spin

Give me one tangible piece of evidence to show that there were Essenes at Qumran. The best that people have given in the past is an abuse of Pliny the Elder, who says that "below [the Essenes] was the town of En Gedi", followed by special pleading.

So, one tangible piece of evidence for the Essenes or forget about them as, in the Qumran context, scholarly fiction.


spin

aa5874

Well, anytime you want to show the historicity of anyone, just prove the historicity of someone else.

The New Testament has credibility problems and who are these Roman witnesses?

gnosis92

Qumran

"More recently the theory of Qumran being a religious settlement has garnered much critique and is not considered very likely anymore.... The Dead Sea Scrolls remain unexplained."

I was under the scholarship that the Essenes at Qumran produced the Dead Sea Scrolls.

interesting. I guess the Hitler channel needs to update some of their documentaries.

Then who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, how did they end up at Qumran, and who were the Essenes and how did they figure into all this? Who were the early Christians, what relationship did they have with the Dead Sea Scrolls if any, and with non-canonical Jewish books like the Wisdom of Solomon and Book of Enoch, and with the Pharisees, including Hillel and Gamaliel? How does it all fit together?

spin

First, do you need an author in order that you remove the Essene baggage from your considerations? Second, the scrolls talk about the leaders being the sons of Zadok and sons of Aaron, ie priestly families.

The Essenes were a poor communal group, which took in other people's children, because they generally didn't procreate. We cant say too much about them for we only have secondary sources from Josephus and Pliny, then later sources.

The site of Qumran reveals an establishment which has been likened to a manor house which produced various commercial items, to a production center which was a satellite of the Herodian estate at Jericho, but the current developments put Qumran as not in a religious context, but of a commercial production of pottery and glass items, perhaps of balsam and perfumes as well.

All Jewish literature is related in one fashion or another. The problem is what the family relationship is. The book of Enoch was written over a couple of centuries starting at the end of the 3rd c. BCE and is a compilation, so it's very hard to make any single position from it. Later rabbinical sources put the Pharisees at odds with a few rulings espoused by the writers of the DSS found in the text MMT, and with the leaders being priestly, we should be able to see that the position of (at leat some of) the scrolls should be Sadducee, and the Sadducee because they were the losers of the theological struggles certainly got bad press.

Wisdom of Solomon is not an easy book to place, but it may be another Alexandrian text -- Alexandria being the home of a Jewish wisdom tradition which may have included Ben Sira, which may have been written when Jews fled the Seleucid persecution for refuge in Egypt --, whereas the Psalms of Solomon may have been a Pharisaic work written (at least in part) just after the death of Pompey, a work which mocks the fall of the "corrupt" temple cultus.

I don't really know how the early christians fit into this complex network of connections. The earliest of the gospels gives indications that it was written in a Latin culture, using Roman coins, buildings and military terms. If GMk was written in Rome, then what relationship can its contents have with events purporting to have happened in Judea and Galilee?

Hillel comes from a less conservative strain of Pharisaism. The rabbinical sources don't seem to present the time of Hillel as containing many struggles other than that between the Hillelites and the Shammaites. The christians seem to be a late layer in the rabbinical literature.


spin

aa5874

Can you name the writings of hostile pagans that claim Jesus actually existed?

spin

How many hostile pagans left literary traces?

I think Celsus accepted the existence of Jesus, along with Porphyry and Julian. None of them were near contemporaries.


spin

Roger Pearse

All pagans are hostile. All references to Jesus in antiquity qualify.

Do you know of any references by any one that question whether he existed?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

yalla

Could you explain why you call all pagans hostile Roger?
That strikes me as strange, as if pagans and Christians must inherently be antagonistic.
cheers
yalla

spin

Just as a small aside, christianity was an urban religion -- in the Roman context at least. It took longer to filter out into the rural district(s), the pagus. So those people who were hostile to christianity tended to be the people from the rural areas, ie the "pagans".


spin

fromdownunder

I am going to go with gnosis92 on this one. I think that the two Josephus references (accepting that there is a partial interpolation in one of them) and the Gospels themselves, plus Paul's writings are sufficient evidence per se of the existence of a historical Jesus.

If we deny a historical Jesus (and I am not talking about the synoptic or John superman-Jesus) we are necessarily denying virtually all history out of hand, because we do not have conclusive evidence that anybody, or anything ever existed.

To me, this seems to be moving towards some sort of version of "last Tuesdayism". Somebody (and not Paul - unless people start denying that he wrote at least the letters attributed to him) started what we now call Christianity, based on something or somebody! Why was not that somebody a rabbi called Yeshua?

I am of the opinion that the people why deny a historical Jesus need to provide falsification of the texts that confirm his existence, not the reverse. And don't get me wrong - I am not looking for falsification of the magic tricks. That is a different argument.

Norm