The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christianity

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Secret Alias
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christianity

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It must be something to sit around making small talk at the forum for months and weeks ... all just to clear the way to re-introduce this perfectly WRETCHED thesis. Retirement must really be boring.
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Secret Alias
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christianity

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“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
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John2
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christianity

Post by John2 »

MrMacSon wrote:
A few people here think Greg Doudna is one of the better commentators. You could search "righteousness" or "Doudna" on the forum search box (top right). I tend to search one word at a time, then sequentially enter the other/s in the search box on the left hand side.
maryhelena got me to check out Doudna more when we were discussing this subject a few years back, but I could use a refresher on him.
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MrMacSon
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christianity

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MrMacSon
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christianity

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Robert Eisenman has proposed James, brother of Jesus as the Teacher against a "Wicked Priest" (Ananus ben Ananus), and a "Spouter of Lies" which Eisenman identifies as Paul of Tarsus.[13][14] However, the introduction of the Teacher of Righteousness in the Damascus Document (CD 1:5-11) places the ascendance of this figure just prior to the outbreak of the Maccabean revolt sometime in the first half of the second century BCE.[15]

That date is roughly two hundred years too early to be James, the brother of Jesus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teacher_o ... ainst_Paul
John2
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christianity

Post by John2 »

MrMacSon,

I'm about to leave work so I won't be able to go online again until tomorrow, but in my peek at one of the articles in your second link (which I think I've read before, as well as your first link), I noticed this:
So let us imagine that the 1QS yachad groups began before the Teacher of Righteousness and were sponsored by priests in power in Jerusalem—perhaps in the time of John Hyrcanus I (135-104 BCE) or Alexander Jannaeus (103-76 BCE), perhaps associated with John Hyrcanus’s or Alexander Jannaeus’s conquests and expansion of the Jerusalem state to areas which they turned into ‘Israel’ again, reviving Israel to its former status of old, as at least a possible context.
:)
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archibald
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christianity

Post by archibald »

John2 wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2018 5:44 pm archibald wrote on another thread:
Interesting.

But......James was openly preaching near the temple (Eisenmann thinks)?

Also, 'Paul' would not have been 'establishment'?

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3780&start=50
So (apparently) did the Teacher of Righteousness, as Kim, for example, notes.
The Dead Sea Scrolls community attacked the Wicked Priest as having taken over the Jerusalem Temple wrongfully in kicking out the Teacher of Righteousness.

https://books.google.com/books?id=XvreA ... em&f=false


And Paul would certainly have been part of the establishment since he had been a Pharisee (Php. 3:5), who are arguably the ones the DSS sect were opposed to, as VanderKam, for example, notes:
"Seekers of smooth things" is the name the Scrolls community gave to their opponents, who are almost certainly the Pharisees ... it is likely that the word for smooth things (halaqot) is a word play for the Pharisaic term halakhot (laws).

https://books.google.com/books?id=i2i5h ... ot&f=false
According to Josephus, even the Sadducees, who did not believe in the oral Torah of the Pharisees, were "able to do almost nothing of themselves; for when they become magistrates ... they addict themselves to the notions of the Pharisees, because the multitude would not otherwise bear them" (Ant. 18.1.4) and "have not the populace obsequious to them" like the Pharisees did (Ant. 13.10.6).
Yes, but is there another way of looking at it, that the 'fully formed template' did not require there to actually be a Jesus?
I suppose not, but there is at least a Messiah (or the expectation of a Messiah) in the DSS, particularly in the Damascus Document where it is always a singular Messiah. And I've always been intrigued by the ending of the Damascus Document, which says that when the Messiah comes in the Last Days, "God will forgive them and they shall see His salvation because they took refuge in His holy Name," with the Hebrew for "His salvation" being "yeshuato," i.e., "His yeshua," which of course is Jesus' name; plus the reference to "seeing" this yeshua is interesting given all the talk in the NT about "seeing" Jesus/the Son of Man (e.g., 1 Cor. 9:1, "Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?").
Before I started reading the book ('James the Brother of Jesus') I was aware of the 'un-named characters' in the DSS being linked to various Christian figures, including by Eisenmann. My own prior opinion was that this was....difficult to establish. I probably leant, and still lean, away from it.

I was hoping that Eisenmann wouldn't make it a cornerstone of his evidence for James for this reason. So far (page 65) he hasn't.

Of course, Eisenmann has me at a disadvantage. He is far more familiar with the DSS than I am. So I doubt I can come to any conclusions and have to be wary that he may be extracting a thesis from a larger picture that I don't appreciate and therefore can't say if the extraction (exegesis) is reliable.

But as I say, I will mostly be reading the book to find out some stuff about James, and the DSS considerations won't be my main source.
John2
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christianity

Post by John2 »

archibald wrote:
I was hoping that Eisenmann wouldn't make it [the DSS] a cornerstone of his evidence for James for this reason. So far (page 65) he hasn't.
My understanding is that he does not. This is how he puts it in JBJ:
There are also strong parallels between the Community led by James and the one reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is particularly true when one considers the relationship of James to the person known in the Scrolls as "the Teacher of Righteousness" or "Righteous Teacher" ... So many doctrines, allusions, and turns of phrase emerge from the material in the Scrolls common to both traditions that the parallels become impossible to ignore ...

But the subject of the person and teaching of James in the Jerusalem of his day is not only more important simply than his relationship to the interpretation of the Scrolls, it is quite independent of it. Even without insisting on any parallel or identification of James with the Righteous Teacher of the Scrolls, the Movement led by James ... will be shown to have been something quite different from the Christianity we are now familiar with.
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christianity

Post by John2 »

While there is some debate about it, arguably one of the similarities between the DSS and Jewish Christianity is the use of 1 Enoch, parts of which were found among the DSS and it is perhaps cited or alluded to in the Letter of Jude, as Bauckham, for example, argues in Jude and Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church (which is an excellent book, by the way).

https://books.google.com/books?id=oCOdB ... de&f=false

So the only pre-70 CE groups known to have used 1 Enoch are the DSS sect and (arguably) Jewish Christians. But that's not to say I think they were necessarily the only ones. I see Jewish Christianity as being a faction of what Josephus calls the Fourth Philosophy (and as I've said elsewhere, I don't think anyone went around saying "We're the Fourth Philosophy'"), and I reckon other factions may have used 1 Enoch too, just like they -and Jewish Christians- appear to have been influenced by Daniel, those who Josephus says interpreted the arguably Danielic signs of the destruction of Jerusalem (world ruler, square temple)
"according to their own pleasure" in War. 6.5.4. In my view, Jesus, in his particular way, was just another one of these guys.

I see the DSS as being the writings that these sects created or older ones they brought with them when they joined the Fourth Philosophy (Essenes, Pharisees, whoever, maybe even Jewish Christians, perhaps of the sort who had vowed to kill Paul in Acts or the "false brothers" Paul complains about in Gal. 2:4; anyone and everyone who were opposed to the Pharisaic/Roman establishment). In that sense it is somewhat similar to Golb, who sees the DSS as being writings of various groups from Jerusalem that were deposited at Qumran for safe keeping during the 66-70 CE war.
Last edited by John2 on Sat Jan 06, 2018 7:16 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christianity

Post by Ben C. Smith »

John2 wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 3:31 pm While there is some debate about it, arguably one of the similarities between the DSS and Jewish Christianity is the use of 1 Enoch, parts of which were found among the DSS and it is perhaps cited or alluded to in the Letter of Jude, as Bauckham, for example, argues in Jude and Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church (which is an excellent book, by the way).

https://books.google.com/books?id=oCOdB ... de&f=false
Yes, that is a splendid book. Bauckham is especially sharp when he is tracing the Lucan genealogy back to the ideas espoused in 1 Enoch.

Enoch's influence is felt in 1 and 2 Peter, as well: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3761.
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