[Ben Holmes]

Mark Oblazney Wrote:This is why the REAL scholars studying the Dead Sea/Nag Hammadi Scrolls wanted some time by themselves with them first, before the amateur sleuths stepped in and started telling the scholars how wrong they were.

Actually, as virtually anyone in the field of Biblical studies is aware, this has been a very famous scholarly scandal.

As BAR put it:

Biblical Archaeology Review Wrote:In 1977, Oxford don Geza Vermes declared that the failure to publish these scrolls and make them publicly available was threatening to become “the academic scandal par excellence of the 20th century.”

Real scholars took a relatively short time to decipher and comment on the scrolls... Anyone who's been in the field of early Christianity would have to laugh at Mark's apparent ignorance. The original team that controlled the Dead Sea Scrolls were still hemming & hawing over their work four decades later... even to the point of passing along "their" scrolls to their students.

Nothing less than a true academic scandal - it was broken only when a set of photographs of the scrolls was publicly released. (and not at the behest of the scholars who controlled the Dead Sea Scrolls, indeed, over their vehement objections.)

It's interesting that Mark conflated the Dead Sea Scrolls with the Nag Hamadi collection... the later were never controlled as the Dead Sea Scrolls were controlled... they didn't have the historical significance that the Dead Sea Scrolls had - and although both collections were discovered at roughly the same time (just a few years apart), the Nag Hammadi was published in English decades earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls.

There never was the scandal attached to the Nag Hammadi collection that was to the Dead Sea Scrolls... and Mark is apparently unaware of that.