I’m enjoying the Marvin Vining book, Jesus the Wicked Priest, but not because I agree with his conclusions. In fact, the more I read, the further removed I become from agreement. He’s another armchair archaeologist, so I feel a certain kinship with him. This despite the fact that the guy has to go through some mesmerizing gyrations to tie his pet beliefs to existing materials. Mmm, gyrations.
Further, these Essenes were not isolated just at Qumran, but instead had populations in every town. Consequently, Vining finds it a necessary corollary that the library of writings at Qumran were Essene, simply because they were the only group with a large enough population and scribal tradition to have created the myriad works found.
Now if I ultimately disagree with this premise, it wouldn’t be the only thing that would shoot down this guy’s method for me — that’s another post. It had been my understanding that the Essenes developed as a result of the Maccabean usurpation of the Temple leadership. It does make sense that there would have been a power-holding group about the time of Ezra that would have been really hard-core about ‘traditions’ — even more so if the area they were moving into had largely abandoned them (or had never heard of them).
I have a hard time believing that whatever it is we think the Essenes were at the time of Ezra had anything to do with Jesus or whatever Epiphanius was gossipping about. This does not rule out the possibility that the Essenes retained the patina of tradition applied by Ezra, or even that there might have been some direct lines of authority traceable from one group to the next. It’s just that I feel it is unlikely to the extreme that sort of continuity throughout the Greek period is possible to trace.
Anyone have any better ideas about what to call the early 2nd Temple crowd?
5 responses so far ↓
1 beowulf1723 // May 28, 2008 at 11:40 am
Calling the 2nd Temple crowd “quisling” might be a bit extreme, but the High Priest was appointed by the Romans, and certainly helped keep the populace in line.
My impression is that the Temple crowd was more or less identified with the Sadducees. Whether they were the same as the Scribes is a good question. The Gospel authors definitely like the phrase “Scribes and Pharisees” though. This might be a good question for a rabbi, as this would be reflective of the division between the “School of Hillel” and the “School of Shammai” in the Talmud. Both Hillel and Shammai were contemporaries of Jesus — assuming Jesus to be a historical person.
I’m also not sold on the Dead Sea Scrolls = Essene documents argument. I think the idea that Qumran was a Essene monastery was Dominican archaeologist Roland De Vaux’s particular wet dream. He never did publish the results of all that archaeological stuff that was done in the 1950s, and, so far as I know, there is still no comprehensive publication of it. There has also been some disagreement on whether the DSS were written at Qumran or at a different location and taken to the Dead Sea caves to hide them from the advancing Roman army. There is also the pesky fact of part of the Community Rule showing up in a medieval copy in the Cairo Geneza. I don’t think I’ve read a good explanation of why medieval Jews would have wanted a copy of it.
2 xephyr // May 28, 2008 at 11:54 am
If we set aside the question of Qumran — let’s just say that it has no direct connection to the DSS, is there any reason why you wouldn’t suppose the DSS to be Essene documents? What other group are you aware of that might have produced them?
I think you have to set aside the idea that Qumran is anything more than a estate-type dwelling for a particularly observant Jew. If there’s any connection, it might have been that this guy belonged to the community, or was related to someone in the community, that wanted to hide a bunch of scrolls. If I was the leader of a religious sect in danger of being stomped away, I wouldn’t hide my precious library a stone’s throw from my own HQ.
But one still must return to the question of who wrote the DSS?
3 beowulf1723 // May 28, 2008 at 12:55 pm
I have no problems with the idea that the DSS are Essene, but they are varied enough that I don’t think that you can get a consistent theology out of them, any more than you can out of either parts of the Bible.
Maybe the problem is different Essene groups. If they had been around as long as Josephus says, there well could have been some splintering from the original group.
The whole idea of the DSS being Essene pretty much started with De Vaux, AIR, and his theory of the Qumran site being a monastery. I think his attempts to explain away the remains of women and children in the cemetery there is his being unable to accept that Qumran might have been a non-monastic community. This doesn’t rule out the DSS being written there, of course, just De Vaux’s — and the RCC’s — attempt to try to prove that Christian monasticism had its origins in some splinter group off of a religion that was very big on the family.
4 baal_kriah // May 29, 2008 at 1:18 pm
The quislings of whom you write were the late 2nd Temple crowd, not the early ones of whom wrote. Early 2nd Temple is 400s-late 500s b.c.e., after Cyrus let the exiles return to Judaea. I would call them something like “revivalists” or “proto-Zionists” or something else that would reflect their desire to revive the religion they imagined to have existed prior to 586 b.c.e.
5 baal_kriah // May 29, 2008 at 1:21 pm
If I was the leader of a religious sect in danger of being stomped away, I wouldn’t hide my precious library a stone’s throw from my own HQ.
I don’t think that necessarily follows. Weren’t the Nag Hammadi texts hidden quite close to the Pachomian monastery where they are thought to have originated?
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