Introduction: Absence of Evidence or Evidence of Absence?

Summary

There are a few starting points for this project, but perhaps the most important comes from puzzling over the scholarly maxim that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” This is true, but an absence of evidence is also not evidence of presence.

The Dead Sea Scrolls represent an unexpected cache for the historian, offering new windows onto Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity. But we often have tattered fragments of manuscripts, when we would prefer pristine productions, and what we might see by way of our new data-set is necessarily limited by our material remains. We can easily understand the draw of a “full” work, or even the possibility thereof. Even the way we articulate the remains, as “fragments,” leaves conceptual room for the existence of a whole. However, some works attested at Qumran, where the Scrolls were found, are found nowhere else. Since Second Temple fragments are all we have, we quickly reach a limit on our reconstructions of literary wholes.

Nevertheless, some works found at Qumran seem to be textually related to works found in other manuscript traditions; that is, the same text is found on leather scraps at Qumran, as is also found in late ancient or medieval parchment leaves or papyrus codices. The non-Qumran witnesses are often, materially, better preserved: less tattered and fragmentary, more continuous and perceptibly whole-looking. It is therefore easy to correlate superior material preservation with the hypothesis of better textual preservation, and assume that fuller documents best model the literary whole to which all our material remains attest.

1 Enoch, as I understand it, succinctly demonstrates the flaws of this logic in practice. 1 Enoch is the modern scholarly name for an Ethiopic work known as Henok (ሄኖክ). 1 Enoch was likely translated into Gəʿəz between the fourth and sixth centuries ce. But the text of 1 Enoch is not attested in manuscripts until the fourteenth century ce. 1 Enoch contains a great deal of textual material that corresponds to that found in a set of Qumran fragments. Therefore, the Ethiopic is sometimes called the “fullest” or “complete” version of the work or works represented by our Qumran fragments.