Historian of the ancient world Edwin Yamauchi examines the power struggles, guerrilla publishing, and bizarre interpretations of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are making headlines once again. Publications as diverse as Time, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times have run major articles on these ancient texts. Even a supermarket tabloid printed claims that the scrolls forecast a modern “nuclear disaster [that] will leave millions dead or homeless” and include “eye-popping predictions for top celebrities like Kevin Costner and Madonna.”
It is not the first time the scrolls have captured the attention of the world. After they were discovered in a cave by a Bedouin shepherd boy in 1946 and publicized in 1947, renowned archaeologist William Foxwell Albright called the scrolls “the greatest manuscript discovery in modern times.”
Scholars found other caves in the Qumran area near the Dead Sea that would eventually yield thousands of scrolls or fragments. The richest repository was Cave IV with some 15,000 fragments representing over 500 texts. Not only was every book of the Old Testament except Esther represented in the scrolls, scores of other documents shed light on the religious crosscurrents of Palestine in Jesus’ day. Strange new theories linking Jesus to the Essenes, the apocalyptic Jewish sect believed by most to have gathered the scrolls, also caught the notice of many.
Now, decades later, the scrolls still spark controversy in scholarly circles and whet the curiosity of Christians (CT, Jan. 13, 1992, p. 36). To learn more about the significance for today of these millenniaold documents, CT turned to Edwin Yamauchi, CT senior editor and professor of history at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of Harper’s World of the New Testament, and coeditor of the forthcoming Peoples of the Old Testament World (Baker).
Why have the popular media shown such intense interest in the scrolls?
Much of the intrigue has centered on clashes between scholars. The wrangling has been fueled largely by the long delay in publishing some of the scrolls. These are strong, colorful personalities who have scholarly reputations at stake. Those in the inner circle—the so-called official committee—have been at odds with those who have been excluded until recently from examining many of the scrolls. The monopoly on the Cave IV fragments maintained by the official committee—and the publication delay of over 30 years—has long frustrated scholars. The media sensed a story there. Then, late in 1990, John Strugnell, a Catholic scrolls scholar at Harvard, was dismissed as the head of the international translation team for alcoholism and anti-Semitic remarks.
How has the control of the official committee been challenged?
The monopoly was recently broken through several separate, but not entirely unrelated, events. First was the culmination of a crusade to release unpublished texts launched in 1983 by Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review and organizer of the Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS). In September 1991, BAS published A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls, reconstituted by Ben-Zion Wacholder of Hebrew Union College and his graduate student Martin Abegg. They used a handwritten concordance of the unpublished scrolls and a Macintosh computer to reconstruct the documents. The result of this remarkable feat was denounced as a “bootlegged” publication by the official scrolls committee.
Then, after a dispute between a wealthy patron, Elizabeth Bechtel, and the librarian at Claremont, California’s Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center, Bechtel deposited a second set of scroll photos at the Huntington Library in San Marino near Pasadena. In September 1991, Huntington’s new librarian, William Moffet, made these photos available to all scholars. This was highly controversial.
Finally, in December 1991, BAS published another set of 1,787 photos, whose source remains mysterious, in a two-volume facsimile edition, edited by Robert Eisenman and James Robinson. Elisha Qimron, a professor at Ben Gurion University in Israel, sued Hershel Shanks and others involved for publishing without permission his reconstruction of one of the important texts.
This series of events coming rapidly in the fall of 1991 aroused a fever pitch of interest, not only among scholars, but in the broader media.
Some publications have alleged that intrigue and secrecy surround the scrolls.
Some writers have even suggested conspiracies. These theories are bizarre. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh argue in The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception that there was a Roman Catholic conspiracy to suppress the scrolls because many of the early scholars were Catholic. The idea is that the Vatican is guarding revelations that would challenge traditional views of early Christianity. That is quite nonsensical. They also erroneously claimed that 75 percent (rather than 20 percent) of the texts were unpublished. It is true that the closely guarded monopoly, the secrecy, and the limited access to the Cave IV scrolls and fragments aroused resentment and chagrin among excluded scholars. But conspiracy theories don’t stand up.
At any rate, we’re at a second stage now. The question of who should and shouldn’t have access to the texts has become moot. People may disagree whether it was a good or bad thing, but now the scrolls are available, and there’s no turning back the clock.
What do you think of the bizarre theories about Jesus that have grown out of the Qumran discoveries?
The most notorious example comes from Great Britain’s John Marco Allegro. He was chosen in 1953 to serve on the first international committee entrusted with the Cave IV materials. He had originally studied for the Methodist ministry, but soon abandoned any pretensions of faith and in numerous books did his best to overthrow Christianity. In 1970 Allegro left the University of Manchester and published a bizarre book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. He claimed that the name Jesus meant “Semen, which saves” and that Peter’s name meant “mushroom,” thus revealing that Christianity was originally a disguised fertility cult centered on a hallucinogenic mushroom. Allegro’s fullest book on the subject of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Christianity was a work that was released posthumously in 1992, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth.
Then there’s Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1992), by Barbara Thiering, a professor at Sydney University in Australia. Thiering concludes that since the Qumran literature and the New Testament emanated from different wings of a single community, the latter should be read as a highly symbolic code.
According to Thiering, Jesus was born near Qumran, and the Magi were diaspora Essenes. She also argues that when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he was releasing Simon Magus from Cave IV at Qumran. Jesus was crucified along with Simon Magus and Judas at Qumran, after Jesus was given snake poison that rendered him unconscious. Simon Magus administered aloe and myrrh, which purged Jesus of the poison. Jesus married Mary Magdalene, who bore a daughter and two sons. After a divorce, Jesus later married Lydia of Philippi, a female bishop. Jesus accompanied Paul, the author of the Qumran’s Habakkuk Commentary, when he traveled to Rome. It was there that Jesus died of old age.
Scholars like Thiering have abandoned orthodox Christianity as a viable option, so they seize on new evidence, which they develop into an idiosyncratic, revisionist theory. They have a peculiar conceit that they alone have the truth about the origins and nature of primitive Christianity, truth that evaded all other generations.
What do we know about the keepers of the scrolls?
Most scholars associate the scrolls and the Qumran settlement with the sect of the Essenes described by Philo, Josephus, and Pliny the Elder. There are some 50 parallels and only six discrepancies between their descriptions of the Essenes and what we find in the Qumran Scrolls. The Essenes, who were more separatist than the Pharisees, had two related groups—married Essenes who lived in the towns and celibate males who lived in a “monastery” by the Dead Sea.
The community probably originated in the second century B.C. There’s a clear date for the destruction of the community in A.D. 68, when the Romans destroyed the site of Qumran. Some of the scrolls predate the community. A text of Exodus, for example, has been dated to 250 B.C.
Why are the scrolls important to Christians?
Prior to the Qumran discovery, our oldest Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament came from the Middle Ages. While we had thousands of papyri from ancient Egypt and a half-million cuneiform tablets and inscriptions from Mesopotamia, we had nothing comparable from Palestine. Now we have thousands of fragments representing many manuscripts, especially Old Testament manuscripts. There could always have been some question of how accurately the biblical manuscripts were copied. But because one of the Dead Sea Scrolls is a complete book of Isaiah from about 100 B.C., just to give one example, it is clear that the medieval manuscript of Isaiah and its predecessors were copied with exceptional care. On the basis of the Qumran Isaiah scroll, the Revised Standard Version (1952) team made only 13 minor changes in Isaiah.
The scrolls have also opened a flood of light on the background of Jesus and his disciples. Here is an example: Liberal New Testament scholarship once argued that the unmodified New Testament use of the phrase Lord for Jesus was a Hellenistic intrusion not native to Palestine. And New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann argued that it was unthinkable for Jews to have used such a phrase for God, further undercutting the Jewishness of belief in the divinity of Christ. The scrolls prove that Jews around Jesus’ time used such terms in both Hebrew and Aramaic, and that Paul’s use of the phrase Lord Jesus goes back to an early Palestinian Jewish confession. John’s gospel, once considered by critics to be late and Hellenistic because of its dualism between light and darkness, is now shown by the Qumran parallels to be the most Jewish of the Gospels.
What would you say to those who fear “bombshells” in future scroll research that might discredit conservative Christian belief?
There is a story about John Allegro, originator of the “mushroom” theory. Upon learning of John Strugnell’s interest in a career in theology, Allegro wrote, “By the time I’ve finished, there won’t be any church left for you to join.”
Time has proven such claims ludicrous. Noted scroll authority James Charlesworth of Princeton Theological Seminary has said, “None of the fragments known to me and others who work on them can be judged in any way to disprove the essential claims of the Christian faith.”
The scrolls actually help us to better understand and appreciate Jesus. First, they point us to the Jewishness of Jesus, to things he had in common with other Jews of his time, including the Jews at Qumran. Second, they underline his uniqueness. When we study the Qumran community and their quasimessianic figure, the Teacher of Righteousness, we discover that there are many more contrasts than similarities between Jesus and that figure (see CT, May 13, 1966, pp. 12–14).
Contrasts between Jesus and the Essenes abound. The Qumran community emphasized hatred of outsiders, while Jesus preached love even for one’s enemies. The Qumran community excluded those who were lame, blind, or blemished, because the Essenes were concerned about ritual purity and Qumranites considered themselves all to be priests. (Jewish law specified temple priests must have no deformities.) Jesus, on the other hand, welcomed those who were infirm and healed them. When it came to the Sabbath and other laws, the Qumran community placed an extreme emphasis on purity, exceeding even that of the Pharisees. Christ, however, broke with legalistic interpretations of the law and stressed instead the spiritual intention, which is purity within.
The Essenes expected two messiahs and a final battle between the agents of good and of evil. Unlike Christianity, however, when this community was destroyed in A.D. 68, we hear absolutely nothing further about the group. That is in striking contrast to the Christian church. Christianity was involved in the same political, economic, and social circumstances, but managed nonetheless not only to survive, but to grow and to expand.
One major difference, of course, was that Christians believed fervently and firmly that their Messiah had risen from the dead and was coming back again. In spite of the controversies and bizarre interpretations of recent decades, nothing in the scrolls need lead us to question that.
Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
