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Re: orion Orion James Brother of Jesus

>At 14:56 20/05/97 +0200, Ian Hutchesson wrote:
>>I'd love to know where this idea of "collaborationist Sadducees" comes from.
>>There is just so little information about Sadducees. Josephus knows almost
>>nothing. The gospels likewise. "Sadducees" is a very hollow name by the end
>>of the first century.
>
>By this do you question that the strongly Hellenist Pseudo-Tz'doqim of the
>Beyt Miyq'dash were Roman-appointed, often despite not being genealogica
>Kohanim, that the appointees weren't Tz'doqim, or that such appointees
>shouldn't be regarded as collaboraters with the Romans?

Well, let me say, I haven't got a clue what you mean by "Hellenist
Pseudo-Tz'doqim". The only near historical source I know about is Josephus
who claims to know of only one Sadducee high priest. The one thing that
writers seem to know like it's on a nail driven through their heads is that
these elsewhere unknown Sadducees don't believe in the resurrection. Perhaps
I just lack the right information, but it seems to me that anyone talking
about first century Sadducees hasn't got much historical evidence to go by.

>>>Further conforming evidence is given with
>>>regards to "early church" history paralleling that of the Qumran sect.
>>
>>However this is pure fantasy, based on the fantasy coming from 50 years of
>>mismanaged analysis of the dss. One has to create a "Qumran sect" and a
>>series of scenarios that give that sect a history by sewing together the
>>sparse historical data in the dss, before one can have said parallels. Sect?
>>Schmect.
>
>It seems fantasy to me too, but not for this reason.  Doesn't MMT provide
>adequate insight into Qumran halakhah, uh ma'aseh (maybe we should call the
>collective term miyshnah?),

(It may be true that MMT does provide an insight into the halakhah of the
dss, yet the interpretation of this text from what became normative hundreds
of years later will not allow one to take advantage of that insight.)

>to give a reasonable definition of the Qumran
>sect in terms of contrasts with the other major sects as well as the parallels?

What Qumran sect?

The looney fabrication that started off as a misguided attempt to make sense
of Pliny's "hos en-geddi" as some place two thirds of the way to Jericho
instead of something that is truly up above Ein Gedi? The sect of celibates
who have marriage rituals and rules about women during menstruation?
Alright, so we ditch this silly Essene rubbish and call them "the (Qumran)
sect". What's the difference? We've lost a name for this hypothesized sect
-- very Monty Pythonesque: the (non-Essene) not so loosely sexual, perhaps
inhabiting an ex-Hasmonean stronghold, hypothetical believers in some
non-standard (though noone can say what standard actually was for the
period) variety of Judaism. Wouldn't convince a six-year-old.

Perhaps with the exception of Ezekiel, there are no documents more temple
oriented in all the Jewish literature than are the dss. This should in
itself suggest that these documents are temple based, ie written in or
around the temple (I have listed the range of dss temple lit. before),
expressing mainstream Judaism of the second and first centuries before the
loss of the temple oriented leadership of the Sadducees and the "permanent"
rise to power of the Pharisees.

Cave 1, that gave us all those early texts before the clamps were put on
access, does not represent the overall tone of the dss, yet it is naive
interpretations of those texts that condition the present approaches to the
whole corpus.

Ian Hutchesson