Epiphanius on the Ebionites

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DCHindley
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Re: Epiphanius on the Ebionites

Post by DCHindley »

Joseph D. L. wrote: Sat Nov 02, 2019 12:23 am I also find it suspicious that letters of bar Kochba were found at Qumran, so the community there must have still been active at the time of his revolt.
Might want to fact check that one. The Bar Kochba correspondence was found in the Dead Sea region all right, but about 25 miles away from Qumran, close to En Gedi. Since the find also included a cache of letters of a wealthy woman, Babatha, which were dated, we are pretty sure the Bar Kochba letters dated to the same time, about 131-135 CE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Letters

DCH
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Joseph D. L.
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Re: Epiphanius on the Ebionites

Post by Joseph D. L. »

DCHindley wrote: Sat Nov 02, 2019 6:10 pm
Joseph D. L. wrote: Sat Nov 02, 2019 12:23 am I also find it suspicious that letters of bar Kochba were found at Qumran, so the community there must have still been active at the time of his revolt.
Might want to fact check that one. The Bar Kochba correspondence was found in the Dead Sea region all right, but about 25 miles away from Qumran, close to En Gedi. Since the find also included a cache of letters of a wealthy woman, Babatha, which were dated, we are pretty sure the Bar Kochba letters dated to the same time, about 131-135 CE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Letters

DCH
Thanks for that. Was not aware.

I still think the Community was still active during bar Kochba, but I'll need to reevaluate my thinking for it.
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Re: Epiphanius on the Ebionites

Post by Secret Alias »

It is almost a requirement at this forum to persist in beliefs and prejudices without evidentiary support
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Re: Epiphanius on the Ebionites

Post by John2 »

Secret Alias wrote: Sun Nov 03, 2019 4:37 am It is almost a requirement at this forum to persist in beliefs and prejudices without evidentiary support

But "how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?" You dismiss the relevant evidentiary support. The DSS, Josephus, patristic sources and the NT are all "nonsense" to you, leaving us with little else to discuss but your thoughts (which in any event I have a hard time following).

But from what I can gather from them, your tactic (in general) appears to be to 1) misread; 2) mischaracterize; and 3) dismiss. You do this to all relevant sources and also to me, which your last post directed to me illustrates perfectly:

You graciously explained that you think Jewish Christians used to carry out sacrifices in their synagogues before 70 CE. That was enlightening. I thought the temple was the only place Jews could make offerings. But what do I know. One more question please. You never have any doubt that any of these details in Irenaeus or Josephus might be outright inventions? Because it's in print it's true? No need to question, wrestle with what's written. It's there in print. Someone wrote it. It must be true.

In this one paragraph you have shown that you have misread and mischaracterized me, since I have not said that I think "Jewish Christians used to carry out sacrifices in their synagogues before 70 CE," and then you dismiss what Irenaeus and Josephus say (though I have not cited them regarding Nazarenes being pro-sacrifice, only Matthew, Acts and Epiphanius, but then you dismiss what they say too). The only thing (or at least the most important thing) that seems to have any value to you is you. And I think this is why you are so obsessed with hijacking my threads about Jewish Christianity, because I see value in the sources and not in you. And since that's not going to stop, you are not going to stop, because you cannot abide that.

But I've managed to enjoy sorting through the relevant sources and responding to other people's comments on this thread despite your presence.
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Re: Epiphanius on the Ebionites

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You dismiss the relevant evidentiary support
Ok I've tried to avoid continuing this fight.

1. The identification of the DSS sect with the Essenes is not confirmed
2. The only ancient Jewish sectarian material that has survived is the Qumran texts
3. If (1) is NOT confirmed, if the material is Sadducean, then your whole theory falls apart.

Do you realize how close you are to having your theory disproved? It's just one of many holes. But you don't even recognize or acknowledge how easily refuted this nonsense is.

In other words the reason the Qumran texts resemble early Christian literature might just be because of their generic Jewishness. If we found a cache of Essene literature we might say they are even closer to those early Christian texts - more than the Sadducean material at Qumran.

If I've never had sex before I am likely to think the first woman who agrees to have sex with me is my perfect match. But if I find another I might say this one is even more perfect and I might be able to find things about the first one that wasn't so perfect. Life's like that (although maybe not for people at this forum or others with limited experience). Trust me. You only know you have the perfect match if you go through a few misses. You act like the DSS = the Essenes = the Ebionites and heaven knows what else all equal this perfect match. Trust me - it's not a perfect match.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
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Joseph D. L.
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Re: Epiphanius on the Ebionites

Post by Joseph D. L. »

Secret Alias wrote: Sun Nov 03, 2019 8:18 pm If I've never had sex before I am likely to think the first woman who agrees to have sex with me is my perfect match. But if I find another I might say this one is even more perfect and I might be able to find things about the first one that wasn't so perfect. Life's like that (although maybe not for people at this forum or others with limited experience).
Ouch, man. That was a little too close to home.

Trust me. You only know you have the perfect match if you go through a few misses. You act like the DSS = the Essenes = the Ebionites and heaven knows what else all equal this perfect match. Trust me - it's not a perfect match.
That's why I think it's important if not overall necessary to have auxiliary theories and models, because the evidence we have is not at all yielding for us. We all argue in a generalized fashion our own particular ideas with a partial certainty that matches our sensibilities. That is just the limits of our language however. Maybe we should be careful and be more sceptical, but that doesn't mean we should stop speculating altogether. It's all we have.
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Re: Epiphanius on the Ebionites

Post by John2 »

Secret Alias wrote: Sun Nov 03, 2019 8:18 pm
You dismiss the relevant evidentiary support
Ok I've tried to avoid continuing this fight.

1. The identification of the DSS sect with the Essenes is not confirmed
2. The only ancient Jewish sectarian material that has survived is the Qumran texts
3. If (1) is NOT confirmed, if the material is Sadducean, then your whole theory falls apart.

Do you realize how close you are to having your theory disproved? It's just one of many holes. But you don't even recognize or acknowledge how easily refuted this nonsense is.

In other words the reason the Qumran texts resemble early Christian literature might just be because of their generic Jewishness. If we found a cache of Essene literature we might say they are even closer to those early Christian texts - more than the Sadducean material at Qumran.

If I've never had sex before I am likely to think the first woman who agrees to have sex with me is my perfect match. But if I find another I might say this one is even more perfect and I might be able to find things about the first one that wasn't so perfect. Life's like that (although maybe not for people at this forum or others with limited experience). Trust me. You only know you have the perfect match if you go through a few misses. You act like the DSS = the Essenes = the Ebionites and heaven knows what else all equal this perfect match. Trust me - it's not a perfect match.

Yet more misreading and mischaracterizing of me. I can't count how many times I've said on this thread and others that I think the DSS are largely Fourth Philosophic writings (i.e., older writings people brought with them when they joined the Fourth Philosophy and newer ones they wrote themselves) and that I view Christianity as being a faction of the Fourth Philosophy and thus don't agree with Eisenman (or anyone else) about an Essene connection to Christianity (and noted in support of this that Hegesippus says the Essenes had opposed Christians and that the Jewish Christians I view as being proto-Ebionites in Acts don't seem like Essenes to me).
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Re: Epiphanius on the Ebionites

Post by John2 »

John2 wrote: Sat Nov 02, 2019 1:39 pm
davidmartin wrote: Sat Nov 02, 2019 10:28 am One problem with associating the DSS and Christianity is the former seemed to be preparing to arm themselves to fight the Romans at least the narrative I've heard is the reason they were left in the caves is because they hid them during the battle and never returned
Yet Jesus appears to be opposed to fighting the Romans in the gospels, and not only that during the Bar Kohkba revolt I have heard Christians didn't join in with in
So how can Christianity really have sprung from a group who wanted to overthrow Roman rule with Jesus's opposition to fighting?
Assuming the DSS/Qumran community were preparing to fight and Jesus was opposed to physical battle, and apparently a physical kingdom
And that's not the only big difference, although there are similarities too I'm just not sure why people are excited to connect the two it doesn't seem to resolve hardly any questions

The DSS I think could be Jewish Christian (some of the pesharim and the Damascus Document) would have been written by violent proto-Ebionites of the sort that tried to kill Paul in Acts (and the "false brothers" he complains about in Galatians) who gave the more moderate Nazarenes a bad name (Acts 24:5: "We have found this man to be a troublemaker, stirring up riots among the Jews all over the world. He is a ringleader of the Nazarene sect").

I want to add something to this, David. The proto-Ebionites in Acts are not only violent and thus gave moderate Nazarenes a bad name (which makes sense given the Fourth Philosophic context of the times), I can understand why they would have found Jesus appealing (despite his apparent moderation), since he considered himself to be Daniel's "son of man," a figure who is said in Dan. 7:14 to have been "given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed." Does it really make any difference if this "son of man" figure is a spiritual being?

In other words, while Jesus had submitted to being tortured and executed, that was only the first part of his philosophy, in keeping with his interpretation of various OT passages (e.g., Daniel's "cut off" Messiah and Isaiah's Suffering Servant), as per Mk. 8:31:

He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.


But there is a second part to Jesus' philosophy, as per Mk. 8:38 and 14:61-62:

If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.

Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?”

“I am,” said Jesus. “And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

This is the same scenario mentioned by the grandsons of Jesus' brother Jude in the time of Domitian according to Hegesippus in EH 3.20.6:

And when they were asked concerning Christ and his kingdom, of what sort it was and where and when it was to appear, they answered that it was not a temporal nor an earthly kingdom, but a heavenly and angelic one, which would appear at the end of the world, when he should come in glory to judge the quick and the dead, and to give unto every one according to his works.

So in my view Jesus simply had a different approach to accomplishing the same thing other Fourth Philosophers were trying to do, i.e., suffer first then conquer (as a spiritual being), as per his interpretation of Daniel's "son of man" and "cut off" Messiah and such. And as I've mentioned upthread, a relatively large number of copies of Daniel and Daniel-related writings were found among the DSS. As Flint notes:

No less than seventeen of the scrolls found at Qumran are relevant for the study of Daniel, and present the reader with two surprises of unequal impact. The first surprise is the relatively high number of copies (eight) of the biblical book in the Qumran caves. Despite its relatively small size (twelve chapters), Daniel is outnumbered by only eight other compositions -counting both biblical and non-biblical- at Qumran ... The discoveries at Qumran have yielded several other writings that either mention Daniel or contain material that is in some way related to, or of relevance to, the biblical book of Daniel. This new material, none of which was previously known to scholars, bears powerful testimony to several traditions related to "Daniel" among at least some Jews in the last century BCE and the first century CE.


https://books.google.com/books?id=NuZlN ... an&f=false



But Jesus seems like he was a pretty bold guy when he alive too. He told the Pharisees, whose oral Torah was the law of the land during his time according to Josephus and which is regarded as being divine in Rabbinic Judaism to this day, where they could put it (e.g., Mk. 7:1-13) and did not mince words when he was asked by the high priest if he was the Messiah. So I can see how someone like that could appeal to extremists like the violent proto-Ebionites in Acts who I think could have written some of the DSS.
Last edited by John2 on Mon Nov 04, 2019 11:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Epiphanius on the Ebionites

Post by Secret Alias »

Your arguments for connecting a non-violent movement (early Christianity) whose members identified him as 'chrestos' to a violent nationalist movement sounds even less promising.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
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Re: Epiphanius on the Ebionites

Post by Ben C. Smith »

davidmartin wrote: Sat Nov 02, 2019 10:28 am One problem with associating the DSS and Christianity is the former seemed to be preparing to arm themselves to fight the Romans at least the narrative I've heard is the reason they were left in the caves is because they hid them during the battle and never returned.
Yet Jesus appears to be opposed to fighting the Romans in the gospels, and not only that during the Bar Kohkba revolt I have heard Christians didn't join in with in.
Jesus' opposition to fighting in the gospels can easily be viewed as picking "the right side of history" after the fact. Since the gospels — in their final forms, at least —postdate 70, of course the Jesus speaking in them is going to predict accurately the destruction of the Temple but simultaneously not encourage anyone to fight the Romans, who are destined to come out victorious. To expect anything else from documents written after the fact seems unrealistic.
And that's not the only big difference, although there are similarities too I'm just not sure why people are excited to connect the two it doesn't seem to resolve hardly any questions.
It helps to resolve two of the greatest questions about early Christianity:
  1. Why did the stories and sayings about Jesus shape him up to be the kind of Messiah figure that we find in our Christian sources?
  2. Why did so many early Christians expect the end of all things within the span of a single generation?
Nota bene: I do not think that the Qumran sect (or that one of the Qumran sects) is the source from which Christianity sprung. I simply think that the Qumran literature, in conjunction with the pseudepigrapha (much of which is represented at Qumran anyway), gives us our closest extant parallel for the kind of group which must have produced Christianity. There is no other group which answers the big questions better, IMO.
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