The Dead Sea Scrolls Controversy

ALLEGRO By JOHN

Nearly twenty years ago an Arab shepherd, on the trail of a lost goat from his flock near the north-western shores of the Dead Sea, stumbled upon a cave containing hidden manuscripts. They turned out to be the records of a Jewish .sect living near by, identified by most scholars with the Essenes, and known previously only through the writings of the ancient historians.

On December 16, an exhibition of some of the manuscripts from this and near-by caves sub- sequently found is to open in the British Museum and thereafter tour the country.

WHAT was once described as a 'storm over the Dead Sea' seems to have blown itself out. To the onlooker it appears as though there is scarcely a ripple to disturb the surface. The big controversies that rocked the scholarly world soon after the Scrolls were found in 1947 have apparently subsided. Have we now, after nearly 'twenty years of research, really reached such unanimity of opinion? I doubt it.

The writer is lecturer in Old Testament and Inter- testamental Studies at the University of Manchester, and the first British member of the international scrolls editing team in Jerusalem.

The first controversies concerned the date of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The suggestions ranged from mediaeval times to the period of the Maccabees in the second century ac. Most scholars now are seemingly content to follow the

4 original palaeographical and archaeological argu- ments and date them between the second or first centuries ac and AD 68, with a few of the earliest Biblical fragments perhaps going back into the third pre-Christian century. Those who, like Dr. Driver of Oxfprd, identify, the writers of the Scrolls as Zealots, place the events underlying the writings to the First Jewish Revolt, which ended with the taking of Masada in AD 73. In any case, the differences between the scholars are not nearly so marked from the point of view of chronology as they once were.

Much more puzzling to the interested observer of the Scrolls conflict has been the almost total disappearance of the war which once seemed to be brewing between the secularists and the Christians on the importance of the Scrolls for the study of Christian origins. Sparked off initially by Professor Dupont Sommer of Paris and on a more popular level by Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker, this battle of the Scrolls seemed likely to bring to the fore some of the questions which had tormented the minds of believers and unbelievers for a long time past.

What happened was that Dupont Sommer's belief that he had found in Jesus 'an astonish- ing reincarnation' of the Essene Teacher of Righteousness fell foul of one misreading of a word in one document. The Christian scholars lost no time in dismissing the 'whole thesis, and Dupont Sommer in his later writings seems reluc- tant to press the matter further. Edmund Wilson's onslaught in the magazine article and in its revised and expanded version Scrolls from the Dead Sea was a brilliant effort, but his own readily admitted non-specialist approach left him even more open to counter-attack from the religionists, smarting under his accusations that they were afraid to delve too deeply into the Scrolls for fear of what they may find harmful to their faith.

There followed a spate of popular and semi- popular works so full of arguments and counter- arguments and so uniform in their conclusion that nothing in the Scrolls could affect the faith of the believer that before long the faithful and the infidel alike subsided into mental torpor.

Now, nearly twenty years after the first dis- covery, the crucial questions raised by the Scrolls still remain unsolved and hardly even considered. It is true that a large body of the evidence still remains unpublished. Some of it lies in a safe in the Jerusalem Museum while the trustees try to 'sell' the publication rights in order to reim- burse their funds for the outlay required to rescue the manuscripts from the Bedouin. All the same, it is extraordinary that a Semitist of such renown as W. F. Albright, who, at the beginning of the Scrolls story, believed that they would 'revolutionise our approach to the beginnings of Christianity,' just recently had occasion to deplore the fact that 'there is still a partial boycott of the Dead Sea Scrolls on the part of New Testa- ment scholars' (Journal of Bible and Religion 31, April 1963).

This 'partial boycott' is probably only in small measure due to a reluctance on the part of the Christian scholar to deal with new evidence that might affect his faith. Not a little of this slow- ness to grasp the unique- opportunities offered by the Scrolls lies in the appalling ignorance of so many Christians, teachers and laymen, of the Jewish origins of their religion. The Old Testa- ment and intertestamental literature has been neglected for years in our seminaries, and the number of parsons who can preach from an Old Testament text that they have read for themselves in the original must be fast diminishing. Today it is quite normal for a theological graduate to have done no more than one year's Hebrew in his three- or four-year course at a university, and very many more will have achieved a kind of degree without ever once having opened a Hebrew grammar. Of the non-graduates among the clergy and those teaching 'religious know- ledge' in our schools, perhaps the less said the better in this regard.

It is thus hardly surprising that the Scrolls found a Christian theological world almost completely unprepared. Accustomed to fighting off the attacks of the rationalist on such minor fronts as to the 'My advice is to put it into sonic nice little 6 per cents.'

truth of stories about a man changing water into wine or walking on the sea or even dis- appearing into thin air, the apologist found that his lay inquirer had begun posing very much more difficult questions about the Jewish origins of Christianity. The Essene scrolls from Qumran had suddenly begun to fill in the sectarian back- ground of New Testament Christianity in a wonderful way. Here were ideas, even actual phrases, in their original Semitic form which clearly underlay the Greek words of the New Testament. Quite apart from the real or sup- posed parallels between the Christian leader and the Essene Teacher of Righteousness, the Scrolls were offering a climate of sectarian Judaism into which Christianity fitted to a remarkable degree. The lay Christian, as well as the uncommitted inquirer, asked with ever-increasing urgency, how far were the correspondences going to be drawn before the uniqueness of Christianity stood in peril? Small wonder that the bewildered parson seized eagerly upon the popular apologetic literature already referred to and induced the required soporific effect among his inquirers.

However, one must regret the temporary with- drawal of the lay gadfly. He probably did more to stimulate interest among the professional Chris- tian in the origins of his faith than all the goading of generations of university dons. Nevertheless, the questions then being posed still clamour for answer, even though they may not now hit the headlines. Does the story of Jesus owe anything at all to a forerunner of a century before? Can the difference between them, so emphasised by the Christian apologist, be explained otherwise than by recourse to pleading the divine nature of Jesus, or the uniqueness of his teaching that stood out so very remarkably against the stream of current religious opinion? Have the Scrolls provided any contemporary evidence to support the otherwise uncorroborated witness of the New Testament to the very existence of Jesus, let alone the historicity of the miracle stories?

A tremendous amount of profound and honest scholarship has been applied to the Scrolls and the New Testament by Jewish as well as Chris- tian specialists. We have certainly gone a long way and, for example, our understanding of the place of the Johannine literature in the develop- ment of Christian traditions can never be the same again. It stands among the earliest of the New Testament strata and stems from the common terrestial home of Essenism and Chris- tianity. Nevertheless, the central problem facing the historian remains unsolved. How is it that this strange Gospel, in its origins an expression of a fervent, even fanatical, Jewish patriotism, com- mitted to the violent overthrow of the Gentile world and the establishment of a Jewish dictator- ship in Palestine, became so transformed that it could offer a faith for the very people destined to wallow in their blood at the Last Trump? As I have said elsewhere, it was tantamount to 'selling' Zionism to President Nasser.

While it is conceivable that such a trans- mutation in this kind of Jewish sectarianism could have taken place outside the cockpit of Jewish politics and more particularly after the fall of the Temple and the temporary eclipse of the Jewish hopes, it becomes in the light of the Scrolls more and more unbelievable that such a pro-Gentile gospel could have been openly preached in Jerusalem around the time of Pontius Pilate. There is, in fact, much in the New Testament story that rings horribly untrue to the historian, and for all the platitudes of the Christian apologist the Scrolls only emphasise the unreality of the situation presented by the Gospels and Acts.

It appears, then, to me that the most profitable line of research in future Scrolls studies is to discover the means by which essentially Essene ideas and history could possibly have been woven into an entirely mythical framework of miracle stories relating to a messianic figure and his followers. Much of the material is already apparent: the New Testament chronology that puts the Messiah in Pilate's time, his birth thirty years before, the names and functions of his chief officers, their healing faculties, and even the raw material of such miracles as the Nativity and the crowd-feeding. I venture to suggest the Vital clue to the actual process of deriving the myths from certain key Old Testament passages may not lie far off recognition.

What is still so appalling, however, is that this generation can offer so few scholars of the front rank capable of dealing with this new material. An even greater tragedy, it seems to me, is that of that number even fewer are likely to be able to bring a sufficiently uninhibited mind to ques- tions which must bear so acutely on the central figure of their faith. Even among Jewish scholars there is an understandable reluctance to tread, at least publicly, on such delicate ground. Perhaps, after all, the shepherd lad's goat should not have begun his escapade for at least another generation.