[My apologies: this message went out on Friday
but was held by the moderator because it exceeded the word limit.
Sorry for the delay.]
Stephen,
Thanks for your interesting and provocative
questions. Perhaps there is a postmodernist membership card, but then
it's probably a text, too, so that just reproduces the
problem.
One of my best memories of the Sepphoris dig is
of watching you clean that coin--I remember being thoroughly
amazed.
Let me say first off that you caught me in one
big inconsistency: I did indeed draw conclusions in this lecture that
are based on several unstated assumptions. This is not necessarily a
problem, as such, but it does indeed shape the sort of conclusions I
can draw from the evidence as I've constructed it.
Now, on the subject of the "late date"
of MMT. You did engage in a "strong misreading" (but as far
as I can tell, reader-response people consider this a good
thing!) of what I said when you introduced the
possibility:
But, say, if Yannai was the
wicked priest (the earliest MMT mss are estimated likely from his lifetime)
and if Judah the Essene teacher of righteousness sent him a letter quite close
in wording to extant MMT copies (parts B and C), even if the 6 or 7 (if the
7th is in cryptic text as Pfann proposed) extant copies are not that ms, MMT
could, at least conceivably, have been a letter.
Yes! This is exactly right, and I completely
agree. IF Yannai was the WP and Judah was the T of R, then this
scenario is entirely possible. But my claim wasn't just that the
manuscripts of MMT were late, but that the composition of MMT was
late. And in claiming that the composition of MMT was late (here's
where my historical assumptions become relevant), I was also assuming
that MMT would date from a time after the period of the T of
R's leadership. So, yes, if we assume a later date for the Teacher,
the whole rest of the narrative can fall into place just as you've
presented it.
I'm not saying I agree with you (or even that I
don't), but just that you're right in noting (as I tried to point out
in the lecture) that our assumptions of what counts as evidence make a
huge difference to the sort of narrative we can tell.
And a text can be two things at the same time, can't it?
I think I did try to say this, or at least I
tried to in the various longer versions of this discussion (shameless
plug: see RevQ 20 [2001] 3-22, and Reading for History,
ch. 2). It is absolutely the case that a text that starts off one way
can end up another. The Pauline epistles give us lots to work with on
precisely that question.
Is the "*cannot*" above shading toward totalizing or being overdrawn? In other
words, I looked for conclusions, and one of the most emphatically-stated ones
I found I found not at the moment persuasive.
I think what I was getting at here was that
if you say that MMT was written after the Teacher was gathered to
his fathers, then it really can't have been written by the
Teacher. The statement was conclusive because I thought it was a
gimme. But it was based on an unstated historical assumption that you
are right to highlight. Different assumptions? Possibly different
conclusions.
Question 2. After working methodologically, what then, in brief, are the main,
even if provisional, conclusions about D and MMT in history? What can we or
you reliably say?
OK, here I'm going to be completely annoying and
unsatisfying, but at least consistent with my earlier conclusions: I
really do think that we can generate a number of different, parallel,
and sometimes contradictory historical accounts based on how we select
our evidence and what we do with it. Some will be more convincing than
others, but the conclusiveness won't come from any kind of proof--it
will come from the belief that this use of evidence is the most
responsible.
There are places where I think the evidence is
overwhelmingly clear (e.g., that we're talking about a thoroughly
sectarian group in the sociological sense: lots of threats of schism,
lots of insider-language, lots of nasty rhetoric towards outsiders),
and where I think this has an impact on the way we do history (don't
trust these people to be speaking literally, but recognize that they
sometimes might be, even so). Other assumptions I have about these
texts: that they reflect several generations of real sectarians
(although it's worth walking through other models to see where it gets
us), that they reflect people who were very concerned with proper
religious practice and were steeped in scripture, and that the people
of the scrolls may not have been nearly as important in their world as
their texts make us think they were.
In other cases, I think the evidence is
overwhelmingly provocative (e.g. that the classical descriptions of
the Essenes bounce up against some of the scrolls evidence in
important ways), but that this provocation needs to be handled
carefully (so, OK, who got what right, and who got what wrong in their
descriptions, and how did the actual movements change over time?).
Priesthood is another example of this ("Zadokite" priests
are rhetorically central in complicated ways, and in different ways in
different texts. What's the relationship to real Zadokites, and also
to non-Zadokite priests and non-priests?).
Other evidence is a real problem or is used in
problematic ways. Do I think the scrolls come from a Christian milieu?
No. Why? Because I think the evidence doesn't warrant it. But do I
think such theories can be interesting or useful? Possibly, and
especially when they suggest combinations of evidence that we hadn't
thought of before (and even when we don't agree on conclusions, we can
often agree that new combinations of evidence are
useful).
As much as I respect the desire to nail the story
down more closely, and as much as I recognize that some such
historical narratives can actually be accurate (but how can we
say which one is? and how do we confirm that claim? especially if we
can't trust the "best" narratives to be anything other than
reproductions of exactly what the sectarians wanted to believe was
true?), I'm not ready to side with one or another.
Sorry for this overly long post, and thanks for
your interesting and helpful questions,
Max
