spin

gregor, I won't be much help on specific literature as I find myself at present in a small country town far from my books.

If this book has a title of Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed (or Uncovered) and is a collection of documents with introductions, please be very careful with the introductions. Michael Wise did the philological work collating texts and translating them. Robert Eisenman wrote most of the introductory material working on an old ideological basis of his own which desired to insert James the Just into the scrolls as the Righteous Teacher. He has never produced any substantive evidence for this position, yet those intros are infused with the stuff. There is still a little useful information, but one needs a good basis in the scrolls to be able to extract it.


spin

Ted Hoffman

So, what happened to the idea of an informal debate?

spin

There was no debate because there is no evidence in favour of the Essene Hypothesis. The best scholars have done is

1) manipulate Pliny the Elder who talks about the Essenes above Ein Gedi (where an Israeli archaeologist found a settlement of single cell huts) to make it refer to Qumran (this is ultimately a pawltry linguistic argument), and

2) argue from silence that because they cannot see any other group responsible for the scrolls, it must have been the Essenes, oh and

3) there are some gross similarities (ignoring the dirrences) between the cultic matters in the scrolls found near Qumran and the Essenes, they must have been the work of the Essenes.

As you can see, no hard evidence whatsoever. What is there to debate?


spin