Re: orion DSS and rabbis

[fred cryer <fc.dss@pop.teol.ku.dk>]

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I suppose what astonishes me, Stephen, is your *certainty* about the past,
which seems in your presentations of it to be as well and comfortably
furnished as a Victorian drawing-room, and at least at sturdily appointed.
But there seems little point in debating with you, as you already "know"
everything about the community or communities behind the DSS, and
apparently every scrap of any document can be drawn into the field to
"prove" your contentions. I´m sorry; that is not scholarship, and I don´t
propose to discuss on that basis. 
If the Essenes were actually mentioned in the DSS, fine; if the Pharisees
were actually ditto, fine; if the Sadducees were actually ditto, great! But
all these entities, which the NT and other reasonably contemporary
narrative sources seem to regard as well defined presences in the period
during which you assume the DSS to have been produced by the alleged yahad,
remain at best topics for extrapolation and conjecture, even on the basis
of the largest collection of Hellenistic-Roman semitic-language documents 
known to us from the period. If you are unable to grasp the implications of
the disparity between the narrative and documentary sources, and persist in
misrepresenting your opponents, then it really is impossible to talk with
you.

yours,

Frederick H. Cryer
Assoc. Prof. for Research
Univ. of Copenhagen
Faculty of Theology
Købmagergade 44-46
1150 København K.
e-mail: fc.dss@pop.teol.ku.dk
fax: (045) 35 32 36 52

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