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orion Newsday piece

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   I've been admonished for posting the Newsday html piece on the list.  My
apologies. Asia Lerner requested it and I saw the return address was the
one we used to use in posting (pre panda), so I thought it would go to an
administrative address  -- not the list.  Didn't mean to impose on any one.

  While I'm here, I will say Mr. Altman and I shall be responding to Dr.
Goranson and the red ink issue, here and elsewhere.  But if I am not
mistaken, the fragments with red ink shown in color in DJD for the first
time are not really identified with anything other than PAM numbers that
refer to the photos themselves.  The DJD series and the new book on red ink
in the scrolls were not  published until 1996, which is 49 years and change
after the first discoveries of the scrolls, Cross' 1956 article
notwithstanding.   
  We relied on some pretty good people for that information, and there will
more to say. Two questions, though:  Was the Egyptian use of cinnabar at
any time remotely close to the period when the scrolls were supposed to
have been written? We are told not. And, we understand the red ink in the
scrolls is not cinnabar. Is that significant?
   As for Mr. West, out here we'd just say que no tiene madre.  But I will
only wonder aloud why, if the scrolls are so indisputably reliable, the
Jewish Bible publishers are not making the changes that publishers of the
Christian versions of the Old Testament are? 
  The scrolls are, after all, Jewish texts treasured by the Jewish state. 
We have only checked with the top English-language publisher of Orthodox
and Conservative Jewish religious texts in North America.  So I will ask,
have the Hebrew Bibles published in Israel have been altered on the basis
of the DSS?  A sixth book of Moses, anyone?
  I recall no one really dispensed with the "mother of God" reference we
heathens stumbled upon at 7:11 in the Isaiah scroll, especially after the
message from the writer in Oslo who said two 12 year olds had easily read
it that way.  Are we stupid to ask who could possibly have been writing
about the mother of God in 200 BCE?
  Well, if that's not enough, Mr. Altman and I now have an article being
published here and there on the Son of God text, 4Q246, quoting one rabbi
as saying,  "I am convinced that a Jew of that time (25 BCE) didn't write
this.  It's not a Jewish way to refer to a messiah, and I don't believe a
Jewish source would ever use that phrase."  The phrase, of course,
referring to the son of God.  
  Having said far too much, I will say one thing more toward Mr. West: I
learned my Latin as a teenager in a school where our translation
assignments came not only from Caesar's letters but from the inscriptions
and letters at the Foro romano, two buses away.  Adesso, basta. 
  
  David Crowder
  El Paso