This is just a post concerning the value of Community Pricing (typically older books), and the value of contrasting today's writings with those of 'yesterday'.
George Foot Moore wrote in the early 1900s and if you google him, you'll find a considerable influence in the judaic area, especially following the 1st century.
It was during the late 1800s, that a series of manuscript scraps were found in Cairo in an old synogogue, and among these manuscripts was what became known as the Damascus Document, (due the group mentioning 'the land of Damascus' as their site).
Mr Moore wrote 'the Coventers of Damascus' (downloadable pdf) following earlier work by the gentleman who dug out the manuscripts. And in it Moore moves from clue to clue trying to deduce who these people were, and why they lived in 'the land of Damascus'.
Of course, it was about 40 years later, the caves west of Qumran contained the same writing, along with a whole lot more.
But most interesting was that Moore deduced that 'Damascus' would have to be in southern Palestine, along with other features he was correct about.
The relation to CP is that if you stick with today's perspectives, you don't realize how many assumptions support the perspective. Reading the earlier authors, you get an expanded view, since in their case, they had considerably less to work with and utilized each small clue.
Lastly, Moore quickly figured out that the group, though similar to later Christianity, could not be the same ... something the early Qumran researchers did suggest.
CP ... it's not just cheap!
