DCHindley wrote:I am not so ready to shed any present attempts to connect figures in the scrolls with historical figures, however meager the historical remains may be. The writers must have been thinking of certain people when they used the words they did, although I am happy to think that over periods of time several folks may have been identified by similar labels: "Righteous Teacher," "Wicked Priest," "Man of Lies," etc. I am interested in creating a matrix of options along both axis, just for heuristic purposes.
The writers were happy enough to talk of Amelios and [Demet]rios and Jonathan and various others, but chose not to provide names of local powers, but to use epithets. It was deliberate obfuscation for those who were not within the chosen readership who knew what the terms meant. We were lucky with Daniel because there are a lot of sources that supply context for decoding the cloak of mystification placed over the central figures of the second part of the book. We are nowhere near as lucky with the DSS. This leaves us at the moment with unresolvable theory wars. It has been extremely detrimental to scrolls study. Hence my willingness to leave the identification issue
hanging in order to get on with achievable things.
DCHindley wrote:That being said, the OP was actually in response to a request by Lena Einhorn, as she has an interest in how individual persons in the war years 66-73 CE were described and at least test this out for the sake of her own "time shift" theory. Privately, she expressed disappointment at Roth's theory just as you do, but perhaps for different reasons. IMHO, Roth had his own agenda, to remove any possibility that a figure mentioned in the non-biblical DSS could be connected to figures in early Christian legend and literature. I doubt that there were any, but early Christianity, if really an outgrowth of Judaism as practiced in that era, may have easily shared many cultural practices with the writers of the non-biblical DSS.
First, Roth's theory made quite good sense of the data available to him. I wouldn't be disappointed with it: it was simply falsified. That's the way it goes. Second, one would expect a religion that has its hooks so tightly into Judaism to somehow be an outgrowth from it and a recent DSD volume shows a lot of scholarly interest in links between the DSS and christianity.
Personally, I'm more inclined to see christianity's dependence in diaspora Judaism.
I'm just dribbling pearls of rambling wisdom.