gnosis92

I don't know if this has been threaded before but given the number of did Jesus exist threads, I thought to give this a crack.

On the History/Discovery channel, the essenes wrote the Dead sea Scrolls at Qumran. Here I learned that this may not necessarily be true, the scrolls may not have originated from Qumran (they could have come from the Temple), the community at Qumran were not necessarily Essenes (perhaps they made pottery?), and the content of the community that produced the DS may not match up with known Essene practices (this point is raised in BAR) as described by Josepheus.

Anyway the current issue of BAR raises the issue of whether Josepheus description of the Essenes matches up with what is known at Qumran.

Steve Mason acknowledges that the Essene-Qumran-DS scroll hypothesis remains the dominant school.

http://www.bib-arch.org/bar/article....6&ArticleID=11

Since there are at least three separate issues regarding DS-Qumran-Essene hypothesis, BAR and this thread focuses on one: does Josepheus account of the Essenes matches up with the self-description of the community of believers and the Teacher of Righteousness as presented in the DS?

Based on the DS, and Community rules, what known branch of Judaism matches up most closely with "DS and Community Rules" based on Josepheus account of Judaism in his time? Can a credible case be made that the content of DS is more in common with the Pharisees or Saducees than the Essenes?

BAR kindly offers Josepheus passages on the Essenes here
http://www.bib-arch.org/e-features/josephus-essenes.asp

Diogenes the Cynic

I think there should be an option for "undecided."

gnosis92

u can + if u want

Diogenes the Cynic

Done.

spamandham

The DS scrolls do not appear to me to form a cohesive whole, so I favor the idea that they are simply a library of some kind...but not strongly.

show_no_mercy

Weren't the "Essenes" not one homogenous sect of Judaism, but just a collection of various possibly unrelated highly ascetic Jews who otherwise didn't fit into the Pharisees or the Sadducees? If that's true, then saying that the "Essenes" wrote the DSS doesn't really say much.

Charles Gadda

It's not clear what this poll is saying. Or rather, the premises are skewed: it suggests that a single group wrote the scrolls. Norman Golb, for example, does not deny that the Essenes may well have written some of the scrolls. But he believes those scrolls (we're talking about the "yahad" texts) were undoubtedly written by a group of sectarians that lived in towns all over Palestine, including in the Jerusalem region.

Thus, the poll should contain choices such as the following:

Do you believe the Essenes wrote all the scrolls?

Do you believe the Essenes wrote some of the scrolls?

Do you believe all the scrolls were written by a single group living at Khirbet Qumran?

Do you believe Qumran was the Essene settlement described by Pliny?

Do you believe the bones of women and children found in the cemetery at Qumran are the remains of women and children who lived at the site?

Do you believe the scrolls were written by a variety of groups, including sectarians and non-sectarians?

Do you believe Qumran was a secular site (fortress, villa, commercial trading post, pottery factory), uninhabited by any sect?

Do you believe some, many or all of the scrolls were brought down for hiding from the Jerusalem region at the time of the siege and sacking of the city by the Romans in 70 A.D.?

Do you believe the Copper Scroll is an authentic historical document?

Do you believe the Copper Scroll came from Jerusalem?

Do you believe the Masada scrolls came from Jerusalem?

etc., and then the results should be put together to form a coherent ensemble.

Charles Gadda

P.s. the "self-description of the community of believers and the Teacher of Righteousness" is featured only in a tiny portion of the Dead Sea Scrolls, yet BAR obsessively focuses on this as if contained some kind of conclusive implications for the scrolls as a while. This is cheap commercialism at its worst -- typical of the kind of ignorant "Bible archaeology" rubbish that systematically comes out of that rag. Why doesn't BAR focus on the corpus of 100 texts that Rachel Elior identifies as writings of the Temple priests?

Ignorant Gnostic

The entire idea of this poll is basically garbage--scientific debates aren't solved by popularity surveys, especially ones made after millions of people have been indoctrinated by propaganda coming from BAR itself and from fraudulant museum exhibits.--the whole scandal here has been well documented in various internet forums including this one. The amazing thing is that despite disgraceful efforts such as this one by BAR, the Qumran-Essene hypothesis has collapsed before our eyes. For anyone who reads French, see the announcement of that collapse (and of a new French edition of all the Scrolls approaching the texts in the inductive manner they merit) by Alain Beuve-Méry in Le Monde, 5 November 2008.

Ben C Smith

I think you are absolutely right about scientific debates not being solved by polls, but probably wrong to suggest that the purpose of this poll is to solve the debate (which, BTW, is principally historical, not scientific, though science can of course get involved).

Ben.