness to find characters that couldn't have appeared before the Middle Ages because the Chinese characters in question hadn't yet been invented. Check this brief article by one of Mair's colleagues for a refutation of the Chinese hypothesis, arguing that the marks are scribal notations to separate paragraphs and sense units, modified versions of Hebrew letters.

Now Altman has latched onto two photographs of a purported medieval scroll owned by a Chinese person with Jewish roots, and based on these amateur photographs of a portion of the scroll's Hebrew script, believes that some of the distinctive letter shapes provide paleographic evidence that they are directly related to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Next week we get to find out the thrilling implications of this mound of conjecture unsupported by any actual Dead Sea Scroll scholarship that I can locate.

Carbon-14 dating of scroll samples, paleographic (study of ancient writing) evidence found in the caves and records of the Qumran community -- all of it supports dates for the scrolls from the 3rd century B.C.E. to the early 1st century B.C.E.

Here's more Altman, this time fixating on highly-respected Scrolls scholar Jim VanderKam (author of one of the most widely-used textbooks on the Scrolls) and his supposed discovery of Arabic numerals 2 and 3 in the margins. And here's VanderKam's response to how he was portrayed in the article.

And yet again: A letter to the editor from Duke University scholar Stephan Goranson responding to a Newsday article and refuting Altman's claims that the red ink used on some Scrolls was covered up because red ink doesn't appear until centuries after Jesus.

What's up with the conspiracy theories? Why is Altman so fixated on showing that the Scrolls are medieval? Why is he writing like someone with an axe to grind, rather than a journalist or a scholar? There are references by those who have tracked his quest to the need to "preserve some theological presuppositions," but I am mystified about what theology is threatened by the Qumran community depositing the Scrolls in the first century. Apparently it has something to do with early dating of the gospels, a rejection of the two-source theory for Matthew and Luke, and a commitment to supernaturalism in the miracles reported in and the preservation of the gospel texts. That leads him to believe that apostles carried gospels to Asia (India, specifically), proving that they were independent and contemporaneous eyewitness accounts.

Well, thanks to our newspaper's decision to give him an unopposed forum for his Da Vinci Code-esque theories, a bunch of Arkansans who don't know squat about the Dead Sea Scrolls are going to think they come from 1200 and provide no information at all about first century Judaism, Gnosticism, and Christian sectarianism. Anybody who tells them otherwise is going to be dismissed as a puppet of the anti-Christian academic conspiracy. Sigh.

*Link to the stories uses the identical Northwest Arkansas News web version; Dem-Gaz website is subscription only. And this story appears nowhere else in the media. Apparently only Arkansas is interested/gullible enough to print it.

Posted: Wed - June 7, 2006 at 09:48 PM         |

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