The Silver Scrolls, 400 years older than Dea Sea Scrolls and a testimant to the faithful copying of the Bible over a period of 2700 years

Faith & Science Conversation
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Ron i think that perhaps my response to St Roymond to which you are referring may have been better explained if i had included the statement that uniformatarian methods are being ignored by a uniformatarian (St Roymond). That this is self defeating to his own argument against the significance of the Silvers scrolls in proving Bible authenticity and more importantly accuracy (faithful copying) down through the ages.

Here is the exact point i was responding to in St Roymonds post (hopefully this will fix your dilemma there)

The point is, illustrations are often best served when they are taken directly from the recipients own methods/habits/theology/doctrine/beliefs (hence the relevance of uniformatarian habits of naturalists in the presuppositions of time because miracles are not scientific and are not considered)

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yes.

What you guys need to understand, i am not anti uniformatarian in the way in which i am perceived to be.

To kinda explain…think of it like this…

I do believe in Evolution…just not the Darwinian model in its entirety. Elements of the model, yes, but not all of it.

same with uniformatarianism…some aspects yes, but not all. The most signficant parts are those which we have historical evidences that clearly denies. I will never accept that what many men have actually seen and recorded is ignored because an atheist has decided cannot occured miraculously. So whether you agree or not, presuppositions in science are the only proofs we have of Old Age Earth. You keep claiming you have proofs…and yet the very science theories presented start out with the opening statements containing hypotheses, proving hypotheses. These are not proofs. What they do illustrate is that individuals can easily string together a belief system which is wrong with accurate supporting evidence. Anyone who wishes to challenge my claim there should read the Lindy Chamberlain “Dingo Took My Baby” case.

There are many other examples of false imprisonment with overwhelming evidence that is later shown to be comletely wrong.

Its shown to be wrong because the original hypotheses utilised in gathering evidence and prosecuting the case was at fault and the outcome the complete opposite to what was agreed by many jurours vs the single defendant!

As ive said before, there are “evidences” of biblical historical accuracy…lots of evidences and they consistently point towards the same conclusion that we see in the silver scrolls. That the bible has not changed, even a little bit, in roughly 3000 years.

The principle of Uniformatarianism there, demonstrates that this evidence demands that the rest of the story is also true.

The difference is, these are real writtings from roughly 3,000 years ago…not assumptions by individuals who werent there.

So let me get this straight…because you know the date of the fall of Jesualem, an artefact found that is from the period related to that known military event tells you that the exact date the object was made is no older?

You see how ridiculous what you are claiming there is right? Your claim essentially is that this object was made on the day Nebuchadnezzar randsacks Jerusalem! (that is a whopper of epic proportians).

The dating of the Silver scrolls did not rely on a single test. It involves known dates due to other artefacts also found inside the tomb with radiometric dating methods, as well as the location of the tomb itself within rock strata…its far more complex than just nitpicking the most convenient evidence out of a lucky dip jar!

There is a reason why the 200 year date exists…its because there are evidences in the hundreds of artefacts found with the silver scrolls that are much older than 600 B.C.

Its quite logical to make the claim that the only reason for the 600 BC date not being younger is because we know that cannot be that case because Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians at that time…so no chance the tomb was built after it. However to then claim it cant be older is absurd for obvious reasons…the single biggest and most obvious, it was a family tomb for many generations of individuals!

Im suprised that im the only one with any building and construction knowledge here smart enough to make the above correlation! IT just goes to show how easy it is for supposedly scientific and logical individuals to conclude the younger date is the safer option simply because accepting an older date in biblical historicity would begin to quickly unravel the essence of their world view and theology! I hope this serves as a model in illustrating why i stay true to the text, with a normal reading of language, in my own biblical methodology and beliefs…its because of the necessary consistency.

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Uniformitarianism has absolutely nothing to do with textual transmission. I’m not sure at all what your imagined point is, but your claim is like saying that because you found a small square of cloth that was made for a quilt then the quilt exists.

That depends on how you define “old”. We have physical evidence that the Himalaya and other uplifted mountains are at the very least hundreds of thousands of years old – no presuppositions at all involved, just physics.

That’s not a conclusion, it’s wishful thinking. One may as well claim that finding a button in a ninth-century BCE tomb proves that the people then had button-down shirts.

Uniformitarianism demands no such thing. If you want to apply uniformitarianism to the silver scrolls . . . you’re up a creek, because uniformitarianism doesn’t apply to human activity.

Exactly – and claiming that the scrolls show that the Hebrew scriptures existed in whole is an assumption by individuals who weren’t there.

I’m not an archaeologist, so I don’t know why they dated the scrolls to 586/7. There are ways of setting earliest-possible dates and ways of establishing latest-possible dates, so I presume they used those.

Um, what? How the heck do you get that from my preferring a conservative approach to dating?

Have you even read the sources cited? The date of 586/7 was established by on of the foremost (if not the very top) scholar on the subject in the world.

If you go by the artifacts also found then the dates run from 800 all the way up to 200.

That’s how you characterize the work of the University of Southern California’s West Semitic Research Project? Really?

Back to lying about people, I see. Are you ever going to throw out your preconceptions of the slots you think people have to fit into and pay attention to all of us here?

It does – it shows that you have categories you can’t think past and so you’re stuck interpreting the text according to a MSWV.

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Adam, what you described in your quote is not uniformitarianism, but interpretation.

From Wikipedia:

Uniformitarianism , also known as the Doctrine of Uniformity or the Uniformitarian Principle ,[1] is the assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in our present-day scientific observations have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe.

Human history does not occur according to natural laws and processes. The changes or lack of changes to the text of the Silver Scrolls is a matter of human history, human behavior, not natural laws and processes.

What the state of the text of the scrolls tells us, (beyond “This is what we see, when we compare different manuscripts”) is a matter of interpretation.

Interpretation of observations is not a matter of uniformitarianism.

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  • Question put to Gemini AI: What is the difference between evidence and proof?

  • Gemini AI response: "Evidence and proof are often used interchangeably, but there’s a subtle distinction between them:

    Evidence: This is information or material that supports or suggests a particular fact or conclusion. It’s the building blocks of a case. For example, a fingerprint at a crime scene is evidence that someone was there.
    Proof: This is the final conclusion reached based on the evidence presented. It’s a definitive judgment that something is true or false. In a court of law, the prosecution must present enough evidence to prove a defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
    To sum it up: Evidence is the raw material, while proof is the finished product. Evidence can be used to build a case, but it doesn’t guarantee a conclusion. Proof is the ultimate determination based on the evidence presented."

Proof vs. Evidence – What’s the Difference? (Examples)

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Faithfulness, also known as divine trustworthiness, is the affirmation that the same natural laws that God established and we see operating in our present-day life and observations have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in God’s universe.

Nicely and patiently explained!

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Hymn - Great is Thy Faithfullness

Summer and winter, and springtime and harvest;
sun, moon, and stars in their courses above
join with all nature in manifold witness
to Thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love.

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Oh, you can’t just post lyrics!

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You make a good point.

If the benediction was independent of Numbers and older then it would only be natural to expect its inclusion in completely different texts.

Its called being conservative and trying not to claim more than is warranted.

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Uniformitarianism is used to refer both to a particular scientific idea and a more general principle. The precise definition is a challenge. The principle that natural laws apply anywhere and at any time is uniformitarianism. Sometimes this is differentiated from actualism, the principle that we can understand the past from the present. But in both cases, it is necessary to work out what really is an unchanging law and what is more variable. Historically, there is the extreme uniformitarianism of Lyell, who was unwilling to accept that anything appreciably outside the observed range of events could have happened in the past, and also assumed that some processes were more constant and gradual than they really are.

But we need to make basic uniformitarian assumptions for every reconstruction of the past. Reading historical accounts requires the assumption that words did not somehow abruptly change meaning without notice (and an awareness that words have changed in meaning over time). Given that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and that He rules over creation in an orderly way, uniformitarianism in this broad sense is quite reasonable theologically. Some young-earthers bash uniformitarianism as supposedly atheistic, often in conjunction with making bad arguments for a young earth that rely on unwarranted uniformitarian assumptions.

What I quickly see for the basis of dating of the silver scrolls is that the associated artifacts and the script point to somewhere in the late 600’s to early 500’s BC. They certainly disprove the claims that the Pentateuch was completely invented during the exile. I don’t know of particular reasons to take the dates claimed for JPED and the like any more seriously than the dates claimed by young earthers; in both cases 18th century philosophy has led people to claim that nothing could exist before a certain date and to dismiss all evidence to the contrary. The silver scrolls show that parts of the text of Numbers and Deuteronomy were available around 600 BC. I believe that the full texts in reasonably close to modern form were probably available at least by the early monarchy around 1000 BC, compiling the writings of Moses from a few centuries before that, but the silver scrolls don’t prove that.

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Good point. It always amuses me that YECists claim they are utterly different than the JEDP folks when they share the same philosophical origin.

It’s a tough impulse to unlearn, treating evidence as supporting your most extensive claims instead of conservatively limiting it to what can actually be demonstrated from it.

Though I wouldn’t put the time for the full texts in recognizable form before Hezekiah, possibly as early as Solomon; I don’t see the circumstances in Israel supporting that.

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Solomon’s time is more likely than right at 1000. It’s hard to judge if conditions had stabilized enough during David’s reign to make a project like compiling the Pentateuch feasible.

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That is not the conclusion that i made. Im sorry that i think in a rather complex way with this kind of stuff in that when i study others beliefs (if you like) i criticise their full world view and the methods used in order to develop personal beliefs.

When i see inconsistencies, even seemingly insigificant ones that the individuals does not think are important, i tear their world view up and throw it in the bin…its fundamentally useless (in the same way a mouse trap is fundamentally useless when it has missing or wrong parts)

Next, my comment about uniformitarianism does not relate to historical data…you have misunderstood my statement there.

Uniformatarianism is purely the assumption that we can know the past based on “current data” not where there are no historical data…i disagree with this claim largely because it ignores variables and one example i can use to help you understand this is weather forecasting.

Im quite satisfied that the evidence proves that most weather forecasts regularly get it completely wrong (do you agree or disagree with that statement?)

I am not saying that the science behind weather forecasting is false or wrong…what i am saying is that despite the accuracy of the science, the variables in our environment are such that even something as simple as forecasting a pleasant day are fraught with inaccuracies and downright error and that these errors are due to variables that are not set in concrete. Uniformatarianism makes statements of millions of years that it simply cannot prove with any recorded historical data it largely ignores environmental variables and relies heavily on little or no significant change over time. If we are to belive the Bible than that notion is clearly not supported by the bible which tells us quite specifically that after the fall of mankind and again during and after Noahs flood, there was significant environmental change.

I accept that you do not agree with a lot of the above, however, as i have said before, the bible is Gods recorded word and if Christ in Matthew says “as in the days of Noah people were eating and drinking and then a flood came and killed all life on earth” (paraphrased)…then i find no evidence to support that a normal reading of language can explain away that text to mean any other than exactly what it says…especially when i add the Genesis account and, the apostle Peter also says the exact same thing!

If you want to correct my theology Kendel, you need to prove that Moses, Christ, Matthew, and Peter did not all mean the same thing when they spoke/wrote about Noahs flood!

The genre argument has serious deficiencies:

  1. Moses was Egyptian in approx 1300BC,
  2. Christ was an adult Jew whose ministry started around AD 27,
  3. Matthew a tax collector and eyewitness to Christs ministry…his gospel circulated sometime in the years after the death of Christ,
  4. Peter a fisherman who became the first Bishop of the Christian church,
  5. Genesis written in an ancient Hebrew language and the New Testament written in Greek.
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Not in this case. I am focusing here on one small detail, a definition. Certainly of a significant concept, but nevertheless one small, non-theological thing.

The term “uniformitarianism” has a specific meaning and application:

the assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in our present-day scientific observations have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe.

One may or may not accept that the natural laws and processes have always operated in the same way, but that is a different matter.

Before we can competently discuss something, we need the right words and common concepts of them. This is so simple as to be foundational to communication.

Ummm…My comments about the term began in response to this exchange of yours with @vulcanlogician. You were applying the term to human historical events, which do not operate by any version of uniformitarianism.

Maybe you were employing sarcasm or irony that I didn’t catch to make a point tangental to the exchange with Vulcanlogician, a point that was intended for others rather than him.

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Then you’ve decided to accept the books written by Tom Clancy and John Grisham as history?

No, it only has to be shown that your claim about “normal use of language” does not hold up – which is why I keep asking if you’ve accepted those writers’ books as history, since they read just like the parts of scripture that you claim are meant to b taken as indicating history.

That’s a nice list that shows exactly why we need to know the literary genre:

Moses would have used a genre known to both the Egyptians and the Hebrews.
Jesus would have taught using genres known to His audiences.
Matthew used a genre known to Greeks, Hebrews, and Romans.
Peter used forms that had meaning for his audiences.
Ancient Hebrew had its own particular genres, as did Koine Greek.

That you list what are arguments for why we have to start with the genre of any piece of literature and claim they are “deficiencies” shows that you haven’t got the slightest clue what a literary genre is – just as the fact that the books of James Michener and John Steinbeck meet your criteria for being history shows that you have no clue what the “normal use of language” is.

You’re doing a Dawkins here, claiming expertise in something you haven’t studied.

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Wait!
Hold it!
…
Back the truck up.

“Human history” and uniformitarianism…

Maybe I have just grasped why you keep talking about theology, while I am talking about vocabulary.

@adamjedgar, when I was talking about “human history”, and when @vulcanlogician was talking about transmission, we were both talking about the scrolls as physical objects.

The study of the history of texts, any text that has been copied, looks at the text as an object, not at the thoughts or information the text is conveying. Such a study can be done - and regularly is - with texts no one alive can read. The process includes a careful comparison of the marks on the page of one version with the marks on pages of others.

When I said that uniformitarianism doesn’t have anything to do with human history, I had in mind your comments about the work of humans in making and copying texts of any kind. Uniformitarianism does not describe this process. At all. That’s why there are variations, because humans and human processes include mistakes all over.

This is, at it’s base, not a theological issue, unless part of one’s theology demand that every copy of one’s scripture is perfect, as transmitted from the god/s.

Are we getting any closer to comprehending each other on this topic?

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I don’t know about silver scrolls. Is there something on them from mainstream archaeologists?

As for the dead sea scrolls, the text has changed quite a bit over the centuries. Some of the changes are minor but some are rather significant.

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The wikipedia article on the Ketef Hinnom scrolls contains some references to actual archaeology papers. They were found in 1979 so the “news” is actually rather old. The dating continues to be debated.

Yes, just read this morning that the text of Jeremiah in the DSS is quite a bit shorter than the Masoretic text.

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