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Re: orion Ian's willful disinformation
>Ian wrote, "Without Pliny there is no Essene hypothesis." The "hypothesis"
>has several aspects besides Pliny, as you very well know.
Dear Stephen,
Perhaps you can understand the idea of a necessary condition. For the Essene
hypothesis to hold relevant to the dss, then something needs to connect the
Essenes to the location of the dss. The only evidence you have to connect
the Essenes to Qumran is a difficult passage in Pliny. So, Pliny is a
necessary condition for the Essene hypothesis as it stands. Hence, "Without
Pliny there is no Essene hypothesis."
>As I recall, you are not persuaded by the "hypothesis"...
As a matter of fact, times have changed and I can say I'm less than not
persuaded by the "hypothesis".
>But I question whether you have a right to misrepresent the facts
Stephen, as you are the major supporter of the "Essene hypothesis" on the
list, I asked you for tangible evidence to support it as I was not persuaded
and would like to have had something to make it a bit more reasonable. You
were less than forthcoming. You must admit that it's hard to misrepresent
facts when there aren't any.
The Essene hypothesis was the only basic choice when there were more wayout
ones flying around. The Essene idea was fostered by the enforced lack of
access to the documents leaving one to work with a small unrepresentative
selection of the texts which nearly all came from cave 1. These are the main
corpus of yahad texts and it is not strange that, without a context to these
documents, they seem out on a limb. The liberation of the texts has shown
that the picture that came from the cave 1 texts was simply not
representative of the whole body of dss. No longer were the hypothesized
Qumran scribes popping out a few dozen texts, they were producing literally
hundreds of texts and there were now literally hundreds of scribal hands --
noone writing more than one text. No longer can the documents be read to
support a secluded non-mainstream religious group. And it is very difficult
to make claims about how well the dss fit the theology of the Essenes when
you have nothing to compare these claim with.
All you are left with as I see it is a possible etymology of the name
"Essene" (how many others are around, 10?), and a passage from Pliny that
might link the Essenes to some place to the north of En Gedi -- if that
interpretation is correct (and it still isn't given).
Have you got anything more to add than the "concensus" as stated by
Charlesworth in his "Jesus and the dss"?
Ian Hutchesson
And what wilful disinformation?