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orion AMS dating
Tom Simms wrote that the median of the date measurements for AMS C14
dates of tested Qumran manuscripts is 65 BCE. That corresponds to what I
wrote (or at least it very, very closely corresponds; I said almost half
of the ranges were post-63 BCE; for an exact number one would need to
decide whether to exclude texts of uncertain provenance, etc.) For
conversation's sake and for the sake of civility :-), I'll assume your
date is correct.
My *point* remains the same with either presentation of the data--or,
more importantly, with the scientific journals' reports of the data
(which anyone can read in Radiocarbon and 'Atiqot articles; and anyone
can make a chart combining the results).
Whether the precise numbers for the median and the mean are 65 or 63
or so is a small difference. The *point* of my post was: what does this
mean mean? Or, more precisely, what does the range of date probabilities
mean? It means or shows--contrary to what posts by you and others have
declared--that the Qumran scrolls cannot have been all deposited before
63 BCE or so. Or to be more precise: the data indicate that the chances
of such a date of deposit are vanishingly small.
Stephen Goranson