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Re: Sects
I've watched this developing for a while, ever since Philip Davies
mentioned something about the community of the CD, or something, and
someone replied something about the "sect" of CD.
As far as I'm aware, from observing the usage, the "community" of a text
refers to all we can infer about the writer(s) and reader(s) of a
particular text from the specific text itself. It does not necessarily
imply that each text is produced by a separate community from every
other, or that we really *know* which texts belong to which (textual)
communities.
The reason for talking about the community of a text is to have a handy
way to say that we are not trying to generalize beyond what we know or
infer or even imagine about the people who had to do solely with *this*
particular text. Thus, the people who form the community of the Temple
Scroll are not necessarily completely different from those who form the
community of the CD; however, they are described differently in a work
which deals with the Temple Scroll from the way they get described in a
modern work discussing only CD. (Two of P. Davies's works.)
The rationale for this approach is that it is impossible to know the
internal structure and valuation of the different texts for some or all
of the members of any group which concerned themselves with the texts.
A sect, on the other hand, is a "community" that is sociologically
defined in some way, by those things which set it apart from other sects.
All baumgarten may be on Irion by now, and he can answer that part of the
definitional issue better than I -- or someone else might.
Finally, in terms of Yirmyahu's logical analysis, the specific reason for
talking about "communities" of texts is to remove the analysis from
concerns that X --> Y, i.e. that X (community) implies Y (sect). However,
it would be true that W (text) implies X (community), with the operation
of implication a very dense matter which involves the necessity that a
text had author(s) and reader(s).
Sigrid Peterson UPenn petersig@ccat.sas.upenn.edu