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Re: orion Chinese connection
>To David Crowder, I would ask whether he would explain why the proposed
>characters for "god" appear next to texts not about God. Further, I would
>ask if he recognizes now that numerous assertions made in the articles by
>N. Altman in The Lutheran and in The Jewish Times were mistaken. On the
>other hand, David, if you have additional information or proposals which
>would help explain these marginalia, I, for one, invite you to write them.
> On the issue of copyrights, I am no lawyer, and I may be corrected
>by Judith or others. Also, Qumran is an area in which copyright disputes
>have been lively indeed. For example, the DJD X copyright text is certainly
>one of the most unusual I have ever read. And, if the unnamed person Prof.
>Wegner described does actually misuse her text and pretend, falsely, to be
>in dialogue with her--and given some of the ex-ioudaios posters, such would
>not be unthinkable--such misuse and fraudulance certainly should be exposed.
> However, it is my understanding that we all automatically have some
>copyright rights to our words. I do not know why that post was explicitly
>copyrighted, and what the legal consequences are,but, if Prof. Kraft and
>Prof. Mair agreed to do so, they have that right, I suppose. What use N.
>Altman or D. Crowder may make of V. Mair's previous reports, I assume,
>depends on what Prof. Mair told N. Altman. In any case, it has not been my
>experience that Bob Kraft opposes open dialog. On the contrary, his service
>in introducing many SBL members to electronic media is well known.
> Perhaps we can agree on one thing: if there is any evidence of a
>"Chinese connection" it will not be supressed by any copyright issues, and,
>in fact, orion has been extraordinarily hospitable to the airing of what,
>on current evidence, is a very tenuous possibility. Anyone can view the
>photos and write their interpretation. I hope other scholars of early
>Chinese will do so. The nuances of Prof. Mair's various earlier phrasings
>are not the central issue. I say this is a tenuous theory, even after the
>interesting front-page story in the NY Times last Sunday of an early Jewish
>traveller to China. That manuscript, however, is said to date to about 1272
>CE.
>Stephen Goranson goranson@duke.edu
>