George,
>
> Pardon me, but I would be more willing to think you are
> not being obscure if you answered the question I originally
> put to you. Instead, you've quickly eliminated the value of
> Josephus as a witness by saying that his 3-way assessment
> ignores many other sects, and so is not useful. And then you
> replace his witness with your own.
We know from other situations (no, I don't have them close at
hand) that Josephus' material is sometimes, um, skewed a bit for
his own purposes, so we have to use his material carefully. The
rabbinic and other testimony about more than just the 3 sects
must be given at least equal weight when considering a question
such as this one. It seems to me that Ian is doing this and you're
not.
> In my earlier post I invited you to consider the point that the
> Qumran materials are, at the very least, NOT Sadducee or Pharisee
> based. But you have totally ignored that consideration.... while
> trying to draw attention to how impossible it is to identify
> WHICH of the DOZENS of sects might have produced
> these works.... if there really were DOZENS of them between
> the time of the Maccabees and John the Baptist. (The word
> "dozens" is my own.... I know you did not use that term.)
It has never been proven to my satisfaction that the sectarian
documents (if that is even the correct term) weren't written by one
of the other groups such as the Sadducees. I'm sure Schiffmann
and others would take you to task on that one. In addition, there
are numerous crucial differences between Josephus' description of
the Essenes and, say, 1QS, so the picture is far more complicated
than one might think.
> 1) I find Josephus's views as describing what I would loosely call
> "tents".... "wings" or "movements". I, personally, tend to view the
> various other sects as PART of the Essene movement. But this is
> completely beside the point - - this is merely my private view on how
> to handle these matters.
Why only the Essene movement? Why not PART of the Sadducee
movement, or the Pharisee movement, or some other movement
about which we know nothing? With any discovery such as this,
there is always a huge temptation to try and associate the
unknown with something that is already known, and I'm afraid
you're falling into that trap. Principles such as asceticism, strict
legal codes, exclusivity and special garments etc. are
characteristic of just about every religious splinter group throughout
human history. The Essenes certainly didn't corner the market on
such ideas in Judea. It is very possible that, if there was in fact a
splinter community that produced the sectarian scrolls, we don't
know anything about them from history because they simply
weren't that big or significant.
> More importantly - -
>
> 2) As far as the Qumran material goes, I can find NO evidence
> that they are Sadduceean or Pharisaic.... and so I am satisfied
> with at least THAT conclusion. Whether it was Essene or some
> "Essene-like" sect hardly affects the value of these writings,
> wouldn't you agree? Will you please comment on this
> particular point?
Again, much has been written on the similarities of various writings
such as MMT to Sadducee ideas and others have found plenty of
Pharisee ideas in other documents. You can't just dismiss this
evidence with a single keystroke. It hasn't really even been shown
that the sectarian documents present a unified picture of a single
group; what has been preserved seems to include ideas from all
the ones we know and some that we don't know. This is one of the
things that leads me to lean toward Golb's suggestion that this
collection was part of the temple library, but that's just me.
> If you want to make your point convincingly, you need to
> show that either the other 2 KNOWN sects wrote the sectarian
> materials, or you need to identify ANOTHER sect that you think
> DID write them.
This is a false test, because it may be impossible to identify this
"ANOTHER" sect. Once again, we're falling into the trap of trying
to associate the unknown with the known. It's not always possible
because there's a lot of history that we just don't know. Historical
records don't include everything, they emphasize the big and
significant. If there were a splinter group of, say, 150 men who
wandered off into the desert to have a circle-jerk and pat
themselves on the back for being the only ones with the real story,
would we know about them? Doubtful, because history wouldn't
consider them a big deal. And if they produced a cache of scrolls
on various subjects that later generations happened to stumble
onto (such as the ones we possess, obviously) we would be hard
pressed to figure out who they were because we have no external
information about them. If it weren't for mass media, none of us
would know about Jonestown, or Heaven's Gate; such tiny
movements would lapse into total obscurity. There's no reason not
to suspect that the same thing happened to such tiny movements
in ancient Judea, and if one of those produced the scrolls we have
before us, we don't have anything by which to identify them.
Hence, this requirement to identify EXACTLY what sect might have
produced the scrolls is not legitimate because there are too many
unknown variables.
Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"You just keep thinking, Butch. That's what you're good at."
For private reply, e-mail to "Dave Washburn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
----------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from Orion, e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the
message: "unsubscribe Orion." Archives are on the Orion Web
site, http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il.
