Paul's letters of arrest for Damascus

[perseusomega9]

I'm reading Michael Wise's The First Messiah where he's attempting an identification and reconstruction of the situation dealing with the TEacher of Righteousness (ToR) from the DSS. Based on some of the hymns and sections of other peshers he believes the ToR and his community lived in the wilds of Damascus as bandits. As further support he quotes Josephus and various Roman writers on banditry of the time and steps taken to combat it. Also based on the DSS and Josephus he believes Pharisaic Jews with the authority of Queen Alexandra led incursions into the wilds of Damascus to capture the ToR and his followers and execute them. Now the authorities in Damascus wouldn't be happy with Jewish bandits in the wilds preying on their citizens and trade caravans and they probably wouldn't like an uninvited Jewish military force in their borders either. However, if the Jewish forces approached the Damascus King and asked for permission to hunt down their own bandits in the region he may allow it. I'm wondering if something similar is at the kernel of this claim in Acts 9

1Now Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest, 2and asked for letters from him to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, both men and women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. ... 7The men who traveled with him...

if pharisaic jews, temple authorities, Herodians etc saw the early pre 70 Christians as living as bandits in te wilds of Damascus, or if this is a transvalued story from another sect similar to the case Wise makes?

[Ben C. Smith]

Interesting idea. I have no real answer(s) to your question(s), but of course the whole idea of early Christians being outlaws in some sense (whether noble or ignoble) holds some appeal for me overall.

[Jax]

I wonder if an even simpler theory exists. From Paul's letters we have no reason to suspect that he is from anywhere else than Damascus. Is his persecutions of the people 'of the way' simply because he is a member of Damascus and they are a threat to it?

[John2]

if pharisaic jews, temple authorities, Herodians etc saw the early pre 70 Christians as living as bandits in te wilds of Damascus, or if this is a transvalued story from another sect similar to the case Wise makes?

I think the "wilderness of Damascus" (as the Damascus Document puts it) and the Damascus that Paul is said to have been sent to in Acts to persecute Christians is the same place and needn't have been occupied exclusively by Christians but also by (other) Fourth Philosophic factions during the first century CE (including bandits). I think this region would include the area around Qumran and the wilderness where Jesus and John the Baptist and (other) Fourth Philosophers preached, as per Josephus in War 2.13.4:

These were such men as deceived and deluded the people under pretense of divine inspiration, but were for procuring innovations and changes of the government; and these prevailed with the multitude to act like madmen, and went before them into the wilderness, as pretending that God would there show them the signals of liberty.

And I think this is the same place Elijah fled to in 1 Kings 19:15:

Then the Lord told him, “Go back the same way you came, and travel to the wilderness of Damascus. When you arrive there, anoint Hazael to be king of Aram.

As Wacholder writes:

... Elijah's wandering to the wilderness of Damascus in 1 Kings 19:15 ... may have served as an inspiration for [the Damascus Document's] central thesis of the exile to Damascus.

https://books.google.com/books?id=ZZ58U ... 15&f=false

I see it as a place that "holy" people could go to be "holy" or escape persecution since OT times, and I reckon Christians were being persecuted because of their messianism and rejection of the Pharisaic establishment and oral Torah (i.e., their interest in "procuring innovations and changes of the government," as Josephus puts it above) rather than because they were "bandits."

[perseusomega9]

The whole point of them being bandits is that would be the only way to make a 'living' in that wilderness.

[John2]

The whole point of them being bandits is that would be the only way to make a 'living' in that wilderness.

The Essenes made a living out there too. Were they all bandits?


War 2.8.4:

For this reason they [Essenes] make trips without carrying any baggage at all—though armed on account of the bandits.

[perseusomega9]

Can you show me where the Essenes supposedly lived outside of the border of Judea

[perseusomega9]

Granted, I suppose I should elaborate more on known economic models in antiquity, especially on options for exiles outside of their former borders, but i suspect we'd still be arguing mostly because you don't want it to be true.

[John2]

Can you show me where the Essenes supposedly lived outside of the border of Judea

I don't know if that's the case, and no one knows if "the wilderness of Damascus" in the Damascus Document is literal or symbolic, but some certainly argue that it includes Qumran and the area around the Dead Sea where the Essenes are said to have lived (and even the Golan Heights, where Judas the Galilean is said to have come from), and in any event that area is at least adjacent to and associated with the wilderness of Damascus if it is understood literally.

In the case of Christians, this association is mentioned in the Recognitions of Clement (in a portion known as the Grundshrift, which is thought to include earlier Jewish Christian sources).

1:71-72:

But when the evening came the priests shut up the temple, and we returned to the house of James, and spent the night there in prayer. Then before daylight we went down to Jericho, to the number of 5000 men. Then after three days one of the brethren came to us from Gamaliel, whom we mentioned before, bringing to us secret tidings that that enemy had received a commission from Caiaphas, the chief priest, that he should arrest all who believed in Jesus, and should go to Damascus with his letters, and that there also, employing the help of the unbelievers, he should make havoc among the faithful; and that he was hastening to Damascus chiefly on this account, because he believed that Peter had fled thither.

And about thirty days thereafter he stopped on his way while passing through Jericho going to Damascus. At that time we were absent, having gone out to the sepulchres of two brethren which were whitened of themselves every year, by which miracle the fury of many against us was restrained, because they saw that our brethren were had in remembrance before God.

While, therefore, we abode in Jericho, and gave ourselves to prayer and fasting ...

http://compassionatespirit.com/Books/Re ... Book-1.htm

[John2]

Granted, I suppose I should elaborate more on known economic models in antiquity, especially on options for exiles outside of their former borders, but i suspect we'd still be arguing mostly because you don't want it to be true.

I don't care if everyone who lived in the wilderness of Damascus was a bandit, but nothing you've said so far has persuaded me that any Christians were.