Subject: nice detail, robbie...
From: Jim Rovira (jrovira@drew.edu)
Date: Sun Jul 07 2002 - 00:11:17 EDT
I appreciate very much your detailed knowledge of the texts :). From
what I understand of the DSS, there's a full text of Isaiah and Deut.,
and fragments of everything else at least, as you said. I think that,
though, by the time of Christ there was already a sense of the canon of
Scripture. Christ refered to the division of the writings you yourself
mentioned -- the Law and the Prophets, or the Law, the Prophets, and the
Writings. I don't know that the idea of a canon was as fixed as it is
now, but the idea did exist prior to the time of Christ.
That isn't to say the Qumran community necessarily held to this idea -
they seemed to have some idiosyncratic interests that aren't quite
reflective of, say, major groups actually involved in Jewish life like
the Pharisees (precursors to today's rabbis) and Sadduccees (priestly
class). I don't think it's necessarily wise to apply their attitudes
toward their texts to the rest of Hebrew culture.
But yeah, I think you're dead on RE: the importance of the Sept. being
dependent upon Christianity. Judaism was known throughout the Roman
Empire but they generally weren't as aggressively missionary as the
Christians were.
Jim
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