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Re: Calendar, MMT
Dear Russell,
You wrote:
>Now that MMT has been published, I think it's fair to say there
>is no textual basis whatsoever for this fantastic claim [: the TR wrote MMT].
I obviously agree with this judgement.
>MMT has "we", "you", and "they". Schiffman (for one) argues in my opinion
quite
>properly that the "we" group is the council.
But what exactly do you mean by "the council"? The Jerusalem high priestly
leadership, or a "sectarian" council?
>Schiffman sees MMT as the earliest sectarian scroll, before the rise of the
>Moreh Tzedek, but if the sectarians already had such a developed halakhah,
what
>did they need the Teacher for?
As I see that MMT was written in a comparatively tranquil period (as against
say the Zadokite fragments), I'd say that it was pre 175 bce. The righteous
teacher is righteous (!) -- that is his special quality, he needn't have
written the rules to have had his impact on the writers of the later
documents. He it seems was a writer himself, if the thanksgiving hymns were
in fact his, and they show something special about the writer's approach to
his position in the world. That perhaps caused the perception of his
righteousness.
I know you want to put MMT late, but I do like Greg's sugestion that MMT was
written not as a sectarian document. If it was really written by the
Jerusalem inner priesthood, which seems a credible reading, it was produced
before Jason and Menelaus -- before 175 bce.
Yours,
Ian Hutchesson