The Dead Sea Scrolls in Popular Culture: "I can give you no idea of the Contents"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
want to begin my response to these thoughtful papers with an illustrative quotation that Professor du Toit uses in her paper. Du Toit tells us that while offering to procure scrolls for McGill University, G. Lankester Harding wrote, I can give you no idea of the contents of what propose to buy for you. This phrase is emblematic of the relationship between scholars and the various publics who have been interested in the scrolls from their discovery down to the present conversation. Something of great interest and importance is happening with the discovery, study and publication of the scrolls, but we can give you no idea of their contents. There are of course genuine difficulties in talking about the content of the scrolls. Even to someone like this respondent, who comes from another field and whose biblical studies never went far beyond basic seminary courses taken twenty-five years ago, it is evident that the scrolls are fragmentary and written in ancient languages understood only by a few specialists. They have to be translated, typed by genre, related to other documents and to historical events. It is often hard for academics to talk in accessible ways about such matters. In addition to our difficulty with talking to the public about our work is the impact of state and academic politics, differences over the significance of the scrolls for understanding Judaism and Christian origins, and the question of whether and how they impact the translation and interpretation of the existing scriptural canon. It is not surprising that different audiences have read onto the inaccessible scrolls a variety of contents. Our authors, with varying degrees of good humor and frustration, identify these popular hopes for what the scrolls might accomplish and their annoyance at popular misunderstandings of the content and implications of this material. In fact, these writers share an assumption that scholarly insiders, at least biblical scholars, understand the actual
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".