In a delightful retrospective, Geza Vermes retells the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The article reveals many a sordid detail about this scholar and that. Over and over again, the best-laid plans of mice and men went astray before the scrolls were properly published, in some cases, a half-century after they were discovered. HT: James Davila
Vermes repeatedly characterizes the Essenes
and the Qumran covenanters in terms of an all-male celibate community with a common
purse. I could not help but be reminded of a bitterly polemical article by
George Wesley Buchanan in Revue Biblique 115 (2008) 49-55, entitled “Integrity
in Translating and Editing.” Buchanan lambasts Harold W. Attridge and Linda M. Maloney
for the use of gender-inclusive language in the translation from the German of Strecker’s
commentary on 1 John in the Hermeneia series. Buchanan takes it for granted
that the intended readerships of both the Epistle of Hebrews and 1 John were all-male
celibate communities.
Outside of the current editors of Revue
Biblique, I’m not sure that Buchanan’s theories are taken seriously by
anyone. (Peer-reviewed journals are sometimes just as indulgent and
self-indulgent in their choice of what to publish as our bloggers.) On the other hand, one
thing is certain: discussions of asceticism and monasticism found in the
manuals and encyclopedias almost always overlook scads of evidence. Few if
anyone seems inclined to connect the dots, as it were, beginning with the
evidence for all-male celibate Jewish communities and individual ascetics in
the Second Temple period, inclusive of a figure like John the Baptist, the
reality to which texts like Matthew 19:12 and Revelation 14:4-5 seem to allude,
the kind of life Jesus lived, and the attestation of the ascetic ideals,
including celibacy, in Syriac Christianity, possibly ab initio, not to
mention the apparent singlehood of the wandering prophets in the Didache. In
short, it’s about time someone developed Buchanan’s theses in a cautious,
carefully documented fashion. Better yet, it's about time someone wrote a comprehensive history of asceticism in both East and West beginning as early as the evidence allows and going right up through the 4th or 5th centuries of this era.
Great Story. Thanks for sharing. One of my profs. in undergrad was one of the two students that took that concordance in Cincinnati, and made a data base that put the texts back together. His conversations about the DSS, were always the highlight of his classes.
Posted by: Adam Couturier | May 06, 2009 at 04:20 AM