Digitised data from the scrolls for textual analysis was a thorny topic for years, according to my father who worked a bit on this at Edinburgh University with Andrew Morton. People guarded datasets jealously. The dead sea scrolls centre, places like the Freud archives, they're guardians of artefacts but also guardians of a specific group think. If you attack their credibility, you lose access to the data. It's maybe normal, human, but for scholarship its pernicious. The Vatican archives are in some ways more open i believe, Dan Brown not withstanding.
(My dad and Morton mainly worked on new testament, easier to get the texts maybe. He said if you go back to the earliest Aramaic, its plain the Pauline epistles is the work of a committee which pisses off a lot of people.)
The amount of bullshit in biblical scholarship is crazy. Digs in Israel are finding second and third heads of John the baptist all the time (that's a "name of the rose" joke)
Lots of careers have been built on 1-2cm of scroll. I can't read hebrew ancient or modern, I'm told it's a dense script with ambiguities in written form, which make interpretation overly subjective.
(My dad and Morton mainly worked on new testament, easier to get the texts maybe. He said if you go back to the earliest Aramaic, its plain the Pauline epistles is the work of a committee which pisses off a lot of people.)
The amount of bullshit in biblical scholarship is crazy. Digs in Israel are finding second and third heads of John the baptist all the time (that's a "name of the rose" joke)
Lots of careers have been built on 1-2cm of scroll. I can't read hebrew ancient or modern, I'm told it's a dense script with ambiguities in written form, which make interpretation overly subjective.