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Re: orion re: "Damascus"



Fellow listmembers,

Excuse me for jumping in on an already wandering thread, but ... it seems
to me that many of the posts so far have assumed far more historical
reliability in Acts than most NT scholars are prepared to grant. So -
again! - we are doing more speculating than anything else.

For example:
1. We don't know if Saul/Paul really did receive "letters" from the High
Priest to the synagogues in Damascus, and even if he did, we don't know the
nature of the letters (introduction? arrest warrants??)
2. Even if it were certain that "Damascus" was a code word for Qumran (or
wherever) in the DSS, why would that code be used in the NT (written much
later than at least most of the DSS)?

In short, although the NT evidence is interesting to me personally, it
seems that - once again - it is only tangentially related to the scrolls.
If we want to discover whether "Damascus" was a code word in them, that's
where we have to look.

Paul Sodtke
London, Ontario
psodtke@execulink.com