Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

This is just for fun. I've never seriously considered Jesus to be a candidate for the Teacher of Righteousness, but some things are starting to "add up" and I thought I'd flesh it out here (again, just for fun). My big picture idea is that Christianity is a version of Fourth Philosophic Ju...

I've got a lot of homework to do, but I stumbled across a detail I hadn't noticed before in Wacholder's The New Damascus Document : ... האסף in [the Damascus Document] does not, as many have argued, allude to the death of the Just Teacher, but refers to his act of assembling the exiles in Damascus, ...

However one may interpret the text of 4Q171, it is worth noting that this manuscript evidently is not an original autograph, but a later copy. That is important, chronologically. The date of composition in this case is not the same as the date of this later re-penning. A particular scribal mistake ...

John2 claimed, above: "But the Teacher is alive in 4Q171, so he existed while that text was written." That is not a fact. Anyone interested in 4Q171, a pesher on Psalms, would do well to read the thorough presentation on pages 192 to 226 in Maurya P. Horgan Pesharim: Qumran Interpretation...

Again, of all the texts (autographs or copies) mentioning that Teacher and/or that Priest must have been penned after they were known as such, by those names. So they existed before the earliest available mention. But the Teacher is alive in 4Q171, so he existed while that text was written. B. Webs...

"The Christian identifications [of the Teacher of Righteousness] are ruled out by the fact, among others, that the oldest manuscript of the Damascus Document (4Q266) and the manuscript of Pesher Habakkuk (1QpHab), which together form the two most important sources of information about the Teac...

Regarding the dating of 1QpHab, Lim writes in The Earliest Commentary on the Prophecy of Habakkuk : The handwriting of the two scribes of the scroll has been dated to the first half of the first century BCE or slightly later ( 25 BCE-25 CE , Trevor, 1948: 23; first half of the first century BCE, Bir...

Here is what Lim writes about the dating of 4Q171 in the link I provided upthread: The results for 4QpPs showed dates of 22-78 CE and 5 to 111 CE in the one and two standard deviation ranges of confidence respectively. Jull et al. have not noted the palaeographical date ... but it can be deduced fro...

PS, and less important, do you imagine Lim agrees with you--not the impression I got from conferences.)

About dating 4Q171 up to 20 CE to 70 CE, yes.

Address other than 4Q171 mentions, or admit yours is not an academic-based approach. 1QpHab carbon dates go up to 2 CE, which is during the Herodian era (and is only an estimate). And I cited King regarding the Qumran Damascus Document fragments ("the majority of the scroll versions of the Dam...