Thoughts on Antiquity

Why I wouldn’t I make a good journalist? Because I take too long to get to the news. (Also, I don’t like to proofread what I’ve written…but I’m working on liking it.) By now, just about every other Biblioblogger who will write on Raphael Golb has already written on it. I may have gotten in early with a note, but who wants just a note? So here’s more…

I briefly mentioned when I first saw the news that Charles Gadda ὁ καὶ Raphael Golb, son of Norman Golb, the Ludwig Rosenberger Professor of Jewish History and Civilization at the University of Chicago, has been arrested. Raphael Golb has been harassing several Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) scholars whose opinions differ from his father.

What is the fuss about? Well, as regular readers of this blog may have noticed, there’s a controversy on the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls (BAR/New York Times & Haaretz), ancient Jewish documents written in Hebrew and Aramaic which were found in the 1950’s and 60’s. These documents date to the second century BCE through the first century CE. But their origins aren’t so easy to determine. The older and prevailing view (let’s call it the “sectarian view”) is that the Dead Sea Scrolls were copied and produced at Qumran, a city north of Ein Gedi near the Jordan River in Israel, which was inhabited by Essenes (vel sim.), an ancient ascetic Jewish sect mentioned by Pliny and Josephus.

The newer and less-accepted view is that Qumran had nothing to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls (the Scrolls were, after all, located in caves out in the eastern wilderness), instead being, among other proposals, either a fort or a pottery factory. The connection to Essenes or sectarians in general is often doubted as well.

Norman Golb has long doubted the prevailing view, seeing Qumran as a fort and the Dead Sea Scrolls as originated from Jerusalem. Apparently, Norman Golb has been rather belligerent concerning those who disagree with him, and for this reason he has, apparently, been excluded from plenary speeches and paper invitations.

Therefore, his son, Raphael Golb, took it upon himself to create a sock-puppet nomine Charles Gadda in order to defend his father’s reputation online. This has essentially been a large ad hominem campaign to discredit the sectarian view of the Scrolls. He began to write for the online editorial site NowPublic. Apparently, he didn’t do a good job of it, because he soon created other names as well, like J. Friedman and an alias for NowPublic Peter Kaufman.

I’ve come across several incarnations of Charles Gadda as well, apart from J. Friedman. Every time he has appeared belligerent, accusing the majority view of anti-semitism and bullying (ironic, ain’t it?). Nor does he listen to reason. He tried to enlist the help of Dr. Steve Mason (a Josephan scholar) to support his claims that anti-sectarian theorists (like Mason himself) were being discriminated against by the establishment. I happened to be at the SBL 2007, one of the conferences where he tried to claim widespread discrimination, where Jodi Magness gave a plenary speech (to ASOR) and here she, along with three others (three if I remember correctly, perhaps four, and one was from Crichton College here in Memphis as well) tried to argue that Josephus supported the Essene theory, which Steve Mason then gave a one paper rebuttal (and did it very well!). You can see the memoirs of the conference here.

Dr. Robert Cargill has a full list of sock-puppets created by R. Golb here; he switched it from his earlier site Who Is Charles Gadda.com, but apparently redirected the site to the website of the district attorney who had Golb arrested.

Which leads me to my next point, why was he arrested? Had he left it at sock-puppetry, perhaps nothing would have come about it (except continued loss of integrity). However, Raphael (allegedly, now, please remember!) started harassing and slandering names like Lawrence Schiffman and Robert Cargill. I’m unsure of the legality of this, but he also posted in full private correspondence between him and other scholars, like Bart Ehrman (over Ehrman’s colleague Jodi Magness). Perhaps the breaking point, though, was that he created e-mails in the names of scholars and emailed “forgery confessions” in their name.

Apparently, Norman Golb is not only OK with it, but might even urge him on as well.

New York Daily News:

“I don’t think he’s guilty of anything besides telling the truth about the Dead Sea Scrolls,” said Norman Golb, adding that he has been blackballed from the lecture circuit.

New York Times:

“My son is an honorable person,” Professor Golb said. “He could not have done such a thing.”

Professor Golb said that opposing scholars had tried to quash his views over the years through tactics like barring him from Dead Sea Scrolls exhibitions. He said he saw the criminal charges as another attack on his work.

“Don’t you see how there was kind of a setup?” he said. “This was to hit me harder.”

I’m not sure how this could be a setup, nor how this could be construed as an attack on his work… Does Norman Golb really think that Jodi Magness, Lawrence Schiffman, et alii could really have gotten a DA to cooperate like this? Unfathomable. If convicted, Raphael Golb can get up to 4 years in prison. Hopefully, this will stop anyone from sending emails out under someone else’s name.

(And really, did Golb think that NYU wouldn’t email Dr. Schiffman to see if the email was real or not? Really?? Also hard to imagine… Blinded by hatred, as the very, very, very old saying goes.)

Here are some other good articles too worth reading for some more interesting tidbit on the story.

National Post article on the “Dead Sea Scrolls curse”, National Post transcript with Dr. Risa Levitt Kohn, BBC article quoting Lawrence Schiffman, and Chronicle of Higher Education thoughts on the matter. The first is especially entertaining to read. It made me immediately think of John Marc Allegro and his transition from rational thoughts on Qumran to lunatic ravings on the “Sacred Mushroom”.