Subject: Re: Responses
From: Jim Rovira (jrovira@drew.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 29 2002 - 09:25:38 EDT
Responses below:
"L. Manning Vines" wrote:
> Jim said:
> << I have copies of books like The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English,
> but simply haven't had time to read them. >>
>
> Is that really the title of one of them? If so, do you know what it rests
> its claims of completeness on, and how many pages/volumes it fills?
>
> I would suppose it to be a "complete" translation of the less fragmentary
> so-called sectarian Essene texts (although the identification of the Qumran
> community and keepers of the scrolls as Essenes, long-accepted almost
> unanimously, is now becoming increasingly controversial) and maybe
> inter-testamental books, with everything from the Hebrew Bible left out,
> variant or not. Is that right?
Right, that's exactly it. It says it's "complete" in the sense that it provides
translations of the major documents and fragments, and leaves out numerous teeny
tiny fragments (some of which are only a small piece of scroll material with
half a letter on them, or partial sentences) and, of course, the Hebrew Bible
and Intertestamental books. Another translation of those would have been
redundant, especially since contemporary translations generally reference the
DSS. Essays describing differences would have been nice, but even then variant
readings in the DSS are usually footnoted in the translations.
It was published by Penguin, by the way.
> And:
> << It would seem odd that attitudes/beliefs about Scripture from Christ's
> time to Josephus' time -- perhaps 60-70 years -- would vary that greatly.
> But it is possible and Jewish society was severely disrupted between the
> time of Christ and Josephus. So I tend to lean toward thinking the
> attitudes in Christ's time were similar to the attitudes in Josephus'. >>
>
> It might seem odd, I suppose, for such attitudes to change in any given
> period of a generation or two. But it doesn't seem less likely to me that
> they would change in the twenty years following Jesus' death than that they
> would change in the twenty years preceding it, or the twenty years preceding
> his birth, or the twenty years preceding those, or some other arbitrarily
> given twenty-year period.
The comparison in time difference I was referencing was about 100-200 years
preceding Christ vs. 60 after Christ. The nature of the beast we're talking
about seems to require some time lapse -- Josephus' language describes a canon
that's fixed and accepted and has been for some time. The destruction of the
temple was a terrible loss, but the Jewish synagogue predated the temple, and
texts were disseminated (alright, in Greek :) ) all over the Roman Empire and
probably throughout Palestine. Josephus' tone implies a canon that was somewhat
fixed before his readers' conscious memory -- there isn't a hint of any question
about the extent canon. 20 years -- from the destruction of the temple to
around the time of Josephus' writing -- just seems too soon. It is possible
that the destruction of the temple caused a crisis that made a fixed canon
necessary, but then the decisions made at that point would probably be
reflective of attitudes the community already held for some time.
But again, yes, it's impossible to really set _when_ this canon was fixed in
more or less the form Josephus had it in.
Jim
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