Everything about the Dead Sea Scrolls suggests mystery.
Collected by a radical Jewish sect, perhaps Essenes, who lived monastically
in the arid and almost lifeless Judaean wilderness, the scrolls include over
800 Jewish manuscripts—many biblical—dating from as early as 250
B.C. The scrolls were hidden in the caves of
Qumran, on the northwest corner of the Dead Sea, so that the Roman armies
would not destroy them on their way to conquer Jerusalem. The Essenes, of
whom we know little, expected to liberate the scrolls when their community
was liberated by the Messiah. The Romans prevailed, however, and so the scrolls
stayed hidden for almost 1,900 years. But the mysteries don't end with the
scrolls' discovery 50 years ago, which many label the archaeological event
of the century. Since then, the scrolls have been a pawn of Mideast politics
and the cause of an unusual number of academic scandals.
Which makes Trinity Western University in verdant British Columbia in Canada
an unlikely port into this cryptic world. A half a globe away from the caves
of Qumran, the campus's spiraling western cedars and low-hanging utility
lines have nothing in common with the stark terrain of the Judaean desert.
And when it comes to history, the school boasts only its Seal Kap House,
where the sealable cap for milk bottles was invented.
But step through the front door of the Seal Kap House and you are transported
back to ancient Palestine. The languages of choice are Aramaic and its descendant
Syriac, Hebrew (biblical, Qumranic, and rabbinic), Greek, and Latin. The
residents are twentieth-century evangelical Christian scholars Peter Flint,
Martin Abegg, and Craig Evans, who form the core of the school's Dead Sea
Scrolls Institute, but the guests of honor are the Essenes.
If the scholars at the Seal Kap keep one eye focused on the past, they train
the other on the late twentieth century. Two tabloids pinned to a bulletin
board outside Flint's office proclaim "Startling Revelations from Dead Sea
Scrolls: 1997 Weather to Be Worst Ever," and "Lost Prophecies of the Dead
Sea Scrolls: Christ Reborn—Woman in Idaho Will Be New Virgin Mother." Next
to them a newspaper clipping announces the latest discoveries of the Jesus
Seminar—phrases from the Gospels they determined Jesus could never have
uttered.
While not intended as a most-wanted list, the bulletin board profiles the
trio's top foes—sensationalism and biased scholarship. Armed with direct
access to the ancient manuscripts—Flint and Abegg are members of the official
team of 70 Dead Sea Scroll editors worldwide—Trinity's triumvirate is waging
a new evangelical battle for the Bible. It is a war fought among mysterious
texts, tantalizing New Testament parallels, and theories as quirky as the
experts who conceived them. And so to solve the mystery of the scrolls we
go to Langley, British Columbia.
I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask, to be found by those who did not seek me.
—Isaiah 65:1
Half a century ago this year a young Arab shepherd crawled into the mouth
of a cave near the Dead Sea in Palestine and re-emerged with the oldest Bible
manuscripts now known. One was a complete scroll of the Book of Isaiah, copied
by scribes 100 years before the time of Jesus. Additional findings in ten
other caves in the Qumran region over the next decade gave the world a jigsaw
puzzle of 100,000 pieces of ancient Jewish religious texts that were the
remains of about 870 distinct scrolls. Written in varieties of Hebrew, Aramaic,
and Greek, 220 of these were biblical scrolls representing at least portions
of every book of our Old Testament except Esther.
The remaining 650 nonbiblical texts contained an intriguing assortment of
religious prose and poetry, including plans for building a new temple the
size of Jerusalem (the Temple Scroll), a secret list of buried treasure (the
Copper Scroll), and a prophecy of how the Sons of Light would defeat the
Sons of Darkness in the last days (War Scroll). In addition, there were
commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures, books of the Apocrypha, calendar texts,
rules for achieving ritual purity, and documents outlining community life
and initiation rites. Some referred to a Teacher of Righteousness and a Wicked
Priest.
This Isaiah matches the A.D. 1000 Masoretic
Text upon which all modern translations
are based 99 percent of the time.
Taken together, they raised the question of who the members of this community
were, and who the revered Teacher of Righteousness might have been. For over
five decades now, experts have offered a variety of colorful—if sometimes
far-fetched—answers. But until the early 1990s, those seeking to answer
these and other questions faced a handicap: the refusal of the official scroll
editors to release the remaining manuscripts to outside scholars before they
had completed their own work on them.
By the late eighties, these outside scholars would mount a growing protest
against what came to be labeled "the scrolls cartel" and "the academic scandal
of the century." The liberation of the scrolls, surprisingly, would begin
with the gutsy sleuthing of a young graduate student at Hebrew Union University
in Cincinnati named Martin Abegg.
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THE SCROLLBUSTER
From all tribes of Israel they shall prepare capable men for themselves to go out for battle …
—War Scroll, column 2
In the fall of 1991, Abegg rounded the corner of a convention booth at the
annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL)
and came face to face with his former Jewish professor Emanuel Tov. He had
studied for several years at Hebrew University in Jerusalem with Tov, who
was now chief editor of the international scrolls team. Mysteriously, Tov
greeted Abegg with the Hebrew phrase banim giddalti v'romamti ("I
reared children and brought them up").
Abegg replied with an unsure thank-you; later that evening he looked up the
phrase, which he recognized from Isaiah. In chapter 1 he found the verse
that his mentor, in good rabbinic fashion, had left unfinished: v'hem
pash'u bi, "but they have rebelled against me."
Rebellion, controversy, and outright war have surrounded the scrolls from
their ancient birth and burial in Palestine to their modern resurrection
in the high-tech presses of popular and academic publishing. Many scholars
believe that the scrolls belonged to a Jewish sect that lived communally
at Qumran near the caves where the manuscripts were found. The puritans of
their day, they became disillusioned with the political corruption of the
priesthood in Jerusalem under the Jewish rulers known as the Hasmoneans.
Around 166 B.C., the group withdrew to the
desert dwelling in Qumran, about 20 miles east of Jerusalem. There they rallied
around a teacher they believed God had blessed with a special ability to
interpret the Hebrew prophets.
This Teacher of Righteousness, as the scrolls cryptically call him, saw in
the events of his day, and particularly in the calling out of the Qumran
sect, a prophesied division of the forces of darkness from the forces of
light. The pure remnant would soon wage a final and preordained battle against
the Romans and their puppet Jewish temple leaders, and with the help of a
messiah, they would victoriously usher in Israel's redemption.
War against the Romans did come with the First Jewish Revolt in
A.D. 66. But instead of giving rise to their
hoped-for messiah, it led to the destruction of not only Jerusalem and the
temple in A.D. 70, but also the Qumran settlement
itself. Before its destruction, however, the members of the sect had hidden
their sacred scrolls in the surrounding caves for safekeeping—expecting
to reclaim them after their victory.
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For nearly two thousand years the scrolls lay undisturbed in their dark,
dry cavities. When uncovered shortly after World War II, the first modern
eyes to read their scripts and recognize their antiquity were those of E.
L. Sukenik, a specialist in Jewish paleography. Coincidentally, it was November
29, 1947, the very day the United Nations voted to partition Palestine in
order to create a Jewish state. The timing was not lost on Sukenik as he
read with awe these manuscripts he was sure dated to the time when Herod's
temple still stood proud.
One result of the UN partition was that when the team of eight
scroll editors was formed in 1952, most of them were Catholic. By order of
the Jordanian government, into whose territory the scrolls fell, none of
the team could be Jewish. That would change, however, during the 1967 Six
Day War when Israeli solders captured the Palestine Archaeological Museum
in East Jerusalem, where the scrolls were housed. It was renamed the Rockefeller
Museum, and Jewish scholars were added to the team.
While fighting sometimes erupted around the museum over the years, the editors
inside soon began having skirmishes of their own. As early as 1956, scroll
editor John Allegro, an agnostic who vowed he would one day undermine the
fairy tale of Christianity, announced to the press that he had found a 100
B.C. manuscript containing an Essene story
of a messiah's crucifixion and resurrection. It showed, he claimed, that
the Christian Gospels were nothing more than later adaptions of this earlier
Essene story, and that Jesus was a fictional character derived from the historic
Teacher of Righteousness.
Allegro also maintained that his Catholic colleagues on the team were suppressing
scroll texts for fear of the damage they would wreak on the church. Even
Jewish scholars roundly dismissed Allegro's imaginative readings; nonetheless,
the same basic theory of a Catholic conspiracy would resurface as late as
1991 in a book by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh called The Dead Sea
Scrolls Deception (Touchstone).
Other specialists over the decades seemed equally eager to find the fantastic
in the scrolls. In the 1980s, Barbara Thiering, an Australian scholar, claimed
the scrolls were encoded with secret messages; when the Gospels are read
using these codes, they tell us that Jesus was the Wicked Priest, was crucified
but kept alive with snake poison, and eventually married and bore two children.
In California, historian Robert Eisenman found in the scrolls evidence that
after Jesus was executed as a Zealot, his brother James became leader of
the Qumran sect and then ousted the apostle Paul from the group for his
blasphemous teachings about Jesus.
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Added to this volatile environment was the impatience of many mainstream
scholars with the slow pace of publication of the scrolls. While in the early
years scroll editions had come out in a timely fashion, as the editors sensed
the growing importance of the scrolls to the scholarly community they began
writing comprehensive commentaries on the texts instead of simply publishing
the texts and photographs and thereby allowing other scholars to make their
historical and critical evaluations.
It was a situation Abegg saw from both sides in the late 1980s. He remembers
the instructions that his Professor Tov had given him as Abegg was preparing
to leave Hebrew University in Jerusalem and move to Hebrew Union University
in Cincinnati to complete his doctorate under Ben Zion Wacholder. As one
of the scroll editors, Tov had sometimes given Abegg and the other students
unpublished scroll materials to work on. "He told me directly, 'Don't show
this to your professors back in the States.' "
"That was the first of the bells that went off in my head," says Abegg. "Here
I am a master's student, and I'm going back to work with men that have gone
a whole generation before me, and I can't show them this. That seemed strange."
In the press, perceptions of a scrolls cartel were not at all dispelled when
John Strugnell, the chief editor of the scrolls, in 1991 called outside scholars
who wanted access to the unpublished manuscripts "a bunch of fleas who are
in the business of annoying us." Soon after, in a statement to a reporter
for an Israeli newspaper, he asserted that the Jewish faith was "a horrible
religion." Having undone himself, Strugnell was replaced by Tov as chief
editor. In Cincinnati, in the meantime, Tov's former student had already
begun his deed of rebellion.
As early as 1988, rumors had circulated that a concordance existed for the
unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls. In magazines such as Biblical Archaeology
Review, these rumors were flatly denied, but when Abegg's professor Wacholder
met Strugnell at a conference in Israel, he learned that the concordance
did exist, and that in the early years after the scrolls' discovery the editors
had created 3x5 cards with transcriptions of corresponding fragments of the
manuscripts. This helped them in their work and prevented them from overhandling
the scrolls and scraps themselves. Wacholder, using his connections, eventually
secured a copy of the secret concordance.