>With
>> all the Roman scriptoria, all the parchments reused in wrappings and
>> buried in tombs, the oldest copies of Caesar and Pliny and Aristotle and
>> Plato are from Medieval copies. Yet no one doubts their authenticity.
>
>Because they seem to be more firmly anchored in reality.

I could be flip and argue that you thus argue that _The Illiad_'s Zeus is
anchored in reality and the God of the Bible is not.

But you have made my case in another way.

In fact, there was a long period where scholars argued that there was no Troy,
no King Achilles, not even a Homer. They wrote that the document was a
composition "by the masses," or that it was composed by four or five people,
even that it was a late fraud. There were thick books arguing a four- or five-
author composition, with careful assignment of each section to different
authors.

After the discovery of Troy, for no discernable reason, the "false Homer"
hypothesis fell out of favor. The "false Bible" theory is still floating
around -- with as little evidence.


E. P.