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In honour of Prof. Mazamisa, chronology, at its correctness, is viewed as the cornerstone of understanding every successful elaboration of any historical origination and leadership in realities through the perspective of the reader, text and two horizons. Second Temple period groupings’ identities are not immune to such perspective of historical order at foundational dimensions and towards the higher unfolding of origination and leadership narrations, aiming to place or show them correctly in their context. The three Afrocentric generations’ lessons and perspectives of leadership surfaced within the Second Temple three groupings context as an art of affirmative indigenous knowledge wisdom in origination and leadership chronologies from anti-colonialism and apartheid different generations. As Second Temple groupings, only Essenes, Pharisees and Sadducees are zoomed in to understand their correct historical chronology of originations and leadership through the three Afrocentric generations’ lessons and perspectives of leadership. This is aimed at surfacing an understanding of cause and reaction, advantages and disadvantages within similarities and differences, identities and actions from three Second Temple groupings context affirmed by the three Afrocentric different generations’ lessons perspective of leadership.ContributionThis article aims to showcase the comparative leadership lessons from the Second Temple era and early Christianity of the Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes through Afrocentric perspectives in line with Mazamisa’s reader, text and two horizons. It is a lesson within theology, sociology, political sciences, and other fields of study to show the importance of comparative lessons drawn from the Second Temple groups and the Afrocentric leadership perspectives of different generations.

A reexamination of the people and movements associated with Qumran, their outlook on the world, and what bound them together Dead Sea Scrolls, Revise and Repeat examines the identity of the Qumran movement by reassessing former conclusions and bringing new methodologies to the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The collection as a whole addresses questions of identity as they relate to law, language, and literary formation; considerations of time and space; and demarcations of the body. The thirteen essays in this volume reassess the categorization of rule texts, the reuse of scripture, the significance of angelic fellowship, the varieties of calendrical use, and celibacy within the Qumran movement. Contributors consider identity in the Dead Sea Scrolls from new interdisciplinary perspectives, including spatial theory, legal theory, historical linguistics, ethnicity theory, cognitive literary theory, monster theory, and masculinity theory. Features Essays that draw on new theoretical frameworks and recent advances in Qumran studies A tribute to the late Peter Flint, whose scholarship helped to shape Qumran studies

Abstract While the Traditio apostolica ascribed to Hippolytus has primarily been the focus of studies about authorship and dating, this unique work also has much to suggest about rhetorical presentations of catechesis in the early Christian era. Comparing the TA to Josephus's account of the Essenes in the Judean War and Iamblichus's account of Pythagorean initiation in De vita Pythagorica, this essay argues that the TA's presentation of catechesis can be read as constitutive of a quasi-apologetic defense of the Hippolytan \"school\" during the transitional period from school Christianity to monepiscopacy during the second century. Deploying similar Pythagorean imagery to describe the process of initiation, the author/editor of the TA makes a case for the Hippolytan school as offering a true philosophical way of life.

This paper presents an attempt to systematically describe and interpret the evolution of different religious and political movements in Judaea during the period of the Second Temple using the methods of the theory of social networks. We extensively analyzed the relationship between the main Jewish sects: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes (Qumranites), and later also Zealots. It is shown that the evolution of the relations between these sects agreed with the theory of social balance and their relations evolved toward more socially balanced structures.

General insights from the discipline of religious studies may contribute to a better understanding of the Essene Hypothesis. In its \"softer\" form, the Essene hypothesis posits a sub-group relationship between the Qumran community and a larger Essene movement as described, above all, by Josephus. This effort to accommodate differences between accounts of the Essenes and the Scrolls can be better understood when contextualized in light of the so-called \"insider/outsider\" problem. Josephus's use of the term \"Essene\" can be productively compared to generalized labels for groups of sub-groups, like \"Quaker,\" \"Mormon,\" \"Hasidic\" and \"Gnostic\"-terms used more often by outsiders, and frequently by writers of introductory religion textbooks. The Essene Hypothesis makes a greater deal of sense when seen in light of the ways generalized labels are used in a variety of descriptions of religious groups, both ancient and modern.

Was there a “Q community”? There are many who think that any quest for a “Q community” is a fool's errand. In this paper, I revisit this vexing question by focusing on several distinctive textual coordinates with which we can map Q's author within the social, textual, and theological landscape(s) of Second Temple Judaism. Since the author of Q was capable of crafting innovative scriptural allusions and adapting inherited Jesus traditions, I suggest that Q is not an isolated “Galilean” phenomenon but a textual production that combines Galilean Jesus traditions in conversation with contemporary Jewish apocalyptic traditions and can be located alongside the wider “Essenic” networks that pre-dated and co-existed with the Palestinian Jewish Jesus movement.

Halakhah in the Making offers the first comprehensive study of the legal material found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and its significance in the greater history of Jewish religious law (halakhah). Aharon Shemesh's pioneering study revives an issue long dormant in religious scholarship: namely, the relationship between rabbinic law, as written more than one hundred years after the destruction of the Second Temple, and Jewish practice during the Second Temple. The monumental discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran led to the revelation of this missing material and the closing of a two-hundred-year gap in knowledge, allowing work to begin comparing specific laws of the Qumran sect with rabbinic laws. With the publication of scroll 4QMMT-a polemical letter by Dead Sea sectarians concerning points of Jewish law-an effective comparison was finally possible. This is the first book-length treatment of the material to appear since the publication of 4QMMT and the first attempt to apply its discoveries to the work of nineteenth-century scholars. It is also the first work on this important topic written in plain language and accessible to nonspecialists in the history of Jewish law.

The Serekh or “Community Rule” (in all its variant manuscript forms) is one of the most famous of all the Dead Sea scrolls. It is commonplace to see it as referring to a sect of celibate men; the assumption is that it “contains no allusions to the presence of women in the group which it regulates.”1 However, in an important study, Eyal Regev has recently challenged the notion that celibate men are the focus of the Serekh texts, or of any manuscript in the scrolls corpus, by stressing that there are no explicit statements that deal with the issue of sexual asceticism, unlike what is found in monastic rules, or among the Shakers. Rather, other yaḥad documents (e.g., 4Q502 Ritual of Marriage or 1QSa Rule of the Congregation) refer to marriage, reproduction, and children.2 If this is so, why assume that the Serekh can only refer to a group of celibate men, even without explicit mention of women and children? Regev's view has essentially been the position of Lawrence Schiffman for many years, given the numerous references to issues of women and family in the halakhic texts of the scrolls corpus.3