[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Steve Goranson's triple "Copenhagen" post
We were hardly accusing you, Steve, of all the ills of modern Qumran
studies. However, as I illustrated, the term "scroll-jars" is
prejudicial to the data, and I doubt if much is gained by hedging the
prejudice with the suffix "-type". Ceramics is a study of typologies,
not of absolutes, and as I mentioned, and as was apparent already
back in the '50s, the jars found on the sites in question are part of
a continuum of types with wide mouths and long or longer bodies, with
flat bottoms. These types have been found beyond the confines of
Qumran, and nothing Ms Magnes has said can change that fact. Finally,
talk of the fabled "Essenes" still butts its head against the
chronological difficulty which I alluded to in an earlier post, that
the C-14/AMS dates are increasingly pointing to the first half of the
first century BCE (and some much earlier), while the Essene
references derive from the close of the 1st cent. CE. Could you tell
me reliable information about the Moravian community in Winston-
Salem, NC, in the 1820s? If not, perhaps you won't be so confident
that we have in the late references a positive identification with
the earlier mss and the groups that produced them...
Much is being assumed here, and the primary difficulty is still the
ancient one best and first defined by Droysen: that what one needs is
an event-contemporary narrative linking various parts of the puzzle
together. The references in Josephus, Pliny and Philo do not fill
the bill, and cannot do so without doing violence to their nature or
to the objective evidence.
Fred Cryer