[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