Contents of this article
I. Introduction
II. Dead Sea Scrolls Background
III. Modern Day Relevance of The Dead Sea Scrolls
IV. Dead Sea Scroll's Relevance For The Future
V. Bibliography
I. Introduction
Looking backward through the history of Christianity and the history of the church, one would have a difficult time not agreeing to the fact that the church was birthed in controversy, and ever since that time has continued to be immersed in controversy and disagreement. History has shown that some of the most fundamental beliefs of Christianity have been tossed, turned and challenged over time, and still continue to be.
Jesus didn't appear to have wanted to begin a movement outside of Judaism, but he was "banished" by Judaism. Some time after his demise, the fourth chapter of Luke-Acts refers to Christ's followers as "Christians". In 452 A.D., the council of Nicaea was called to settle controversy involving the nature of Christ, the forgiveness of sin, what actually happens to the communion elements after they are ingested, and some other issues. As a result, the followers of Eusebius, one of the bishops who believed in total forgiveness of sin, or a universal forgiveness (i.e. gr. "katholikos"), were called "Catholics". In Wittenberg, Germany when Martin Luther challenges the methods by which salvation is attained, he is expelled from the church and his movement is referred to as "Lutheranism", and the Protestant Reformation is underway.
Even today, there is disagreement with the members of the Jesus seminar, who are taking a critical look at the New Testament, and what the authentic sayings of Jesus are, the Society of Biblical Literature, who are looking at ancient (i.e. first century B.C.) documents and comparing them to Septuagint and Masoretic texts, which are not as old, but are the texts used for most Bibles, and for study in many seminaries. There are also several new works that have stirred up modern theologians. Raymond Brown's Birth of the Messiah, and the more controversial Death of the Messiah have generated new dialogue about Christ's origin and passion. There is also Breaking The Code: Understanding the Book of Revelation, by Bruce M. Metzger, which examines the existence of messages contained within the text which have been previously unknown to scholars.
As we look toward the 21st century and what we feel it has to offer with it's sense of millennial "newness", I am afraid that there are some constants that will remain in this new era: doctrinal and theological controversy. I am amazed at the level of disagreement that has surrounded The Bible, and continues to surround it. My question to anyone concerned is: Do we really know who Jesus was? and How accurate is our Judeo-Christian Bible?
II. Dead Sea Scrolls Background
Sometime in the 1940's, a young shepherd in the Mediterranean stumbled on to what would become one of the greatest finds of the twentieth century. In a series of caves located in the area surrounding Dead Sea were found a series of ancient scrolls which have set the theological community on it's proverbial ear since their discovery. After their discovery, many Bible scholars weren't allowed access to the scrolls and had to depend on the word of a few chosen scholars who hoarded all of the scrolls and the information they contained. To put this issue in perspective, the scrolls were found fifty years ago, but most transcripts were not released to the whole of the scholarly community until the 1990's.
The eventual release of this stronghold of information sent as many ripples through the academic community as did the initial hoarding of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The initial wave of information resulted in many far-fetched hypotheses and pseudo-discoveries within the texts. Some scholars hypothesized that John the Baptist was an Essene, others believed that the Apostle Paul, or even Jesus was the dreaded Wicked Priest that the scrolls refer to, and another scholar rather hastily concluded that he had discovered the record of a suffering, dying and resurrecting Messiah in the scrolls, which would have predated any Biblical texts. Despite the controversy, the scrolls still have great significance for modern day Christianity.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were believed to have been collected by a radical Jewish sect, possibility the Essenes, who usually lived outside of a given city, and were isolated within their own community. The community ruins at Qumran, which is on the outskirts of Jerusalem, appears to have been one of these communities. Qumran is also very near to the Dead Sea, and the caves in which the scrolls were found are in walking distance of Qumran. The scrolls include over 800 Jewish manuscripts, with approximately 150 of them being biblical. The other 650 are a conglomeration of religious poetry and prose, apocryphal books, architectural plans for a new temple that would be comparable to the one in Jerusalem, end time prophecies that tell of a war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness, scriptural commentaries, a set of rules to govern the community, rites of purification and initiation, and directions for locating buried treasure.
Much of the early research of the Qumran site and it's relevance to the Dead Sea scrolls was initiated by a Dominican monk and biblical archaeologist by the name of P`ere Roland DeVaux, who used the scrolls to help him translate the Qumran site (i.e. what room served what purpose, who lived there, etc.) The earliest scrolls date as far back as 250 B.C., and are believed to have been hidden in the caves from the invading Roman armies, which the writers of the scrolls refer to as The Kittim. Many of the scrolls refer to a Teacher of Righteousness, who is believed to have been the religious leader of the community, and many scholars believe wrote a letter to the leader of the Temple in Jerusalem, listing the reasons why the community was divorcing itself from the city. Parts of this letter are also contained in the scrolls.
One needs to remember how old these scrolls are, and because of their age and the methods needed to unroll such ancient documents, some of them are not complete. Many fell apart at the slightest touch, others were worn through in places, the text at the top and/or bottom was worn, or missing, so there are a lot of scrolls with pieces missing. There are also lots of tiny pieces that are all that may be left of a complete scroll. These circumstances make translating them an arduous task. Another fact that's sometime overlooked by casual observers is that scrolls were also found all over that particular geographical area, and not only by the Dead Sea or near Qumran, which is where most of the scrolls were found.
III. Modern Day Relevance of The Dead Sea Scrolls
The Isaiah Scroll, which has all 66 chapters preserved in totality, was one of the first scrolls found in 1947, because of it's condition and completeness, a copy of it is displayed in Jerusalem and also in San Francisco. The significance of the Isaiah scroll is that even though it was written in approximately 100 B.C., it matches the Isaiah of the Masoretic text which was written 1100 years later. The text is named after the Massoretes, who were a body of Jewish scholars who organized or systematized the Massorah or tradition, and did not begin that task until the seventh century A.D.
As mentioned earlier, the Masoretic text is the basis of 99 percent of modern Old Testament translations. According to Peter Flint, Ph.D., of Trinity Western University, co-director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute, and a driving force in the Society of Biblical Literature,
"...the level of accuracy of other biblical texts was similar to that of the Isaiah scroll, which validates the accuracy of modern translations, and is a testament to the preservation [of the text]....used [in most places of worship and] most seminaries...".
As to the other one percent, Flint responds, "I'm happy to say....that the scrolls often sort out problems that we've known about for ages. They give us in black and white a better reading of the biblical text". An example of this one percent include an ambiguous Hebrew phrase in Psalm 22:16. The phrase has often been translated, "They have pierced my hands and feet", which is in agreement with the Septuagint (LXX), a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, and the earliest complete texts from the third century A.D. The Masoretic text however translates the same phrase, "Like a lion are my hands and feet".
Flint addresses this concern in a monograph published in July 1997 entitled, The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls, (Brill) and shows that the "pierced" reading is the preferred reading of the Hebrew Dead Sea Psalms, which dispels the notion that the phrase was a later-Christian Messianic misrendering. Another example can be found in a new text located in 4QSam-a (The Book of Samuel, found in Cave #4, near Qumram, scroll "a"), contains a paragraph at the end of I Sam. 10 that explains that:
"Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had grievously oppressing the Ruebenites and Gadites. He would gouge out the right eye of each of them and would not grant Israel a deliverer."
These words, missing from our Bibles, provide the context for Nahash's threats in chapter 11 that he will gouge out the right eyes of the Israelites. At the print date of the Christianity Today article (see endnotes), The New Revised Standard Version was the first translation to incorporate this paragraph.
In order to give an objective viewpoint of the scrolls modern day relevance, a scholar who does not share Flint's evangelical bias was also incorporated into this equation. Edmund Wilson, who has received The Gold Medal for Essays and Criticism of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, considers himself a "born shrinker of myths" and claims that he cannot accept the word of God because it involves a myth at some level. The myth Wilson claims, involves the fact that any deity worshipped by humanity must resemble humanity, or as Wilson states, "wear an anthropomorphic face".
To Wilson then, even if the God we (Christians) serve exists, we have distorted the true essence of the deity by re-creating that deity in our image. Also, our knowledge of the actual words and deeds of Christ are at best, uncertain and "must be conditioned by the circumstances of their historical time and place and by those persons who chronicled them".
Wilson goes on to state his conclusion that the role and expectancy of a Jewish Messiah had already been instilled in Jewish theological thought before Christ, and the Dead Sea Scrolls serve as a historical record of that thinking as early as the first century B.C.:
"...Jesus may well have been assigned [to that role] and [may have] allowed himself to be assigned to it....a Deity, who sees our lives from a higher level--that is, ....[and comes] down to ours, [and]....at moments....[raises us]....to a higher level to be able to forgive ourselves".
In Wilson's opinion then, the Dead Sea Scrolls serve as a sociological and archaeological tool to help scholars sift through the Christian tradition and decipher myth from truth and help scholars operate from a more objective base when in search of the historic Jesus. There is more discussion between members of the Jesus Seminar and those of the Society of Biblical Literature which can be located in the Christianity Today article.
IV. Dead Sea Scroll's Relevance For The Future
So far, most of the information in this work has the opinions and findings of other noted scholars. Although I am not a scholar of their caliber, I am a theology student as well as a minister, and have an opinion about the relevance of the scrolls to the future of Christianity, given the information that I have been exposed to. I must give recognition to one of my instructors, Dr. Gary D. Collier, who is responsible for exposing me to the issues surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as the scrolls themselves. Much of my opinion and learning is a result of mentally processing tapes and notes of his lectures.
One of the issues that still seems to be seated in controversy is the issue of inspiration versus canonization. With the influx of so much new information in recent years about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the books they contained, and the similarity of some of the noncanonical texts to those which are in the Christian canon, our preconceived notion that only canonized texts are inspired writings, needs to be re-examined. Not only do we need to re-examine that notion, but we also need to rethink some common Sunday School statements such as:
1. God only spoke to humanity during the Old Testament, took a 400 year break.
2. God didn't speak again until the New Testament period, and then on some sort of extended hiatus.
3. Humanity is presently either waiting with baited breath to hear from God again 4. Or everything that God wanted to say has already been said and therefore, God does not and will speak again.
Other religions have allowed their canon to remain open, while Christians have
closed theirs. I believe that the Church Fathers meant well, but with this new information in our grasp, as well as some Pseudapygryphal/Apocryphal texts, I think that this decision should be re-examined. One example that immediately comes to mind involves the Thanksgiving Hymns (1QH), in which one passage says:
"...By thy mercies and by Thy great goodness,
Thou hast strengthened the spirit of man
in the face if the scourge,
and hast purified [the erring spirit]
of a multitude of sins,
that it may declare Thy marvels
in the presence of all thy creatures...".
When I read that passage, I can't tell immediately whether or not it's found in our Bible, and if I were told that was, I wouldn't be surprised. It reads and flows much like the 65th Psalm which is part of our Christian canon:
"...Praise is due to you,
O God, in Zion,
and to you shall vows be performed,
O you who answer prayer!
To you all flesh shall come.
When deeds of iniquity overwhelm us,
you forgive our transgressions...".
Poetically, both Psalms are structured similarly, both give the same sense of praise, and thanksgiving when being read, and the form of the sentences in both texts depends on key words and phrases. After reading both, my question is which text isn't inspired? One is obviously canonized and one isn't, but does the issue of canonization remove the possibility of the writing being inspired? All one has to do is read one of these Psalms from the Dead Sea scrolls without realizing it's origin and I believe most people would assume that they are reading canonized biblical text.
Somehow the Christian community has to come to a "meeting of the minds" with inspired texts outside of our canon. Not only do some of these texts validate the books of our biblical canon, they also show that God never stopped communicating with humanity. There is a proliferation of inspired writing that the Christian canon has simply ignored. By "ignoring" these texts as inspired writings, I believe that we are only limiting ourselves, thereby also cheating ourselves of a wealth of history in which humanity communicated with God......and God spoke back. I don't know about you, but that has resounding theological implications about how we perceive how and when God speaks to us.
V. Bibliography
John M. Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the origins of Christianity, New York: Criterion Books, 1956.
Millar Burrows, More Light On The Dead Sea Scrolls; New Scrolls and New Interpretations (with translations of important recent discoveries), New York: The Viking Press, 1958.
Wayne A. Meeks et al., The Harper Collins Study Bible, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993.
Kevin Miller, "The War of the Scrolls [reliability of the Bible seen through study of the Dead Sea Scrolls (cover story)]", Christianity Today, vol. 41, Oct 6, 1997.
William C. Placher, A History of Christian Theology: an introduction, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1983.
Geza Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls In English, New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
Edmund Wilson, The Dead Sea Scrolls, New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.