Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Additional observations by Rollston:
http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=801

Prof. Christopher Rollston offers some cautions:
"The Putative Bulla of Isaiah the Prophet: Not So Fast"
http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=796

If Judah the Essene is a good candidate for the Teacher of Righteousness, then the Wicked Priest must be Judah's contemporary. Also the House of Absalom. The way Vered Noam's HTR article interprets the Jannaeus dinner after he returned from Kohlit--a place name also used in the Qumran Copper Scroll-...

The Teacher of Righteousness lived at a time of sectarian strife. I wrote a case for Alexander Jannaeus being the Wicked Priest and for a contemporary of his being the Teacher, here: http://people.duke.edu/~goranson/jannaeus.pdf After I wrote that, Vered Noam published a quite interesting paper, whi...

Ira Rabin and others (in Dead Sea Discoveries journal* and elsewhere) have given evidence that **some** of the mss were produced in the Dead Sea area, based on bromine/chlorine ratio characteristic of that area. Of course, not even F. M. Cross claimed that **all** of the mss were made there, because...

Many have accepted one thing that R. De Vaux asserted but that may be false: that all the Qumran scroll deposits were made all at one time, all circa 68 CE. Some deposits (especially some that were wrapped in linen, placed in capped jars and sealed sealed with bitumen) were likely done earlier, not ...

Perhaps consider, say, "The Men Who Hid the Dead Sea Scrolls" by A. Douglas Tushingham, National Geographic Magazine, December 1958 pp. 785 ff: "the Essenes,...the 'Doers of the Law'....'" Pharisees and Sadducees and Samaritans would not call them this, 'osey hatorah. More on thi...

One possibility: Julian, who sought to let the Temple in Jerusalem be restored and to return to more or less "old-time-religions" may have found calling Christians Galileans a convenient way of distinguishing them from Jews/Judeans and from Hellenes, using parallel geographic forms.(?)

https://www.livescience.com/61496-dead- ... found.html
Could This Newfound Cave Hold More Dead Sea Scrolls?
By Owen Jarus, Live Science Contributor | January 22, 2018 06:22pm ET

The revolt general John from Essa (Gerasa) is similarly identified as another general from east of the Jordan, in Peraea. May not be an "Essene" group member, as such might have been an unlikely pick for a general. In considering Epiphanius, maybe consider also his Jewish (not Samaritan) l...