Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Yitzhak

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 9:43 PM, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello Karl,
>
>
> The following:
> > The statement I reacted to is the following, “This position seems odd to
> me.
> >  Why do they rule out translations to Greek and Aramaic which were done
> by
> > native speakers of the language, and which provide us first hand
> knowledge
> > of each verb (well, with the exceptions of such textual issues as noted
> > previously) and the way the native speakers understood those verbs.” By
> the
> > rules of English usage, this is presenting your beliefs as fact.
>
> Is not a presentation of my beliefs.


Yes it is. Accepting it from an outside source does not make it stop being
your belief.


>  It is the consensus that translators of
> the Bible into Greek and Aramaic in the late Second Temple period were
> either native speakers of Hebrew or had access to native speakers of
> Hebrew.  There is no problem presenting the consensus opinion as fact.
>

Yes there is. For one, this is the bandwagon logical fallacy. Secondly,
factuality is not decided by majority vote. Thirdly, there are scholars who
disagree with this belief.


> This doesn't touch on my independent beliefs -- that Hebrew continued to
> be spoken for much later.  Yes, the consensus may be wrong.  You are
> perfectly right to think that even if everybody thinks otherwise you have
> it
> right.  However, given the two options, the consensus opinion is the one
> that can be legitimately presented as accepted fact.  It's not a fallacy.
>  It's
> a basic honest representation of the current opinion in scholarship.
>
> You are right that this is an opinion. But it is not the only one.


> > Now if you go back and carefully reread my message, I merely said
> > there is evidence [...]
>
> If you go back and read my message, you'll see that I said that I think
> there is evidence.  See the difference?  Even the question of whether
> something counts as evidence and whether it is relevant to the question
> at hand is something that has to be presented appropriately.  You can't
> say "there is evidence for such and such..." if everybody else disagrees
> with your assumptions for discerning the evidence (such as the
> textual dating).


Again you need to learn English better, you are misunderstanding simple
English. I don’t have time now to go into the explanation of what you have
wrong.


>  You can say "I think there is evidence, but most
> scholars disagree with the assumptions by which I discern evidence."
> That would be honest.  But to say "there is evidence, but it is not
> sufficient to be considered proof" is to present a subjective opinion as
> fact.


This is nonsense English. Take it from a native speaker, this is nonsense.


>  Even if everybody agrees that what you have is valid evidence,
> but most scholars disagree with its relevance, or most scholars have
> a ready response that you don't accept, you have to present it
> appropriately.  You can say, "There is evidence for such and such.
> Most scholars simply respond by saying that X.  I disagree, however."
> You may not have researched the question to know how most
> scholars respond (simply being on this list and hearing responses
> is not research about responses!)  In that case, you probably wouldn't
> know if scholars accept your evidence as valid evidence.  You could
> say, "I think there is evidence for such and such.  The consensus
> opinion is contrary to this evidence so either most scholars don't buy
> the basic assumptions by which I discern evidence, or they have a
> ready response.  I don't know, because I haven't researched the
> question fully."  In any case, your personal subjective divergent
> opinion to the consensus has to be presented as such, rather than
> the way it reads from your posts before, where it simply reads as fact.
> Hey, I could tell you that in Hebrew all consonants represent
> interjections.  I could ignore the consensus position and I could
> simply present my own divergent opinion as fact.  What would you
> say then?  So think about how the consonant-interjection theory
> could be validly presented on the list without conveying the impression
> that it is accepted fact, and argue your own divergent opinions the
> same way.
>
> > No we don’t have a consensus, just a majority opinion
>
> Please look up 'consensus' in the dictionary.
> http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/consensus
>
> Yitzhak Sapir
>

The dictionary meaning you referenced does not bring out one important
aspect of “consensus”, is that all members of whatever group agree to be
represented by a certain statement, teaching, pronouncement, etc. The moment
one member of that group objects, he has broken that consensus. There never
was a consensus among scholars that there were native speakers of Hebrew
into the second century AD. There is just a majority, possibly only among a
certain subset of which you are a member.

Karl W. Randolph.