I have discovered a new application of the word through my Latin reading group with Prof. Celenza. Apparently, an approved rhetorical technique is the “heaps” argument: A plethora of examples developed in quick succession will persuade a listener through sheer volume.

I do believe that, combined with an over-indulgence in passion and the OTHER form of volume has been the crux of my argumentative style since i have known how to speak. I am not particularly convincing though - mostly because yelling makes people stop listening. Let’s not forget the other key method to my poor argumenting: speak so quickly they don’t understand you - then they can’t counter a claim.

Isn’t Latin reading group HEAPS of fun?

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Historians are battling it out over just how incredible the English defeat of the French troops at Agincourt during the Hundred Years’ War - somehow this debate is linked to advice given to Gen. Petraeus: No matter how successful an offensive, the general population must be won over in order for insurgency to stop.

Firstly, holy dumbed down history of a really complicated conflict. Secondly, what in God’s name does Agincourt have to do with Iraq and Afghanistan? Thirdly, SOMEONE HAD TO TELL PETRAEUS THIS? He should try reading some good old Machiavelli rather than getting military historians to write him a “new manual.”

On the bright side, the historians listed in the actual discussion of the debate over Agincourt is pretty much a who’s who of medieval history…

Read the New York Times article that inspired this rant

I had been a tad concerned about the number of children who would be attending a Saturday matinee of a movie that had only opened that week - however, the young-ins were all very well behaved and i was able to enjoy both my comfy seat and the movie in peace.

Although i know that i have read Where the Wild Things Are, i don’t have a great recollection of it, so the story of a little boy whose Dad is gone, whose Mom is busy a lot and whose sister is now too old to really want to spend time with him, was really heart-warming. There were, however, a lot of scenes in which i kept expected disaster - that never struck. He wears a wolfsuit for the majority of the movie, which you are first introduced to before the opening credits in a scene that involves attacking a small dog and i was JUST not sure that the dog was enjoying the game… those sorts of moments. Since nothing bad ever happened, this probably makes a fantastical adventure a little more realistic.

After the movie-outing, a flurry of work was completed. Light-heartedness makes productivit so much easier to maintain.

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Back to my Latin translations…

Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, in recounting various aspects of Nero’s life, presents clues to the socio-political circumstances and concerns of its contemporary audience. This paper analyzes the depiction of those aspects – including his ancestry, education, sexual deviancy, and criminal behaviour – in order to understand the development of historiography. The tools used to complete this task include textual exegesis, an examination of Boccaccio’s manipulation of his classical sources, Suetonius and Tacitus, and the frameworks offered by other historians, like Richard Trexler and Michael Rocke. Boccaccio is revealed to straddle the gap between medieval conception of histories and those of the Renaissance; the conceptions of histories as moral works, exemplified by Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, or as works of political theory, exemplified by Machiavelli’s Discourses.

Stories of accidental finds that overturn our historical conceptions are bound to pique my interest - i’m a late medievalist/early Renaissance scholar after all… and have frequent daydreams of accidentally uncovering in a forgotten box a copy of one of Aristotle’s lost works a la Name of the Rose on a frequent basis. This evening i catered to my curiousity despite the ever-climbing pile of readings to do and attended a lecture given by Dr. Geza Vermes and sponsored by the JHU Near Eastern Studies department entitled “Sixty Year of Wrestling with the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

Dr. Vermes is one of the world’s leading authorities on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He published the first doctoral dissertation on the subject EVER in 1952 and his translation (available from Penguin Books) has been continuously in print since 1962.

The Initial Find

Dr. Vermes first heard about the scrolls only a year after the were found by a young shepherd in the Palestine State. Up until that time, it had been felt that no ancient text could have survived the harsh, dry climate. The manuscripts were acquired for peanuts by an archbishop at a monastery in Jerusalem and later smuggled manuscripts to the US before the first Arab-Israeli war. Three scrolls were published in 1951 in photographic form. The cave was later identified and a Frenchman collected more fragments. Tens of thousands of fragments were found by Arab treasure hunters. There were originally 900 scrolls out of which about a quarter were biblical. Most were written on leather, some on papyrus and a few on other materials. The vast majority of the manuscripts were composed in Hebrew and the texts are dated from end of the 3rd-century BCE to 1st CE. The site was destroyed in 68 CE after the revolt.

An Academic Conspiracy?

Before sending his own manuscript off to printers in the 1950s, Dr. Vermes set sail to Israel to try and catch a glimpse of the scrolls. He was not granted access to the manuscripts at Hebrew U and had to use forged documents to get to Jordan where some of the editors of fragments found in Cave 1 let him view the find.

During the 50s, the team (which worked in a closed shop) continued to edit. By 1962, the contents of the so-called minor caves appeared in one volume. Despite promises from the editorial team in 1956 that there would be a yearly output of edited 2-3 volumes, the first three editors published eight volumes in 35 years. From 1992-2009, 32 volumes additional appeared. Most of the editing team was forced to seek employment elsewhere to supplement their income and rather than permit open viewing to the academic public, the scrolls went largely unavailable for decades.

In 1962, Dr. Vermes tried to mobilize Oxford UP to get the research going. The current editor, Benoit was ordered to get a move on - but things didn’t go much better. In 1977, Vermes called it an academic conspriacy par excellence. In 1984, Benoit resigned. In 1987, Vermes tried to get kickstart the editorial process once again and an international conference was planned to shame the team into action. He demanded that the photographs not edited be published without delay. General dissatisfaction with the team even led some people to claim that the delay was a Vatican inspired-conspiracy.

Despite an editorial gambit by an editor from Hebrew U in which sixty new editors was granted access to the site, the closed shop policy, continued and publications were still slow.

You might be asking - how is it that we can access the Dead Sea Scrolls today?

During the Arab-Israeli war, photographic documentation had been shipped to numerous international sites to safeguard the find. The photo archives as well as a transcribed concordance were leaked to the press in the early nineties after a Californian philanthropist bequested her personal copy to the Huntington Library without any restrictive clauses. Several complete texts were reconstructed and published in 1991. The Huntington library intended to put their collection on open shelves. On the 21st September 1991, a press conference announced the end of the closed access to the scrolls.

The Dead Sea Scrolls became available on microfiche and CD-Rom almost immediately. A completed printed edition, however, took almost another twenty years - only being made available in 2009.

What we have learned
The scrolls agree in substance with the traditional scripture but evidence stylistic and ordering changes. The unified text of the Bible established around 100 CE was clearly preceded by countless variations; Multiplicity preceded unity. Some of the apocrypha conserved in only the Greek form (Tobit and Ecclesiastes) as well as Enoch and Jubilee have now available in their original languages and a large collection of other religious books known only through translation are now extant in Hebrew or Aramaic. Furthermore, a large body of previously unknown religious writings shed further light on an otherwise poorly documented era of literature. The religious rules, poetry, biblical interpretation and liturgical calendar of a sect founded by dissidents are now available for scholarly investigation telling us about how they lived their lives and in what ways they differed from the rest of society.

The Dead Sea Scrolls also shed light on the study of the New Testament and early Christians. Both communities saw themselves as the TRUE ISRAEL and held an expectation that the instant of the coming of the kingdom of God was upon them. They both considered the biblical prophecies to be fulfilled by the persons and events of their respective communities.

Wrapping Up

Dr. Vermes ended his lecture with a series of light-hearted anecdotes, one of which i will share:

Upon receiving his first copy of the 1962 edition of The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, he nearly fainted when saw that the photo of the scroll on the cover is upside-down. He claims he saw the end of his academic career - however, those few readers who noticed rightly assumed it was an editor’s error. Upon learning of the mistake, Dr. Vermes approached the graphic designer responsible who responded that “from an artistic point of view, it looks better this way.” The error was corrected in subsequent editions

My favourite articulation of this argument thus far:

The phrases carnal knowledge and knowing in the biblical sense, based on Genesis 4, were once pious euphemisms for having sex. In the more open sexual culture prevailing since the 1960s, they can hardly be used without irony. But sexual relations do imply the acquisition of knowledge as well as pleasure. Sex is the most intense and intimate possible form of interpersonal contact (16).

The real demon lovers, the persons who most ardently desired physical relationships with embodied devils, were the theologians themselves. Their desire for “carnal knowledge” was of demons was, not pornographic, but metaphysical (26).

Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.