Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 23/02/2004 17:54, Jonathan Walther wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 03:48:19PM -0800, Peter Kirk wrote:
>
> > Jonathan, I think you should apologise to the Jewish members of this 
> > list for posting a link to this kind of anti-Semitic conspiracy 
> > theory material.
>
>
> As a pure-blooded Israelite tracing my lineage back to King David, I
> find such a comment offensive. ...


Jonathan, I apologise for any offence. But if you are really a 
pure-blooded Jew I am surprised that you don't find Pastor Herrell's 
material far more offensive. (Or do your trace your descent from David 
by some other line e.g. via the British royal family?)

> ... Conspiracies take many faces, and have
> many participants.  To hold one group of people as immune from
> participating in conspiracies is to dehumanize and patronize them. ...


I don't hold anyone as immune. But conspiracies should be alleged 
(especially in this very sensitive area) only when there is proper 
evidence for them. Some simple checking of the facts, by Pastor Herrell 
or by yourself, should make it clear that in this case the evidence does 
not exist.

> ... It
> also invalidates the entire New Testament.
I don't understand this comment. Are you suggesting that the New 
Testament gives evidence of a Jewish conspiracy? The most that you can 
legitimately read from it is that a particular group of Jews plotted 
against Jesus and against the early church. That is not the same as 
saying that Jews in general did.

> > From the first page I looked at, 
> > http://www.christianseparatist.org/ast/hist/ot.htm:
> >
> > > Jews begin to deceive Catholics into accepting Hebrew through Jerome.
> >
> > ... and worse.
>
>
> I am interested in whether there is any truth to the allegation, not in
> whether the allegation is politically incorrect.  Pastor Herrell spent
> quite a bit of time developing the thesis you just dismissed.  Now, you
> may be perfectly correct, and Pastor Herrell absolutely wrong.  As a
> non-scholarly outsider though, you haven't given me enough information
> to make a judgement.


Well, let's look at the statement "Jews begin to deceive Catholics..." 
This implies several things:

1) That what certain Jews were saying to Jerome, presumably about the 
priority of the Hebrew text over the LXX, was untrue. Well, this is one 
of Herrell's main themes, and I think it has been thoroughly discredited 
by the evidence given by Søren and Dave.

2) That the Jews knew that what they were saying was untrue. This is 
without any foundation and highly improbable. Whether or not they were 
correct, they were surely sincere and not deliberately deceiving anyone.

3) That the dialogue between Jews and Jerome was the start of an ongoing 
process. Sadly, this was not true. During Jerome's time the western 
empire was overrun by "barbarians" (my ancestors!) and contact between 
the western church and the Palestinian Jewish community was lost. All 
continuing contact between Christians and Jews for the next thousand 
years and more was acrimonious. Only during the Renaissance was some 
contact reestablished, and for the first time in a millennium Christians 
started to read Hebrew.

> I appreciate that everyone has busy lives, and I have no right to expect
> an answer; a proper debunking might take several hours.  Instead of a
> "just trust me", it might sound more reasonable to say "I disagree, but
> it would take a while to show you why".
>
> > I think the following (from 
> > http://www.christianseparatist.org/ast/hist/qumran.htm) illustrates 
> > clearly how valueless the book is:
> >
> > > First of all, the Israeli government has kept the documents from the 
> > > general public, so an exhaustive study of their textual content is 
> > > unavailable. The reason that the Jews have kept a hold on the 
> > > documents is clear from what documents and statistics have been 
> > > released. They even fought the Six Day War to gain control of the 
> > > documents. The Qumran Scrolls of the Old Testament agree with the 
> > > Septuagint version of the Old Testament to a far greater degree than 
> > > they agree with the Masoretic Text. Thus, from a statistical point 
> > > of view, the Dead Sea Scrolls are dangerous to the Jews. At the same 
> > > time, however, for the most part, the Dead Sea Scrolls do not agree 
> > > with either the Masoretic Text or the Septuagint, but preserve 
> > > another type of reading altogether.
> >
> >
> >
> > This is simply full of factual errors with a clearly tendentious 
> > intention.
>
>
> Tendentious or not, I am not familiar enough with the facts for it to be
> obvious that any of the above statements are errors.  You pasted a
> summary of many points that Pastor Harrell spent some time establishing
> a basis for in the rest of his book.


Well, as you suggest I don't have time to go into all of this, but here 
are some points:

1) Despite what Dave says, many of the DSS were kept from the general 
public until 1991. But this was not done by the Israeli government, but 
by a small team of scholars (many of whom expressed openly anti-Semitic 
views) who were the self-appointed guardians of most of the scrolls. 
Only in 1990 was the Israeli Jew Tov appointed to head the team, and in 
1991 the scrolls were made public. (Summarised from the introduction to 
G. Vermes "The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English").

2) The Israeli government had far more important reasons than the DSS 
for fighting the Six Day War. If control of the DSS had been even a 
minor war aim, the government would have exercised that control after 
the war, when the scrolls were on their occupied territory; but instead 
they allowed the team of scholars to keep control.

3) What Herrell says about the contents of the scrolls has been 
thoroughly discredited by the data posted on this list. Herrell may have 
been writing partly from ignorance before 1991. He made certain 
assumptions about the content of unpublished material which have now 
been shown clearly to be false.

> I seek truth, no matter how mucky or dirty it may get.


So do I. But the only muck I can see here is what Herrell has thrown.

> Jonathan


--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/