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The All Seeing Eye is on the prowl as always, and we have been collecting wild tidbits from Skeptics. This time around we were collecting amusing replies on this note that we have used in a few essays:

First of all, you are limited to using only about 20 sheets of paper. What, you say? No more than that? Sorry. Office Depot won't be open for another 1900 years, and neither will WalMart, or Eckerd's, or any other place you are thinking of buying paper. You're not going to be writing on paper. You'll be writing on a scroll, and scrolls are both expensive and go no larger than a certain size. As Gamble reports in Books and Readers in the Early Church [44-50, 266]:

• Scrolls could be fashioned to any length desired, but practically speaking, the mean length was seven to ten meters. "A roll of ten to eleven meters was too cumbersome for the reader to handle...authors of long new works made their own divisions by taking the customary length of rolls into account."
• A roll of papyrus of typical quality "cost the equivalent of one or two days' wages, and it could run as high as what the labourer would earn in five or six days..."

Now maybe if you are wealthy, or know someone who is, you can get another scroll and do a "Life of Jesus, Part 2", perhaps a shorter half. But if you do, bear in mind that generations beyond you (and how can you anticipate WalMart, or the printing press?), in order to preserve your work, will have to also buy two scrolls. If you want your work to get out to people, that's not a very smart move. Your work is going to cost more to keep around than a work with one scroll. So you'd better plan carefully what you want to put on those scrolls...

For a bit now I have observed some of a certain Skeptic's cohorts putting this one on their Laugh List, though why it should be so wasn't until recently actually explained by any of them beyond comments of the "yeah, right" variety. Apparently the diode and processor crowd can't visualize living in a world where 20 sheets of paper would cost them, say, $250 (two days' salary for an average shmoe in the business world). No, they don't provide any data about the price of paper actually being cheap back then, or paper being widely available -- that's not how these guys work. Their way is "take a quick look and announce an opinion". The lead, who we call Skeptic X these days because of his obvious desire to see his name in print, had this blip on the screen to offer, in line with his usual analogical impairment:

But writing materials were not in such short supply that needless repetition was often done, as in the cases of Isaiah 37 and 2 Kings 19 and 2 Samuel 22 and Psalm 18. And there seemed to be enough writing materials for parallel accounts like those in the books of Samuel and Kings and the Chronicles and the synoptic gospels. Sometimes these parallel accounts were almost verbatim.

Well, that's Skeptic X for you; any old parallel will do no matter how remote. Now let's fracture that analogy, shall we?

• To begin, X is missing the obvious point that it is not just a single copy at issue, but multiple copies, for generations beyond the Gospels, who are in mind. The OT documents were not evangelistic and were not intended for distribution to a widely spread audience -- we're talking "Roman Empire and beyond" versus "part of Palestine" and accordingly a larger number of people both in time and space. X fails to think fourth-dimensionally.
• Second, unlike the NT writers, the OT writers we can speak of had the support of wealthy patrons. Ezra and Nehemiah would have been able to call on the Persian royal treasury for help, which made Chronicles (Ezra's work) an affordable luxury. Kings of Judah had the royal treasury at hand for works like Psalms; righteous kings would offer such support to prophets like Isaiah. One copy of Isaiah would be no burden under such circumstances. In contrast the NT writers, though they may have had the backing of members of the educated Roman class, still did not have deep pockets to pull from -- not to the level of the king of Persia.
• Third, other than Chronicles -- a history written at a crucial turning point after the Jewish return from Exile, and again, likely funded by Persian largesse -- X pulls out of his mitt only two real cases of repetition! This hardly suggests a waste of paper, but even if it did, note that in no way is such repetition a contrary indication against our primary point! What? Does Skeptic X expect a compiler of Isaiah's words and deeds to leave out 2 Kings 19? What's he going to do, write in a note, "see other scroll"? The compiler of Isaiah's oracles and of the Kings annals had differing purposes; there is nothing to prevent such double usage with respect to available supplies. And in any case, as noted, neither Isaiah nor the Kings writer, that we know of, were constrained by the limits of funding and of needing to keep in mind the production of multiple copies across an empire, for people from all backgrounds and nations.

  So it is of X's latest paper delivery scheme. But for sheer humor value, nothing beats the comment of X fan J. E. Hill, who as usual imposes his own personal, graphocentric confusion on others, and thinks this is the answer:

  When I read that "lack of paper" defense, I just shook my head, and wondered why Yahweh didn't give them enough writing material to eliminate all the confusion.

  Frankly, some people's confusion is so great that no miracle will be able to fix it!

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