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Re: orion Chinese connection

On Wed, 24 Sep 1997 13:32:21 -0400 (EDT), goranson@acpub.duke.edu writes:
>
>>To David Crowder, I would ask whether he would explain why the proposed
>>characters for "god" appear next to texts not about God. Further, I would
>>ask if he recognizes now that numerous assertions made in the articles by
>>N. Altman in The Lutheran and in The Jewish Times were mistaken. On the

   Oive, who can read the Jewish Times or The Lutheran in New Brunswick 
   (not New Jersey)?  Ask yourself, Step Hen, if there is a record of 
   scholars who had had access to this particular scroll.  What sort 
   of marks are they - made with ink, scratched on, even pencilled?
   For those of us not exposed to the texts in question, perhaps
   you can be good enough to summarize the arguments, as someone 
   else has very neatly done over the Annals of the Han dynasty,
   giving us chapter and verse.  For one, do any of the arguments 
   you didn't cite include views that the add-ons were ancient?

>>other hand, David, if you have additional information or proposals which
>>would help explain these marginalia, I, for one, invite you to write them.

>> On the issue of copyrights, I am no lawyer, and I may be corrected
>>by Judith or others. Also, Qumran is an area in which copyright disputes
>>have been lively indeed. For example, the DJD X copyright text is certainly
>>one of the most unusual I have ever read. And, if the unnamed person Prof.
>>Wegner described does actually misuse her text and pretend, falsely, to be
>>in dialogue with her--and given some of the ex-ioudaios posters, such would
>>not be unthinkable--such misuse and fraudulance certainly should be exposed.

  Notice, if you will, that exposure had little effect on OJ Simpson, 
  save to make him more marketable, but a civil suit was another matter.
  Now he's paying!  So it is with all our writings.  Setting out the
  copyright issue on a text gives someone breaking copyright no defense,
  at least of ignorance, so I have been recently told.

>> However, it is my understanding that we all automatically have some
>>copyright  rights to our words.  I do not know why that post was explicitly
>>copyrighted, and what the legal consequences are,but, if Prof. Kraft and

   [... snip ... scholarly not legal opinion, I take it ...]

>>photos and write their interpretation. I hope other scholars of early
>>Chinese will do so. The nuances of Prof. Mair's various earlier phrasings
>>are not the central issue. I say this is a tenuous theory, even after the
>>interesting front-page story in the NY Times last Sunday of an early Jewish
>>traveller to China. That manuscript, however, is said to date to about 1272
>>CE.
>>Stephen Goranson    goranson@duke.edu
>>
   Well, I would not rule out Chinese contact after the presentation
   on Orion of thorough citations supporting the possibility of
   Chinese contact at the time in question.  However, until we know
   when the marks were made, the question is moot.

Tom Simms