Tag Archives: Dead Sea Scrolls

The Essene Debate Continues…

I just got this from Dr. James Davila’s site, www.PaleoJudaica.blogspot.com. The interesting debate over whether the Qumran community was composed of Essenes or not continues: GEZA VERMES responds to Rachel Elior’s response to his article: In connection with Rachel Elior’s rejoinder to my essay, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls, may I contradict her [...]
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Dead Sea Scrolls Not Written by Essenes?

Hebrew University scholar Rachel Elior (author of The Three Temples), has recently made news for declaring that the Dead Sea Scrolls were not written by Essenes. In fact, according to Elior, there never were any Essenes at all. Josephus (and a number of ancient writers) made them up in order to create a mystique of [...]
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Orson Hyde, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Hierarchy of the Gods

Lately, I have been looking into a very interesting topic in the Dead Sea Scrolls which concerns the idea that there are several levels of heaven and that each level has an appointed chief or guardian who rules over it.  This is actually a fairly common theme in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic and mystical literature [...]
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Levi’s Initiation into the Angelic Priesthood

10/07/08 This post will cover our class discussion of the Testament of Levi, an important apocalyptic document. I will not go into an overview of all that the document contains of theological interest–there is a vast number of details that could potentially be interesting to the LDS reader. For a great overview of the relevant [...]
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Baptism or Temple Initiation? Part III

 Another Word on Resurrection A great insight that Barker gives us that I did not include in my last post has to do with both the resurrection and the priesthood. In my last post, I cited a portion of the Gospel of Phillip: The Tree of Life is in the midst of Paradise, and from [...]
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