Greg,
First of all, let me commend you on your past and ongoing efforts to have
the scrolls radiocarbon dated and to insure such tests are accurate.
Tracking down castor oil as a possible source of error in the dating process
was first of all a great piece of scholarly detective-work; to secondly have
this intuition verified by lab tests is just excellent. The desire of
Rasmussen and his colleagues to get it right is commendable.
Timothy Jull's attitude is just puzzling to me. I would think his top
priority as a scientist would be to insure that lab results are accurate. To
downplay the scientific significance of a source of potential error in past
radiocarbon dates, namely the documented use of castor oil, does not seem
worthy of his position as one of the leading figures in the radiocarbon
field. His posting appears to suggest that errors of dating of less than -
what, centuries? - or errors on dating of only a few rather than all the
scrolls, are not matters for concern.
It is true that in the initial radiocarbon tests, the purpose was only to
determine the approximate era of the scrolls in second temple times, to
exclude for instance the thesis of Solomon Zeitlin that the scrolls were
either medieval texts or modern forgeries. For such purposes, a difference
on the order of mere decades would have been relatively insignificant.
But the issues in the scrolls field have changed appreciably since then,
which perhaps Jull, as a figure not directly involved in scrolls research,
may not be aware. For instance, radiocarbon dates are important as a reality
check on paleographic dating (e.g. Cross's scheme of absolute paleographic
dates with claimed quarter-century precision). Again, sufficiently accurate
radiocarbon dates could theoretically exclude historical interpretations of
specific tested texts such as Pesher Habakkuk (which Eisenman claims alludes
to early Christian personalities) or others. The age of the Qumran corpus as
a whole - whether first century BCE or CE - has great relevance both to the
historical interpretation of the scrolls and to the archaeology of Qumran. A
shift in radiocarbon dates on the order of decades is extremely significant
when considering all such questions, especially in light of the common - and
for the most part proper - perception of scientific objectivity and accuracy
attached to radiocarbon dating. But the necessary scientific method required
to obtain accurate radiocarbon data is surely inconsistent with cavalier
attitudes towards serious issues of sample contamination!
I for one greatly look forward to further developments of procedures to
insure more accurate future radiocarbon testing.
Best regards,
Russell Gmirkin
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