Was the flood/creation account Historical?

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…continue, end.]

In any case, even if this accusation of a bias against the supernatural were true, it would not affect the critical method, because this would still have plenty of work
to do upon those many parts of the Bible where an appeal to the supernatural cannot solve the problems raied by a text. Because not all texts require explanation by the supernatural.

Besides, when Fundamentalists and conservative Catholics discuss the Flood, do they adopt the principle that, because God can do anything, therefore the difficulties vanish ? No: they discuss the problems, without appealing to the supernatural - yet they are not accused of “denying the supernatural”. What they do, is avoid invoking the supernatural as an explanation for things it cannot usefully be applied to - just as the despised critics avoid this, for the same reasons. ##
 
A concrete example would help me. For example, how should a Catholic biblical scholar deal with Mark 5:1-20?

And they came over the strait of the sea, into the country of the Gerasens. And as he went out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the monuments a man with an unclean spirit, who had his dwelling in the tombs, and no man now could bind him, not even with chains. For having been often bound with fetters and chains, he had burst the chains, and broken the fetters in pieces, and no one could tame him. And he was always day and night in the monuments and in the mountains, crying and cutting himself with stones. And seeing Jesus afar off, he ran and adored him. And crying with a loud voice, he said: What have I to do with thee, Jesus the Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God that thou torment me not. For he said unto him: Go out of the man, thou unclean spirit. And he asked him: What is thy name? And he saith to him: My name is Legion, for we are many. And he besought him much, that he would not drive him away out of the country. And there was there near the mountain a great herd of swine, feeding. And the spirits besought him, saying: Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them. And Jesus immediately gave them leave. And the unclean spirits going out, entered into the swine: and the herd with great violence was carried headlong into the sea, being about two thousand, were stifled in the sea. And they that fed them fled, and told it in the city and in the fields. And they went out to see what was done: And they came to Jesus, and they see him that was troubled with the devil, sitting, clothed, and well in his wits, and they were afraid. And they that had seen it, told them, in what manner he had been dealt with who had the devil; and concerning the swine.And they began to pray him that he would depart from their coasts. And when he went up into the ship, he that had been troubled with the devil, began to beseech him that he might be with him.And he admitted him not, but saith him: Go into thy house to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had mercy thee. And he went his way, and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him: and all men wondered.
 
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miguel:
A concrete example would help me. For example, how should a Catholic biblical scholar deal with Mark 5:1-20?.
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This story is frequently discussed because it is so clearly a symbolic story inserted to teach and comfort rather than relate an actual event. Here are some thoughts I am borrowing from various sources while researching this:

To start with there is no such place near or opposite Galilee in any direction. The only town in the Israel of the time that was spelled anything like Gerasene was thirty miles from the nearest water so the swine would have had a long run. So we need to look at the story again and when we do we find it is not an actual event in the historical life of Jesus but an event in the spiritual life of the early church that owes its existence to Jesus.

Jews hated nudity and wouldn’t take part in the athletics of the day because the runners were naked. No surprise then in Luke’s story that the man possessed by demons wore no clothes and lived among the remains of the dead, a place that frightened the Hebrew people. Who then does this man represent?
We get the clue in verse 30 when his name is given as Legion. The common name for Rome, a military dictatorship, was ‘Legions’ because that was what the army was, legions of soldiers. As far as our story is concerned the man had legions of demons because anyone and everyone who stood in opposition to Rome considered Rome to comprise legions of evil ways. As the story says, “for many legions had entered him”, it was the perfect description.

At the time this was written, the early church was making inroads into the Roman psyche. At verse 28 the demonic man says to Jesus, “I beg you do not torment me” for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of him. The early Christian Church was on a crusade to reform Roman society and with some delight the author is saying that the old society was begging for mercy as Christianity swept on, changing structures and people’s thinking.

In our story we then have a reference to previous efforts to control Rome. “He was bound with chains and shackles but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.” Other armies, it is saying, have tried to tie up Rome and nations have rebelled against the Roman rule and maybe the writer was thinking of the attempt by the Zealots and Jerusalem Christians in their war against Rome that destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in AD70, but in every known attempt to overthrow it Rome soon broke free of the attempt to restrain it and resorted to even more violence and evil to maintain control over their victims – but against Jesus the might of Rome, it seems, had no answer.

Where then are the evils of Rome to be banished?

To answer that we must consider one of the things that marked Hebrews out from the rest of their Semitic neighbors. They had different eating habits, their diet was different, and what is significant, they never ate pork. Over the course of time pork and pigs came to represent all that was bad in their neighbors and in foreigners so when they had to get rid of evil from Rome, to send it into pigs and have them hurtle into a death by drowning was a sweet justice.

The swineherds of the story are the pork-eating foreigners who become alarmed at the success of the Christians and tell everyone what is happening but that also just gives greater publicity to the fact that those who have converted to Christianity live, not just better lives, but wholesome healed lives.
 
Thank you. You just demonstrated what happens to the text when some scholars (2000 years removed from the event) try to approach it minus the supernatural. The plain meaning gets changed and what you end up with is an unsound, skeptical interpretation. Skepticism serves insofar as it provides a challenge to Catholic scholars to exercise their muscles in defense of the true faith.
 
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miguel:
Thank you. You just demonstrated what happens to the text when some scholars (2000 years removed from the event) try to approach it minus the supernatural. The plain meaning gets changed and what you end up with is an unsound, skeptical interpretation. Skepticism serves the Christian faith insofar as it provides a challenge to Catholic scholars to exercise their muscles in defense of the true faith.
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There is nothing unsound or skeptical in this interpretation…
  • Every detail represented in the above interpretation is accurate (the Romans were legions, the Jews don’t like pork, etc.)
  • There is no need to consider the supernatural as the author tells us in the very name of the demons that we are talking symbolically about the fall of the romans (just in case we happen to miss the obvious).
  • As stated before, “For truth is set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse. The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture.”
  • There is no reason to believe this was interpreted any differently by the original audience.
 
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patg:
…Every detail represented in the above interpretation is accurate (the Romans were legions, the Jews don’t like pork, etc.)
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Except for the fact that those details weren’t part of the story. They’re being read in 2000 years later.

I like to think the detail about the demons going into the pigs and 2000 of them all going over a cliff (illustrating the meaning of legion), is there because God anticipated modern skeptical attempts to pooh pooh demonic posession as a disease that was not understood at the time. It sure blew the people who saw it happen away. The detail about the guy breaking his chains is also significant in this regard.
 
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miguel:
A concrete example would help me. For example, how should a Catholic biblical scholar deal with Mark 5:1-20?

And they came over the strait of the sea, into the country of the Gerasens. And as he went out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the monuments a man with an unclean spirit, who had his dwelling in the tombs, and no man now could bind him, not even with chains. For having been often bound with fetters and chains, he had burst the chains, and broken the fetters in pieces, and no one could tame him. And he was always day and night in the monuments and in the mountains, crying and cutting himself with stones. And seeing Jesus afar off, he ran and adored him. And crying with a loud voice, he said: What have I to do with thee, Jesus the Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God that thou torment me not. For he said unto him: Go out of the man, thou unclean spirit. And he asked him: What is thy name? And he saith to him: My name is Legion, for we are many. And he besought him much, that he would not drive him away out of the country. And there was there near the mountain a great herd of swine, feeding. And the spirits besought him, saying: Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them. And Jesus immediately gave them leave. And the unclean spirits going out, entered into the swine: and the herd with great violence was carried headlong into the sea, being about two thousand, were stifled in the sea. And they that fed them fled, and told it in the city and in the fields. And they went out to see what was done: And they came to Jesus, and they see him that was troubled with the devil, sitting, clothed, and well in his wits, and they were afraid. And they that had seen it, told them, in what manner he had been dealt with who had the devil; and concerning the swine.And they began to pray him that he would depart from their coasts. And when he went up into the ship, he that had been troubled with the devil, began to beseech him that he might be with him.And he admitted him not, but saith him: Go into thy house to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had mercy thee. And he went his way, and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him: and all men wondered.
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Well, several things need to be done 🙂 (most of them irrelevant to one’s churchmanship, FWIW).​

  1. One must establish the Greek text and look at the variants, and the fine detail of them
  2. Look at the other similar accounts in the gospels
  3. Note the differences, and ask why they are, and how they can be accounted for. This leads to consideration of the history of the tradition which led to these incidents being included where there are, by the Gospels that put them where they are.
  4. What is the evangelist’s picture of Jesus ? What does this incident tell us about the purpose and theology of the Gospel ? Does it offer any clues which answer such questions ? What are they ?
  5. What OT passages are echoed, if any ? What does that tell us ?
There are many other questions to ask, all intimately concerned with the text:

its present form,
parallels to it in Christian and Jewish tradition,
the theology of it,
its position in this gospel,
the reasons for its position,
its literary genre,
  • every question we can ask about, should be asked. And by so doing, we can learn what questions are appropriate (what questions will find an answer, what will lead nowhere). It is by asking such questions, that people progress from some knowledge of the Bible, to expertise in it. Those who teach best, do so because they are good learners, and are still learning.
[continue…]
 
…continue, end]

We only learn to ask questions, by asking them 🙂
None of this questioning need be sceptical. It may well be disconcerting, it may well upset our ideas; but this is part of learning - our ideas do get upset. It’s part of growing up in Christ.

For a member of a Church where such study is controversial it is all the more important to be aware that one’s work is a service to the whole body of the Church. It is always a service to the Body: a use of the talent that one has received, for the glory of Christ and the good of one’s neighbour.

There are many issues for Catholics in this matter: for example, why is this matter controversial for some Catholics ? It certainly, is, so, one must ask why.

One reason seems to be that Biblical criticism (apart from its misleading (?) name) has a reputation as sceptical, destructive. Another: it is often seen as denying or threatening the truth, or the reliability, of the Bible; it can seem arbitrary; needless; a denial of the supernatural, an attack upon God, Christ, the Church; it has been seen as an infiltration of Protestantism into the CC; of rationalism, and general impiety. And there is the “folk-memory” of the Modernist scare, combined with the veneration many have for a Pope who was, after all, canonised.

So there are many reasons against it - whether these are well-founded, or to what extent, is a different matter. But one must be aware of them. And do what one can to explain what is actually involved in such work, and why.
Because this is controversial, it needs to be discussed openly, fully, so that unfairness be avoided on all sides. For the Church is always harmed by an atmosphere of suspicion. For if Christians cannot discuss this openly, where can this happen ? Surely a Church should be the obvious place for Christians to listen to each other on this sensitive subject. ##
 
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miguel:
Thank you. You just demonstrated what happens to the text when some scholars (2000 years removed from the event) try to approach it minus the supernatural. The plain meaning gets changed and what you end up with is an unsound, skeptical interpretation. Skepticism serves insofar as it provides a challenge to Catholic scholars to exercise their muscles in defense of the true faith.
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Geographical impossibilities werre not invented by modern scholars. There are several of these in Mark.​

As for the plain meaning, what is the plain meaning of the French expression “poser un lapin a quelqu’un” ?

“To put a rabbit to somebody”

The French phrase functions as the French equivalent of the English “to stand some someone up” - but that itself is an English idiom which does not mean what the individual words mean.

So the plain meaning can be very far from plain.

This happens in other languages too. As it happens in Hebrew and Greek, it affects the meaning of texts written in those languages: but those who know only English cannot be expected to know that. Yet the features of Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, don’t go away merely because we are unaware of them 🙂 They can’t be ignored, and the texts must be studied for what they say and mean - not made to say and mean what we might like them to say and mean 🙂 ##
 
Gottle of Geer:
…So the plain meaning can be very far from plain…
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So that means all the experts who gave us our English translations did a bad job translating, even though most of them ended up with pretty much the same result for Mark 5:1-20 (i.e., that this is plainly a story about Our Lord casting out demons).
 
There’s another way of looking at all of this. First, historical accounts simply weren’t written in those days the way they are now. They were didactic, which is to say that it was in no way considered deceitful or even inaccurate to intertwine hard historical fact with instructional fable in order to drive home a moral point or solidify tribal loyalty. Indeed, the whole distinction between factuality and legend as we now understand these didn’t even exist in people’s minds then the way it has since the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. So I don’t think it’s at all appropriate to hold up the Bible stories to modern standards of journalistic literalism and either accredit them as literal accounts of supernatural phenomena nor to fault them for their piously intended but nevertheless metaphorical embellishments.

Second, stories like these have parallel motifs in dozens of other mythologies and tribal legends, so it’s the similarity here rather than the uniqueness of these stories that suggests they were added as allegories. The Christian churches may have actually painted themselves into a corner with all their recent insistence on a standard of historicism that didn’t even exist when the Bible was written, and that is no easy corner to wiggle out of. Allegories and tribal legends aren’t contestable the way assertions of fact are contestable, nor can they be validated or falsified by the same methodology. Even when a folk tale is very paradoxical, its truth is something that either resonates with something deep inside us or it doesn’t, and factual verifiability has nothing to do with that.

But in the last 30 years or so Christians of all denominations have leaned quite heavily towards historical factuality as the epistemological foundation of their creed, and now fact and fable get mixed up and disputed as if all of it were fact and subject to the same type of validation as if these were scientific hypotheses. Unfortunately, there is very little physical evidence for the Bible stories that can be examined with any sort of forensic rigor, so the whole thing disintegrates into arguments over the merits of abstract doctrines that can’t be empirically verified or falsified, and which have been reified into concretized doctrines for so long that they no longer have much poetic vitality or allegorical resonance left in them either.
 
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miguel:
So that means all the experts who gave us our English translations did a bad job translating, even though most of them ended up with pretty much the same result for Mark 5:1-20 (i.e., that this is plainly a story about Our Lord casting out demons).
Click to expand...

Not at all - they would be very well aware of such things, and of many more.​

The “linguistic relations” - for lack of a better phrase - of the words of a passage, are the same whether the passage is relating a fact,or something not a fact.

The purpose of that post was, not to criticise translations of that passage - your post did not address that matter, so neither did mine - but to point out that words don’t always mean what someone who knows only his own language and does not think about what translation involves, tends to say.

You raised a point about how meaning is obtained from words - I confined myself to the point raised. ##
 
I voted for myth, but myth that contains truth option. There was no global or worldwide flood, and the Australian kangaroos, polar bears, penguins, and super-slow sloths did not fly to Noah and the ark from their respective geographical locations, then fly on back across the oceans and continents. :rolleyes: Biogeography and evolution explains the origins of these creatures much better.

Already had a long thread on Noah’s Flood. As for the creation-evolution topic, too many good long threads already. Do a search in apologetics forum. 😃

This site deals adequately with all the verses in Genesis 6-9 that seem to talk about a worldwide flood. (Read Buffalo). Someday I’ll work up my own article on this…

The word “earth” or “world” does not always mean the entire planet geography, or the entire surface of the earth (including Antarctica? where no folks even lived?). Many examples can be given from the OT and NT where it refers either to people of a region or local geography. The flood was local around Noah’s Mesopotamia. Too many scientific objections to a global flood. A local flood is plausible exegetically and scientifically.

Phil P
 
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PhilVaz:
I voted for myth, but myth that contains truth option. There was no global or worldwide flood, and the Australian kangaroos, polar bears, penguins, and super-slow sloths did not fly to Noah and the ark from their respective geographical locations, then fly on back across the oceans and continents. :rolleyes: Biogeography and evolution explains the origins of these creatures much better.

Already had a long thread on Noah’s Flood. As for the creation-evolution topic, too many good long threads already. Do a search in apologetics forum. 😃

This site deals adequately with all the verses in Genesis 6-9 that seem to talk about a worldwide flood. (Read Buffalo). Someday I’ll work up my own article on this…

The word “earth” or “world” does not always mean the entire planet geography, or the entire surface of the earth (including Antarctica? where no folks even lived?). Many examples can be given from the OT and NT where it refers either to people of a region or local geography. The flood was local around Noah’s Mesopotamia. Too many scientific objections to a global flood. A local flood is plausible exegetically and scientifically.

Phil P
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It was the Benedictines who taught me how to apprehend metaphorical truth in a wide variety of literary genres. To get through Fr. Alban Baer’s English 3, we had to memorize long passages from Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth. We slogged through Silas Marner, gritted our teeth at Galsworthy and relived The Caine Mutiny. And in spite of ourselves, we learned the power of myth & metaphor to shape our minds, as well as the difference between these and the world of historical and scientific fact. Then, in English 4 we applied what we had learned in English 3 to the Bible. I realize that’s heresy now, but that’s what a good Catholic education used to be.
 
The main purpose of translation (and interpretation) is to convey intended meaning.

As the Catholic Church affirms:

In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm, and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words. (CCC* 109)

So how does God’s intended meaning get conveyed if biblical scholars are free to approach their work without “the appeal to the supernatural”?
 
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miguel:
The main purpose of translation (and interpretation) is to convey intended meaning.

As the Catholic Church affirms:

In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm, and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words. (CCC* 109)

So how does God’s intended meaning get conveyed if biblical scholars are free to approach their work without “the appeal to the supernatural”?
Click to expand...
miguel,

This story is admittedly anecdotal, but I think it’s to the point nevertheless. It was while I was a young Trappist monk in the early 60’s that I first became curious about the whole subject of epistemology and the sociology of knowledge. The community I was in had several exegetes and one recognized Biblical linguist. For the first three years I was there, this latter fellow was at the École Biblique in Jerusalem, where the Dead Sea scrolls were kept under very tight security. His mission at the École was to be one of the scholars to add his expertise to the then new (1963) translation, “The Jerusalem Bible.” His particular bailiwick was his fluency in eight ancient Semitic dialects including Aramaic, plus the Septuagint Greek and the spoken Greek of the New Testament era.

Upon his return, he gradually shared with us his own and the other translators’ disappointment and frustration when their (name removed by moderator)ut was repeatedly overruled by ecclesiastical censors on the grounds that their understanding of many passages rendered them unfit to print, because they failed to support established doctrines. In one instance, I recall him discussing the Hebrew word which has always been rendered as “commandment,” which from the usage in other writings of that time should be more accurately translated as “maxim” or “truism.” Another time he read us a passage from Isaiah in Hebrew so that we could actually hear the poetic cadence of the galloping horses being described. These things get lost in translation.

That was my introduction to the smoke-filled room, if you will, of scripture translation and authentication. And I don’t know of any translation of the Bible that isn’t endorsed by one denomination or another. Since the churches thus decide by editorial fiat what is authentic Christian revelation and what isn’t, and whereas the original manuscripts are no longer in existence, on the basis what kinds of evidence might we tell the difference between what the originals may have said and the real possibility of outright self-serving revisions, deletions and additions by these various autocratic, secretive and vested-interest organizations? So I have to wonder if there ever was a time when the Church didn’t put its editorial “spin” on the authentication, interpretation & translation of these texts in order to promote its own institutional agenda. And one distinct advantage that texts such as the Nag Hamadi scrolls have is that they’re archaeological originals, manuscripts that sat undisturbed for over 1500 years, and thus provide clues to the style in which the canonicals themselves were probably written. It doesn’t seem likely that they’d be in a different literary genre altogether.
 
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miguel:
The main purpose of translation (and interpretation) is to convey intended meaning.

As the Catholic Church affirms:

In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm, and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words. (CCC* 109)

So how does God’s intended meaning get conveyed if biblical scholars are free to approach their work without “the appeal to the supernatural”?
Click to expand...

A part of that answer is, that because God speaks in human words - because the Bible is “the Word of God in the words of men” - those words are to be understood with the same kinds of helps as any other texts would be.​

One can’t rely on infused knowledge of Greek as an aid to the study of the NT - one has to go to the bother of learning NT grammar. There is nothing “unsupernatural” in using grammars, lexicons, the study of literary forms in Antiquity, and the like: one uses the same means to find the meaning of St. Paul or 2 Kings, as one would to find out the meaning of what is said in Seneca or Homer.

It is as legitimate to ask questions about the unity of Isaiah as it is to ask questions about the unity of the Iliad: the Biblical texts are not being uniquely “picked on” to be undermined: they are human texts, and as such it is as legitimate to ask questions about their authorship, textual integrity, transmission, meaning, purpose, date, and the like, as it is to ask these questions about works attributed to Homer. If it is right and proper to study the philosophy of Plato in immense detail, and to seek to establish his text - why should not the ideas of St.Paul or St. John receive the same attention ?

True, the Biblical texts have a theological status that other authors do not: but how does that make them less fully human ? Their humanity, as “words of men” is what makes it possible to study them - if they were purely divine, they would be inaccessible to us. But Jesus Christ “makes God accessible” to us, by having something in common with us - His Humanity. It is because He is both God and man, not one or the other, not either at the expense of the other, that He is so perfect a Mediator. And something similar to the union of Deity and Humanity seems to be true of the texts of the Bible.

I don’t know how to make what I said about the supernatural any clearer. ##
 
I have absolutely zero problem with using the best tools at our disposal for exegesis. My concern is that even after these tools have been used, the end result, in some circles, is very far from the plain meaning as patg demonstrated in the example of Mark 5:1-20.

The Catholic position is that God is the author. He inspired the words chosen by the human authors. They “…consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more.” (CCC 106) And I might add, his readers are not composed of 100% scholars.

If the end result of the process is that God has been edited, there is something wrong with the process.

“But since Sacred Scripture is inspired, there is another and no less important principle of correct interpretation, without which Scripture would remain a dead letter. Sacred Scripture must be read and interpreted in the light of the same Spirit by whom it was written.” (CCC 111)

Ignoring this principle, (i.e., groundruling out the “appeal to the supernatural”) is akin to playing Mozart using only drums. It’s not surprising how it all turns out…a dead letter.
 
**Vatican allows Scrolls change
**September 11, 2001 - Richard Owen/Rome

THE Vatican is to abandon decades of secrecy and obstruction to allow changes in the Bible based on revelations in the Dead Sea Scrolls, more than half a century after they were discovered.

The extent of the changes is expected to be disclosed this month, but the revised version of the New Jerusalem Bible will take five years to complete.The scrolls have been the subject of controversy between Jewish and Roman Catholic scholars since they were found in caves at Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in 1947. The Vatican has been accused of keeping them secret for fear that they would undermine Christianity.

In The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, two British authors, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, accused the Vatican of suppressing the scrolls because they contained material at odds with accepted Christian belief.

The Jerusalem Bible, which was first published in French in 1956, appeared in English ten years later. The writer J. R .R. Tolkien was one of the translators. It is the official text for use in Roman Catholic liturgy and revisions are subject to approval by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Pope’s keeper of doctrine.

Father Gianluigi Boschi, a Dominican theologian at the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas in Rome and a leading expert on the scrolls, said the recent growth in scroll scholarship and the publication of previously inaccessible scrolls meant that some of the changes would be radical. He is to address a conference on the changes this month.

Father Boschi said that the project would link the whole picture of the origins of Christianity to the findings at Qumran. He declined to say which passages would be modified, but predicted that the changes would be surprising and innovative. It was time to end to the extraordinary scenarios put about by conspiracy theorists who claim that the Vatican has manoeuvred to hide the truth about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Continued…
 
Several of the intact scrolls, preserved in terracotta jars at Qumran by an ascetic sect called the Essenes, are now kept at the purpose-built Israeli Shrine of the Book. Many of the other texts and tens of thousands of scroll fragments were bought with the aid of Vatican funds and have been under the control of Dominican scholars at the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise in Jerusalem since the 1950s.

The failure to publish more than a fraction of the Ecole Biblique scrolls led the Oxford biblical scholar Geza Vermes to call it the academic scandal of the 20th century.

Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review in Washington and author of Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, said that unbiased Catholic experts were now in the forefront of scroll scholarship. He said it was hard to imagine what the scrolls could contain that could undermine Christianity.

Minor adjustments have already been made to the Jerusalem Bible in the light of the two scrolls versions of the Book of Isaiah.

The initiative will be officially announced at a conference at the University of Modena on September 26. The team is expected to include Etienne Nodet, author of the The Origins of Christianity; Paolo Garuti, a biblical scholar; and Garcia Martinez, president of the international movement for Qumranic studies.
Martyn Percy, a canon doctor at Sheffield university, welcomed the initiative but suggested the results may be less than dramatic. “There has never been a settled, definitive version of the Bible, it has been an evolving book which has gone through many translations. Only fundamentalists think it came in a fax from heaven.”

Copyright 2001 [London] Times Newspapers Ltd.
 
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