Reading the NYT article (purely as an amateur!), I thought the comments regarding epigraphy were quite interesting, and showed another aspect of your point about problems with presuppositions:Symmachus wrote: ↑Sat Mar 13, 2021 7:07 pm....Yes, and I think that is why Jenkins's exchange with Hamblin was so devastating: just give us one corroborating piece of material evidence and we can go from there. But they've got nothing beyond their flimsy contraption of anachronistic and contradictory parallels that are held together by their very questionable presuppositions—and even that glue lacks sufficient consistency to keep it together.
But then I read Dershowitz' response.Then, in June 2019, came a trial by fire, when nearly a dozen leading scholars from around the world were invited to Harvard Law School to hear him present his research at a confidential seminar organized by Feldman.
It was more collegial than Clermont-Ganneau’s ambush at the British Museum. But it was still a tough crowd. “There was a lot of pushback, rejection, counterarguments and even mockery,” Pat-El, the University of Texas linguist, said.
Dershowitz recalled being barraged by critique after critique. But by the end of the day, a divide had opened.
“Among Bible scholars, who study the evolution of the text, the emergent position was, ‘These can’t be forgeries,’” he said. “But the epigraphers all said, ‘This can’t be real.’”
Epigraphers are experts in inscriptions, with a focus on letter forms and other material aspects of an artifact. They are usually the ones called in to authenticate — or more often, debunk — artifacts, usually with the help of carbon-dating and infrared imaging.
That's disappointing. The only epigraphical information available points to a forgery, and the response is: what if the information is wrong because sometimes the drawings were inaccurate? And apparently, inaccurate in exactly the way necessary to cause an evaluator to incorrectly interpret the specific error as a forgery instead of as the real thing?In his paper, published in the journal Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (The Journal for Old Testament Research), Dershowitz responds to some of the epigraphers’ objections. He offers microscopic analysis of various letter forms: Are they leaning left? Or right? But he also asks another question: Why do we assume that the 19th-century drawings — which, as he notes, sometimes contradict each other — are reliable visual representations of the letter forms to begin with?
Adding that layer and moving the analysis one step further from the original seems a little convenient, notwithstanding the very nebulous comment about drawings contradicting each other (which drawings? Where? What differences?) Maybe he spells it out better in his article, but simply stating that this new hypothesis (errors in copying) favors the conclusion being searched for makes it even more suspect as a legitimate argument. One could just as easily argue that copiers of the stroke marks were extremely careful to reproduce the best copy possible. Speaking only as a nonprofessional in the industry, in my opinion it feels as though someone who says the people who do this for a living actually created changed copies, copies that ever so conveniently show the source is a forgery when its not, sounds a little too much like a lazy conspiracy theory.
Again, this is not my area, so I would welcome any correction from the experts.
Who woulda thought?
