Now that you've seen the pretty pictures, here are some notes from the seminar.
Dr Carroll, speaking of the ancient scriptures, said "I may have touched and seen more of these things than anyone else in the world." He led two seasons of the excavation of a monastic complex at Wadi el Natrun, Egypt, which was at that time the oldest known intact church, dating from the third century.
One thing he used to do to train his archaeology students was to get three 5000 piece jigsaw puzzles, put into it a couple of handfuls of pieces from each puzzle into one bag, then take the bag into class and say "Put this together. Keep working at it every day. Document what you think it is." He seemed to look forward to the day when a student would realize they had five or more corners...
He noted that some people will say the Bible must be full of mistakes for the same reason the Telephone Game is interesting. The books were copied and the copies were copied and now we have no idea what the originals look like. But this doesn't take into account that the scribes weren't listening to someone whisper; they could see what they were copying and they took great care to make it accurate. This is provable--we can compare scrolls from 250BC with the Leningrad Codex, written around AD1000, and there are very few changes across 1250 years.
He also said there are things to remember about archaeologists:
1. They like to find things, but they don't like to publish. Of potential archaeological sites in Iraq, less than 1% have been examined and published. The percentage is even lower in Israel and Egypt. The collection Dr Carroll is working with has 11,000 cuneiform tablets; he said it would take about 150 years to publish them all.
2. They need funding, and that affects what they announce and when. You'll hear about things which could be a spectacular find, but it won't make news when it turns out to be a mistake or a forgery. "The bone box of James the brother of Jesus? Forgery. Shroud of Turin? I'd love for it to be the real thing but I think it's probably from a crusader in the late Middle Ages. The idea that the ark of the covenant is hidden in Ethiopia is preposterous. As for Noah's ark, I wouldn't waste a second or a dollar trying to find it; it's not "on top of Ararat", it's "somewhere in the Ararat range" and the wood wouldn't have survived this long anyway. The chariot wheel on the floor of the Red Sea? When a diver went to look, it had miraculously transformed into the steering wheel of a 1971 Jeep.
3. Archaeologists have political and religious biases, and that affects how they interpret data.
Monday, March 7, 2011
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2 comments:
I just posted something about your posting as This a fake and that a fake over at Shroud of Turin Blog.
I wrote in my blog: "Yes, I agree with everything in #2 except the remark about the Shroud of Turin. Did Carroll say why?"
With the bone box and a couple other things, he said flat out that they were forgeries; with the Shroud, he didn't.
He didn't get into it in any detail, except to note that in his (not exhaustively researched) opinion, the dating indicates it's medieval; and he mentioned an article showing a way the effect could have been created by painting on glass.
The point was that you'll see a big announcement "WE'VE FOUND THE ______ !!!!" and then later on, you won't see the page fourteen snippet that says "Then again, probably not." The first one gets funding, the second doesn't.
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