131–140 of 207 posts
Michael Langlois is quite a Renaissance Man: a working musician, 3 master's degrees, 1 doctorate, a techie good enough to create a new technique to digitize ancient texts, and the youngest member of Institut de France.
The article is confusing and unclear and addresses many different topics at once. The digressions about bass-playing are frankly irrelevant. One could end up thinking all Dead Sea Scrolls are fakes. They are not. The Dead Sea Scrolls are real, but some fragments, sold as originals for millions of dollars to rich collectors, are modern forgeries. And bad fakes too. Dead Sea Scrolls are made of parchment; the fakes are…
Not just forgeries but modern claims like Salvator Mundi were legitimized by a small circle of experts and whales that wanted headliners.
Fine art is very much like crypto, a wildly speculative asset controlled by a small inner market that is prone to criminal activity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t disagree, but also don’t see in what way this is relevant to the original question or opposing my answer. If anything, two billion people care so deeply about it that they can have arguments about what’s “valid” and what the meaning is.
Do you really think 2 billion people care deeply about the Bible? I think the number of Christians who spend any time at all reflecting on or debating validity and meaning of the Bible is in a small minority
How many people care deeply about the works of Shakespeare or Homer, enough to think about the meaning and autorship of the texts (for example, to know that the story of the trojan horse is actually mostly told by Virgil, or that probably Homer, if he ever existed, didn't write both the Iliad and the Odyssey)? I think fewer than that. Is that a good reason to dismiss all research on it? That was the original implication, to which I was trying to answer.
Admittedly I overly estimated the number of people to make a point, but I'd still say there's more people who care about the Bible than Lisp, yet we don't see many comments like "ugh, new article on Lisp, who cares? It's a dead language anyway"...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See, there's the problem. You called it almost certainly false, but what are the criteria of truth? Science uses induction as a measure, meaning it presupposes that we have faith in the proposition that something will happen again because it has happened in the past. That would be akin to claiming to be immortal, because every time someone died, it wasn't you. With a little additional information, such as the recogni…
> Science uses induction as a measure No, it doesn't. This is a common misconception, but it is 100% wrong. Science is the business of finding the best explanations that account for all observations. One of the consequences of this methodology is that it turns out that all known observable phenomena can be described by fairly simple mathematical laws that appear to remain constant over time. But science does not assu…
This is exactly what induction means. Even your wording is almost identical to that of the Wikipedia page on "Inductive reasoning".
> One of the consequences of this methodology is that it turns out that all known observable phenomena can be described by fairly simple mathematical laws. But science does not assume this.
I'm not sure you fully comprehend, it's much simpler. Science does presuppose that observations mean anything related to more general rules, otherwise what would be the point of observations, right? Otherwise all data would be equivalent to TV static and to build a house we would just hope it builds itself. The way you hedge your bets with phrases like "can be described by" and "appear to" makes me think you intuitively understand the limitations of science when it comes to capturing absolute truths, such as analytical a priori truths (e.g. all bachelors are unmarried), which are correct by definition.
I think the title is misleading. There are no forgeries in the canonized books of the Bible
“Having done that (and lacking cash to buy Photoshop), he downloaded an open-source knockoff.” Anyone wanna bet it’s GIMP?
Doesn't he have to pay liscence fees if he is using GIMP professionaly? Or do they have exceptions for academic purposes?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the reference. I have read Enoch 1 and it is a wild story that in my view is pure fantasy (e.g., giants were 300 cubits tall!?). I have always just assumed that Jude and Peter were quoting some authentic version from earlier and the version I have read was the creation of an imposter.
Right. Because everything in Genesis makes perfect sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't he have to pay liscence fees if he is using GIMP professionaly? Or do they have exceptions for academic purposes?
Why would he? The GIMP website explicitly states that commercial use is permitted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, I suspect a large portion of those few billion people would in fact be surprised to learn that, for instance, the New Testament books called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not written by those people (if they even existed) and the texts do not even make any claims about their own authorship.
Yes, and that is probably true for a lot of other things that we assume as cornerstones of Western culture (e.g. Homer). Many people would be surprised at the realisation that Christianity is a eastern religion (having originated in what we call “the Middle East”).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Catholic Church at the Council of Rome formally defined what books were considered authentic and which ones were not (and this list was, with some reduction, also used by Protestants). The Book of Enoch was a bit contentious because of the quotation in an inspired book - but it was ultimately determined to be not inspired, and the quotation not necessarily either. (I.e. Imagine if scripture quoted a Roman decree…
I never understood the historical relevance of religious texts outside of the context of how they impacted societies. Because these religious texts are hardly orimary sources that state historical facts, they are closer to pure propaganda pieces. So, for me, the question of forgeries is interesting because if forged texts were used someone had an interst in doing it. If a text is not a "forgery", it doesn't mean the…
You're overgeneralizing. The Bible is effectively something like an anthology compiled from texts written in different styles over thousands of years. The character of Genesis is quite different from, say, the New Testament Gospels. While Genesis is not intended to be a scientific text, the New Testament does describe events in a historical kind of manner.
> they are closer to pure propaganda pieces.
I have no idea what that means. You should probably revisit your assumptions.