PROFESSOR LAWRENCE H. SCHIFFMAN is someone I love listening to and he's someone I think is a real intellectual. He was one of the early scholars who benefited from and, if I'm not mistaken was kind of in on the project of using a concordance of the Dead Sea Scrolls to reconstruct the text and so break the stranglehold embargo that the intellectual gangsters in control of them enforced. They kept the materials from being largely accessible for decades. His colleagues reproduced the texts by carefully piecing them together word by word, document by document in a real feat of enduring boredom. I can't imagine trying to reproduce a text from a concordance and they reproduced more than one. After that the gang keeping them hostage was shown to be disreputable and that freed the texts from their control. The rather nasty antisemitic remarks of one of the scholar-gangsters helped, unintentionally. It's incredibly ironic that texts presumed to have been generated by a cult of super-pious Jews, for whom other Jews weren't Jewish enough were in the control of an antisemite. How anyone expected honest scholarship from that is worth asking.
That's not to say I necessarily agree with everything Schiffman says, agreeing with everything anyone say about something as dependent on filling in missing information while interpreting the extant evidence of first century Jewish and early Christian culture and literature and religion, politics, etc. is unwise. The art that such scholars engage in should always be considered to be highly contingent and susceptible to new evidence being found, new interpretations of what is there, new assumptions being inserted and taken out of the mix on the basis of newer thinking and honest criticism. As is seen in the period of the embargo, if you don't do that you are apt to impose your own agenda on top of the agendas of those whose work you're supposed to be explaining.
A lecture he gave on "The Dead Sea Scrolls Judaism On The Eve of Christianity"* at the Pontifical Gregorian University is a good example of that. I want to focus on one small detail in his lecture, what he admits is his assumption that some of the literature found in the Dead Sea Scrolls was general literature which was in general use and not peculiar to the Qumran community, assumed to be the origin of the library found in the scrolls. His assumption is based on twenty two tiny fragments of the same texts being found in the ruins of Masada where the famous last stand of Jewish resistance when the Romans sacked Jerusalem to crush the revolt around 73 CE.
The honesty of Schiffman's vigorously asserted conclusions on that includes a statement of why it has to be considered a conclusion based on fragmentary information, he pretty much inserts such conditioned statements all through his lecture. Which is typical of the good scholarship in that area. I'm listening to a lot of the Jewish study of the origins of Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity lately and am finding it really interesting and provocative and helpful. The fact being that both religions rose at the same time and the assertions that far from the one copying the other, both of them were a product of the most intimate interaction and reaction to each other.
All of this is, as already admitted, based on fragmentary information. Those twenty-two tiny fragments of parchment or paper that as eminent a scholar as Shiffman bases a quite consequential conclusion on are something he calls "bits of nothing". However, in comparison to the majority of the fragmentary information on which the scientific and, even more, the allegedly scientific study of evolution is based is far less informative about the phenomenon of evolution than those fragments are about what Professor Schiffman says about them.
The literary fragments have a far more reliably known semiotic content than any fossil will have. Texts are intentionally written to impart dense information, anatomy preserved by chance and the other fossil record is not constructed with the purpose of informing anyone of anything. And not only the actual literary content of the fragments of text. Those fragments carry evidence of the ethnicity of the people who produced them, the time they lived, their language, their general biological relations, their more extended biological relatedness, it certainly identifies their species with complete specificity and the location the people who produced them lived in or were in at the time the texts were left where they were found. Given the contents of some of them, the gender of those who produced them is far more reliably guessed at. It's possible they can give you a good guess at the level of education or, possibly, intellectual capacity of those who had those thoughts and ideas and are a good clue into their moral and intellectual intentions. They show things that no fossil can show, their thinking, what they thought was important enough to write it down.
Especially such texts as Schiffman was talking about which can tell you at least something about what may have motivated their behavior in life if not carrying absolutely certain clues that make assumptions about how they may have lived more secure than almost any if not any fossil will show about the minds and behavior of the individuals or those closely related to them. If they include personal information that can tell you things that no fossil can. Any humanly written and readable text will probably carry enormously more information than any fossilized organism, the farther back in the history of life on Earth, the more unlikely that guesses about those things, even the actual anatomy of the organism, will be as securely knowable. I learned a lot from reading Stephen J. Gould's book Wonderful Life (which I still love) about the creatures whose distorted remains are found in the Burgess Shale and then reading other paleontologists who disagreed with the spectacular reconstructions of them presented by Gould. Thinking back, that was one of the milestones in my increasing skepticism about the pretense that is the possibility of having the kind of comprehensive knowledge of most of evolution the popular presentation of it claims is had. That's something I didn't remember having that reaction to until writing this post. I still love Gould so many years after his death, even as I have some profound disagreements with some of his contentions and conclusions. The Mismeasure of Man deserves to be considered a classic of scientific criticism, something there is too little of. You can learn a lot from going over who it was who slammed the book and looking into their decidedly non-scientific motives.
In so many ways the scholarly study of the field that Professor Schiffman works in with far more extensive information than much of the allegedly scientific study of evolution relies on demands that an honest person consider it closer to the methods of science than much if not most of what is now called "science" which is published in reviewed journals and shares in the "rights and privilege of membership" in the Science Club. The conclusions drawn by good scholars in the field are often so much less of an overreach, so much more modest in their claims, so limited and expressed so contingently. Perhaps it is fortunate that Professor Schiffman doesn't get to call what he does "science" because it's possible he wouldn't practice the virtue of honest modesty over what he does if he did get to call it that.
What he does is entirely more scientific than almost anything ever done as psychology, sociology, evolutionary psychology, etc. I don't feel in the slightest bit embarrassed to have pointed out that the tiny, tiny, bits and pieces, that evolutionary science has in the way of actual physical evidence for almost all of the billions of years of life on Earth is a minute fraction of one percent of all of it. The idea that Darwin in 1859 was able to identify THE "mechanism" of evolution is an absurd overreach. The scientific nature of the theory of natural selection is pretty slight and highly influenced by the fond wishes of the almost entirely white, rich, aristocratic or aspiring to that status guys who had control of biology for most of that period. As I noted Galton was quite shrewd in using the family histories of the families of eminent men of science to support his contribution to the effort in promoting his cousin, Charles Darwin's theory that inspired his eugenics. Of course if you start by flattering their families in a feudal class-system like that of Britain, it's going to give your bogus theories a leg up. If you can believe the British Royal Family is an example of superior breeding, and there is probably no family in Britain with a more carefully selected blood-line, you can buy such bogus science when it tells you what you already wanted to hear. In America, it was sold through appeals to our native form of fascism, white supremacy. It is maintained through the belief that it is a bulwark against religion and for atheism. I can not understand how it could have, otherwise, gained the position in intellectual culture that it has. It is a putrid morality destroying faux scientific theory that is directly responsible for genocides conducted after 1860. It always will as long as it is maintained as the required framing of evolutionary thinking.
* I can't find a url to the Youtubes that will function as a link to the video and I can't get it to come up on Blogger from that channel, I have no idea why that is, I've never had that problem before. Sorry you'll have to look them up at Youtube by the title. I wish they'd do a better job of editing these lectures for their content because if you don't skip to the lecture you start wondering if you should skip the video as the minutes wear on. And there's another one from the same channel, "Did Rabbinic Judaism Emerge Out Of Christianity by Professor Israel Jacob Yuval, which I alluded to about the cross-fertilization of the earliest Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism. I don't fully endorse all of the conclusions, I haven't read or listened enough to know how reliable any of their conclusions are, but they are well worth listening to and looking for more information on the topic.
The biggest reason that they are well worth listening to and taking seriously is the stated intent that what they believe will lead to mutual respect for those who belong to both traditions, whose experience and personal commitments lead them to choose to believe in one or the other and, by extension, those who choose to believe in other traditions.
I've been doing a lot of off-line listening as I have very limited time with an internet hookup, probably less than three hours a week. I download and listen or read offline. I don't know when I'll have in-home internet again. It feels kind of like I remember the 90s as being. I guess internet cafes are about as much of a thing as video-rental places now.
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