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orion-list The Doudna Essay



Hello list members.

I'm not a scholar in the field but I have been following the discussions with 
interest as a lurker. I feel though that with Doctor Goranson's most recent 
posts regarding Doctor Doudna's paper I may be so bold as to comment. Doctor 
Goranson says:

     Doudna has misled orion list on radiocarbon vis-a-vis
     archaeology in this particular case.

following up his earlier post:

     this note is intended to 
     point out, again, that *one* of the arguments used by Greg 
     Doudna is wrong, when applied to Qumran. He asserts, for his
     "one-generation" scroll production proposal, that artifacts 
     ordinarily are most plentiful from the time just 
     before the destruction of a site.
     [snip]
     Qumran was not destroyed in circa 63 BC. Rather, 
     Qumran was destroyed in circa 68 AD
     [snip]
     So, whatever one makes of Greg Doudna's essay
     vis-a-vis paleography dating, his argument based on 
     archaeology is mistaken.

I took the time to read the Doudna article and I found that if one actually did 
read the particular essay, one would find no claim that Qumran was destroyed in 
63 BC, nor any rationale that necessitated a destruction of Qumran. Doudna 
wrote:

     I proposed that most of the Qumran text copies are contemporary
     from the 1st century BCE, with a smaller number of dates of copies
     stretching back in one direction perhaps up to a century earlier;
     and no Qumran text, whether in composition or copy, from the 1st
     century CE. This alternative view [snip] agrees with analogies from
     find distributions in destruction layers at archaeological sites
     (large numbers of artifacts clustered at the late end; smaller
     numbers stretching back earlier) and patterns of copyright
     distributions in modern libraries

which merely indicates to this reader that samples from any point in time (such 
as often noted by archaeologists regarding the time of destruction of a site) 
will cluster close to that point. This does not necessarily refer to any 
destruction. For example, such a point may have been when they put the scrolls 
in the caves -- if they were all placed there at one time --, but it's not for 
me to postulate. Doctor Goranson has no basis whatsoever for his flamboyant 
claim that "Doudna has misled orion list on radiocarbon vis-a-vis archaeology in 

this particular case."

Either Doctor Goranson has misread or misrepresented Doudna's paper. I would 
think that a scholar of thirty years, as he indicates in another post, doesn't 
usually misread papers. This is grave enough, but he has deliberately 
misrepresented Doudna twice in successive posts, persisting in the most recent 
thus:

     What Professor Jull wrote was not merely generalities unconnected
     to Greg Doudna's pathetically fallacious insistance that all Qumran mss
     were produced by 63 BC, but, rather, a response to Doudna's own words on
     orion, a response not generally referring but specifically referring to
     texts including 4Q171 and its test results at Prof. Jull's own lab and
     Doudna's dismissal of that data due to his other hypothesis.

While I cannot see any provided reasoning to support his claims here, I can see 
a behaviour that I would not normally expect on a scholarly list. One does not 
condone such terminology as "pathetically fallacious insistance" to be used by 
one peer of another. I haven't seen quite such vituperative language from anyone 

on this list. I would only expect it from someone who has nothing better to 
say.

With that said, I can fade back into the woodwork.

Bruce W. Davison
U.Wool.





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