Re: what's everybody reading

[Don Smith <dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu>]

Peter wrote:

> Oh, page number! chapter number!  I must look this up.  :)

Um, I think it was page 205 of the UK edition, and maybe 20 pages later in the
US edition (which uses a larger type and has pictures).  It was near the
beginning of the chapter named after that witch from the ministry who came to
teach the Defense against the Dark Arts class.

> > No kidding!  And Meier had some kind of drastic, life-threatening
> > illness in the meantime.
>
> Really?  I hadn't heard about that.  Glad he survived.

It's described in the introduction to volume three.

> > Hopefully he will make it to finish part four.
>
> Heh.  This *was* supposed to be a two-book project, back when the first
> book came out in 1991, wasn't it?  :)

Was it originally just two?  Heh, indeed.  

> > conclusion, any argument about how Jesus relates to "the community at
> > Qumran" is (to me) meaningless and irrelevant.
> 
> Yeah, I remember this Essene thing was a bone of contention for you when
> you read the previous installment, too.

Yeah, it was less important in the last one, though.  However, when half the
book is about Jesus and his relation to rivalling factions and philosophies of
the time, it becomes crucial whether you think the Dead Sea Scrolls represent a
marginalized sect of hermits out in the desert or a cross section of viewpoints
and beliefs from Jerusalem.  It makes a *huge* difference on how you interpret
the way Jesus taught.  For those who don't know what I'm talking about, I
highly recommend Norman Golb's "Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls", in which he
lays out the problems with the "Essenes at Qumran" hypothesis, and defends an
alternate hypothesis that the scrolls came from the temple library in
Jerusalem, and were hidden as people fled from the oncoming Roman army in 70
CE.  In a nutshell, the Essene hypothesis was proposed when there were only
half-a-dozen or so Dead Sea Scrolls, and they seemed to resemble views assigned
to the Essenes by Josephus.  Since there was a ruin not too far away, people
said "aha, we've found the desert retreat of the Essenes".  Problem was, once
the number of scrolls increased to over 800 (with at least 500 distinct styles
of handwriting), it became impossible to assign them all to one movement (many
scholars have given up calling their hypothetical sect "Essenes", because they
cannot avoid the fact that the diversity of scrolls no longer bears a
resemblence to what Josephus said about the Essenes, but they still talk about
"the Qumranites"), or to believe that that many people ever lived at Qumran
(you could argue that the Qumranites were keeping scrolls that came from other
groups, but then you've just argued in a circle and removed the very basis on
which you concluded there were Qumranites in the first place).  All along the
line from Masada to Jericho, scrolls have been found in caves, and yet we're
supposed to believe that the north and south end of the line came from
Jerusalem, but the middle of the line came from Qumran.  It just doesn't add
up.

But if the Dead Sea Scrolls represent a cross-section of Judaic thought in the
capitol at the time the Temple burned, and if they are viewed in continuity
with the other scrolls found along that line, then they paint a very exciting
portrait of a diverse and contentious Judaism in the time of Jesus.  Kind of
like 17th century England, people were passionately arguing about their faith
and its expression.  In that context, similarities between the NT and the DSS
don't mean that Jesus spent time hanging out with desert monks, they mean that
Jesus was actively engaged in the national conversation going on about the
meaning and future of Judaism, and the context for his teachings opens up
tremendously.  It also is important for how you understand Judaism on its own
terms, because some of the scrolls do resemble Esseanic thought, and others are
harshly critical of temple policies and practices.  If these scrolls were
deemed worth preserving, at the risk of life and limb, that means that even the
authority structure valued argument for its own sake (would Bush or Clinton in
a national crisis have preserved documents that made themselves look bad?  I
doubt it.), which provides a nice continuity to the later rabbinic culture that
produced the Talmud.

Okay, I need to get back to work.  Enough off-topic stuff for today.  We now
return you to discussion of the track list of Ohio.  I was glad to see that
"Show Me" is still around.  After three years, I figured that one was in the
dustbin with "Jig Newton".  :-)

See ya,
-- 
Don Smith                           Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                                http://www.rotse.net/dasmith/

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