Was Jesus the Teacher of Righteousness?

[John2]

Dio 3, 2 by Synesius of Cyrene.
Available, Greek and English, in The Essenes According to the Classical Sources, G. Vermes and M. Goodman (Sheffield, 1989) 58-59.
A longer Greek quotation in Antike Berichte über die Essener, A. Adam und C. Burchard (2nd ed., Berlin, 1972) 39-40 and bibliography section.
Cf. Adam Kamesar, review of Vermes in JAOS 111 (1991) 134-5.
Also discussed in publications (as a source separate from Pliny) by Joan E. Taylor.
Maybe Dio got it from Posidonius or Strabo, I suggest.
Also:
Rereading Pliny...
https://orion.huji.ac.il/symposiums/pro ... on98.shtml
with some updating in:
https://people.duke.edu/~goranson/jannaeus.pdf
especially note 31.
Posidonius, Strabo and Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa as sources on Essenes. Journal of Jewish Studies 45,2 (1994) 295-298

When you had said, "Dio also mentioned Essenes by the Dead Sea," I thought you meant Cassius Dio, and I could not find anything from him about the Essenes. Now I understand you mean Dio of Prusa, as cited by Synesius.

But something I'm seeing about the Essenes (which you also cite in your paper) is curiously crossed out here (https://www.livius.org/sources/content/ ... esius-dio/) followed by a reference to a "note" that I cannot find. I don't know what that means, but the crossed out part says, "Moreover, somewhere in this book he praises the Essenes, a whole happy township in the midst of Palestine, beside the Dead Sea, lying at some point not far from Sodom itself."

And if there is anything to this, then I think "not far from Sodom itself" means we need to know where the writer thought Sodom was located. But to judge solely from this, I couldn't say. It also isn't apparent if these were the kind of Essenes that Pliny describes, the kind that didn't have women (unlike the Teacher's followers, which is another thing that he and Jesus have in common).

[John2]

It may not tie Jesus to the Teacher, but Galilee is another thing that Jesus has in common with Fourth Philosophers. As Silver notes here:

In the Herodian period, Klausner explained, "brigand" Jewish bands emerged with special prominence in Galilee ... Much more than Judea, Galilee was suited for the "nurturing of unruly, unbalanced zealots." As Klausner saw it, since the northern region was a hothouse for ... the enthused behavior of political or religious zealots, it was natural that Jesus, "who regarded himself as a Messiah of the usual type, should arise in Galilee rather than elsewhere" ... This was a volatile, politically and religiously excited locale awash in expectation of a special leader ... By the end of Herod's rule, Klausner observed, Palestine was filled from one end to the other with malcontents and rebels, "and this was especially the case in Galilee, the cradle of zealotism."


https://www.google.com/books/edition/Th ... frontcover

So not only (to my eyes) are Jesus' teachings similar to Fourth Philosophic Judaism (issues with the oral Torah, agreement with "Pharisaic notions" like resurrection of the dead, fervent belief that the Messiah would arise "about that time"), so was his location. Fourth Philosophic Judaism was in the air that Jesus breathed.

And the Teacher's place of origin doesn't really matter, since his followers had "departed from the land of Judah" and went to "the land of Damascus" (though CD indicates that some people lived in towns and had jobs and such). But since (to my eyes) the Teacher's teachings are Fourth Philosophic, I don't see it as out of the realm of possibility that he was from Galilee. But that can only be speculation.

[John2]

Regarding Dio's statement about Sodom ("Moreover, somewhere in this book he praises the Essenes, a whole happy township in the midst of Palestine, beside the Dead Sea, lying at some point not far from Sodom itself"), according to Ezek. 16:46 (for whatever it may be worth), Sodom is located south of Jerusalem and not by Qumran.

Your older sister was Samaria, who lived to the north of you with her daughters; and your younger sister, who lived to the south of you with her daughters, was Sodom.

This would place Dio's Essenes in the same location as Pliny's Essenes, south of Qumran (as Hirschfeld argues), the kind of Essenes that did not have women, unlike the sect in the Damascus Document, which did have women (as per Wassen).

And Strabo places Sodom near Masada (south of Qumran).

Near Moasada are to be seen rugged rocks, bearing the marks of fire; fissures in many places; a soil like ashes; pitch falling in drops from the rocks; rivers boiling up, and emitting a fetid odour to a great distance; dwellings in every direction overthrown; whence we are inclined to believe the common tradition of the natives, that thirteen cities once existed there, the capital of which was Sodom, but that a circuit of about 60 stadia around it escaped uninjured; shocks of earthquakes, however, eruptions of flames and hot springs, containing asphaltus and sulphur, caused the lake to burst its bounds, and the rocks took fire; some of the cities were swallowed up, others were abandoned by such of the inhabitants as were able to make their escape (Geographica 16.2.44).

I used to assume that Essenes had something to do with Qumran, but Hirschfield is making think otherwise.

[spin]

On the topic of Qumran archaeology, these might also be significant:

Magen and Peleg summary of their years digging at Qumran.

K. Galor on the plastered pools at Qumran.

David Stacey reassessing Qumran archaeology. He argues that Qumran was a seasonal site.

Important, but I can find no online copy is Rachel Bar-Nathan's article in The Site of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Archaeological Interpretations and Debates, edds Galor, Umbert & Zangenberg, Brill: 2006, chapter 15. Her final conclusion (277): "The similarity between the pottery of Jericho and Qumran, as well as their close geographic proximity, indicates, without doubt, that the inhabitants of both sites shared a close affinity. The pottery is only one of the aspects of both sites in which parallels are found...."

[StephenGoranson]

I attended the conference on Qumran archaeology reported on in The Site of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Archaeological Interpretations and Debates: Proceedings of a Conference Held at Brown University, November 17-19, 2002, edited by Katharina Galor, Jean-Baptiste Humbert, and Jürgen Zangenberg. Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah, Volume 57. Leiden: Brill, 2006.

My book review is in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 347 (2007) 114-116, available via:

https://people.duke.edu/~goranson/Brown ... review.pdf

[spin]

Reads like a list of likes and don't-likes. It's all broth and no meat. Could you at least post something that has some content in it?

[StephenGoranson]

There is now a Second Edition of
The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls
by Jodi Magness
William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2021.

[John2]

On the topic of Qumran archaeology, these might also be significant:

Magen and Peleg summary of their years digging at Qumran.

Thank you for those links, spin. I very much enjoyed this first one and the following in it stands out to me:

Tactical military considerations and the ease of collecting rainwater dictated the location of Qumran -not the desire of members of the Dead Sea sect to live somewhere remote. The site was part of a state-planned system of fortifications that served the strategic needs of the Hasmonean kingdom ...

... it is quite inconceivable that Jannaeus would have permitted the construction, at great expense, of an Essene community or monastery with a tower, water pools and animal sacrifices, right in the middle of the Hasmonean chain of fortifications. In the face of this, to argue that it must have been the Essenes who came to this site -uninhabited for five centuries- and undertook a project that required hundreds of skilled laborers, merely because they were looking for an isolated location, is unconvincing, to say the least ...

Were we to accept the claim that the [Essene] sect lived lived at Qumran for 170 years, we would expect to find hundreds of cooking and baking ovens at the site, as well as thousands of cooking pots. In fact, no such quantities of pots were found, and only a small number of ovens. So where were the cooking facilities for the hundreds of sect members?

They also dispute Hirschfield's idea that the remains above Ein Gedi are from an Essene settlement, but believe rather that they were made by refugees from the Romans, in keeping with finds from other areas in the Judean Desert, which I have no issue with, since, to judge from what ancient sources say, Essenes (if not all of them) lived somewhere near Sodom, and that doesn't necessarily have to be Hirschfield's location.

In any event, that was a great read and I look forward to checking out your other links.

[John2]

I know no one likes the Jesus-was-the-Teacher idea because of dating issues, but as I said in the OP, this is all just for fun. People have wondered if the DSS have anything to do with Christianity from day one, and I'm just indulging the idea through my own lens, given that the writings that mention the Teacher seem Fourth Philosophic to me.

And as far as that goes, and while I know it also applies to Essenes, but given the other aspects of the DSS that sound Fourth Philosophic to me, what Josephus says about Fourth Philosophers in Ant. 18.1.6 stands out as being relevant to Jesus' suicide-by-cop philosophy.

6. But of the fourth sect of Jewish philosophy, Judas the Galilean was the author. These men agree in all other things with the Pharisaic notions; but they have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and say that God is to be their only Ruler and Lord. They also do not value dying any kinds of death, nor indeed do they heed the deaths of their relations and friends, nor can any such fear make them call any man lord. And since this immovable resolution of theirs is well known to a great many, I shall speak no further about that matter; nor am I afraid that any thing I have said of them should be disbelieved, but rather fear, that what I have said is beneath the resolution they show when they undergo pain.

Two things stand out to me here. Not calling any man "lord" seems similar to what Jesus says in Mt. 23:9 ("And do not call anyone on earth your father, for you have one Father, who is in heaven"). And Jesus' whole thing was based on undergoing pain and dying (e.g., Mk. 8:31: "He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again").

This just seems like Fourth Philosophic kookiness to me, on par with the mass suicide on Masada. And consider the way that Jesus died. Offhand, I can't think of anyone else who was crucified during the first century CE besides Fourth Philosophers. The grandsons of Judas the Galilean, Josephus' three friends (who were taken down), those who were crucified during the siege of Jerusalem, and the two guys who were crucified with Jesus. Are there any other examples of someone being crucified during the first century CE besides Fourth Philosophers? Is Jesus the only "exception" here?

[StephenGoranson]

"Fourth Philosopher" appears to be a grab-bag designation--not a continuous, coherent movement--of those Josephus wanted Romans to consider as not the best representatives of Judaism. Jesus was not a fourth philosopher, and he didn't arm against Rome.

As to the claims of Yitzhak Magen, "Chief Officer of Archaeology for the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria," also known as the occupation of the West Bank, and the late Yuval Peleg, see
"Was Qumran a Pottery Production Center?" pages 103-104 in
Second Edition of
The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls
by Jodi Magness
William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2021.

and my book review is in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 347 (2007) 114-116, pages 114-115 on Magen and Peleg available via:

https://people.duke.edu/~goranson/Brown ... review.pdf

Though they made pottery for their own use, Qumran was, among other things, an inefficient site for large-scale pottery making and exporting.

At first Magen and Peleg avoided mentioning that they found yet another inkwell at Qumran; later, they claimed the inkwell was used for "marking pottery."