Subject: Re: nice detail, robbie...
From: Jim Rovira (jrovira@drew.edu)
Date: Sun Jul 07 2002 - 20:15:16 EDT
Good lord, talk about an off topic discussion...but I guess it's OK
because it's only the two of us :).
Eh, whatever you think about the composition of Genesis or, say, Isaiah,
by the time of Christ these texts had a pretty fixed form even by modern
standards. I think the Septuagint is generally deemed pretty
significant in establishing (if not establishing, then recognizing what
had already been established) a canon in the Biblical sense -- why where
those books translated and others were not? That specific translation,
we both already recognize, was the Bible of the early Christian church
and was most likely the basis for the establishment of the Biblical
canon as we have it today (RE: the OT only, of course).
Then there are the teachings of Christ. The Sermon on the Mount, Christ
said, was not intended to "abolish the Law or the Prophets" (Matt. 5:17)
and love "sums up the Law and the Prophets" (Matt. 7:12). In both these
cases the word "prophets" doesn't seem to be used in place of writing or
writers generically, but in terms of a specific collection of works
known to his listeners -- something akin to the Law, which we both
believe was certainly established by the time of Christ.
I don't necessarily believe what was contained in the books of "the
Prophets" was as fixed as, say, the Protestant Biblical canon because
you have quotations from what is now recognized as pseudepigrapha in the
book of Jude -- a quotation from the book of Enoch at least. But the
fact that the boundaries surrounding the collection of books called "the
Prophets" were a bit hazy doesn't mean they were non-existent. The
existence of the Septuagint testifies to that.
The community that produced the DSS, you know, was fairly isolated from
the life of Israel, wasn't it? This isn't to say it didn't share some
facets in common with it, but it certainly isn't to be identified with
it uncritically. If we want to say they shared attitude X toward
Biblical texts with the Pharisees and Sadduccees, then we should have
evidence at hand. The evidence I've seen seems to point the other way
in this case.
Jim
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