The Times Literary Supplement 4 December 1992 (No. 4679)------------------------------------------
Eleven months have elapsed since I outlined in the TLS (December 20, 1991) the story and significance of the discovery and subsequent studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls. That chronicle included the final phases of the "revolution" launched on September 22, 1991, by Dr William A Moffett, Director of the Huntingdon Library near Los Angeles, which reached a triumphant conclusion on October 27 last year, when, bowing to pressure, the Israel Antiquities Authority lifted the embargo on consultation of the "unpublished manuscripts". "After forty lean years", I wrote, "students can now freely examine the sources", and I invited them to avail themselves fully of the photographic archive of the Scrolls owned by the Oxford Centre for Post-graduate Hebrew Studies. Once the green light was given, progress began in earnest. In addition to the access given to photographic reproductions in four different institutions, a two-volume Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls by R. E. Eisenman and J. M. Robinson was also promptly published by the Biblical Archaeology Society in Washington, DC, in November 1991. Furthermore, a microfilm version of all the Scrolls was made obtainable at the Huntingdon Library; and a microfiche edition, including a most serviceable inventory, is due to appear at any minute now in The Netherlands. Professor Emanuel Tov, of the Hebrew University, responsible for organizing successor volumes to the Oxford University Press's Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, has increased the team working on the project by tenfold, and in the Spring 1992 issue of the Journal of Jewish Studies he released for the first time a complete list of the unpublished documents from Caves 4 and 11, together with the names of the prospective editors. A substantial number of preliminary publications have appeared during the past few months, including two volumes of deciphered texts, simply transcribed, without translation or commentary, by B. Z. Wacholder and M. G. Abegg, of Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati. The latter venture began as a computer reconstruction of the material from a privately issued concordance or word-list, subsequently checked against the photographs. The computer has also been used for image-enhancing to enable students to read obscure fragments. Such facilities are available, to all competent scholars, at the Oxford Centre, and research progress is regularly reported at fortnightly seminars organized jointly by the Centre's Forum for Qumran Research and the University of Oxford. It is against this background of enthusiastic, steady and thorough scholarly inquiry that the claims and achievements of The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered by Robert H. Eisenman and Michael Wise are to be measured. This book, which was planned to reveal for the first time fragments from fifty previously unpublished Scrolls – a small fraction of the total, selected on the basis of subjective criteria – has only partially succeeded, in that about half of what was meant to be a massive increase of fresh information has been anticipated by the stream of preliminary publications I have just outlined. Readers are advised to check against those publications some of the translations offered by Eisenman and Wise, and may find that the latter can to varying degrees be improved. Many such errors are no doubt attributable to carelessness, induced by haste, but some may have serious consequences. On the whole, however, the transliteration and preliminary translation of these documents, expeditiously produced, are welcome and may be commended for critical use by scholars. In fairness, this has had to be stated to ensure that my fundamental disagreement, shared by most Qumran experts, with the historical theory imposed on the texts by Eisenman and Wise is not understood as a dismissal of the new material itself as meaningless trivia. This theory, namely that the Dead Sea Scrolls represent the literature of the one Messianic movement which, in the mid-first century AD, included also the Jewish-Christian Church, headed by James, the brother of Jesus, antedates by years the present book and its unpublished or semi-published manuscript fragments; it originated in two earlier monographs by Professor Eisenman. The description of the ancestors and original members of the Judaeo-Christian Church as bellicose, vindictive and filled with hatred for foreigners, which is endlessly repeated in The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, echoes the thesis of those booklets. Fringe writers have again and again tried to foist a Christian identity on the Dead Sea sect. Already in the 1950s, the late Jacob Teicher, of Cambridge, imagined that he had discovered in Jesus and Paul the persons disguised in the Scrolls as the Teacher of Righteousness and the Wicked Priest. The Scrolls maverick, John Allegro, committed figurative professional suicide by linking, on the basis of Qumran literature and fanciful philology, the Jesus cult to a hallucinogenic fungus in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970). More recently, Barbara Thiering has come up with the outlandish idea of a divorced and remarried Jesus, father of four, playing the role of the Wicked Priest against John the Baptist's Teacher of Righteousness. Eisenman and Wise have had a fresh crack at the mystery and decided, for reasons known only to them, that Jesus is unimportant, and that the Teacher's part belongs to his brother James. Not unexpectedly, Paul is cast as the villain of the piece. Owing to a combination of reasons emerging from both the Scrolls and the New Testament, the odds are high that the latest interpretation will share the fate of its predecessors. As far as one can fathom, the Eisenman-Wise thesis implies (1) that all the manuscripts discovered in the Qumran caves form a single corpus and can be used indiscriminately; (2) that they testify to the ideas of "the Messianic Movement" in Palestine; and (3) that one of the final forms of this "Zealot" campaign is identical with the Jewish-Christian Church led by James, who was executed by stoning in AD 62. None of these three presuppositions can withstand scrutiny. (1) While it is true that, in former years, simple-minded students occasionally suggested that the whole Dead Sea library was the work of the Qumran (= Essene) sect – excepting, of course, the Bible, although even the scriptural manuscripts were thought to have been copies on the spot – the prevalent opinion today is that many of the "non sectarian" writings originated outside the community, and that even some of the actual copies found in the caves were "imported" to Qumran. These reflect ideas of bodies other than the local congregation, and those ideas may not always have been shared by all the members of the (Essene) sect. In short, apart from the sectarian texts, easily recognizable by their language, ideology and quite often by their spelling, a number of the documents preserved may turn out to be inappropriate for the reconstruction of the specific doctrines and aspirations of the Qumran group. (2) Not only is it unjustifiable to treat the literature from the caves as that of "the Palestinian Messianic Movement", but the very idea of such a single entity, incorporating Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, Judaeo-Christians, etc, runs counter to the fundamental conviction of contemporary historical research, which considers that Jewish Palestine, prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, was not a monolithic, but a "multi-party" religious system, in which each individual section possessed its own distinctive doctrines, beliefs and practices. The assumption by Eisenman and Wise of a united Jewry, "the Messianic Movement", would put back the clock of historiography by a century. Besides, how "Messianic" are the Scrolls? An examination of the frequency of the use of the term "Messiah" would lead to the discovery that the word occurs on only about two dozen occasions in the manuscripts, and even when the synonyms of "Messiah" are also taken into account, the number of the compositions in which they appear is still remarkably limited. Messianism is more prominent in the New Testament than in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it may be wondered, have Eisenman and Wise unconsciously transferred the ideology of the latter to the former? (3) An identification of Judaeo-Christianity with the community of Qumran must strike any objective student of both literatures as preposterous. This does not, of course, mean that no correspondence between the two exists. It does. But it appears on a superficial level, in the employment of religious language, ideas and biblical proof-texts shared among them and all the other branches of first-century Judaism. More precisely, in some organizational, administrative and cultic respects it is probable that the nascent Jewish-Christian Church modelled itself on Essenism (or whatever name is to be used for the Dead Sea sect). Such views represent common knowledge among scholars investigating the relationship between the Qumran community and Christianity, but are a far cry from the brain-child of Eisenman and Wise. The claim, moreover, that early Jewish Christians, instead of being meek peace-makers and lovers of their enemies, were, according to the Scrolls, animated by vindictiveness, hatred and xenophobia, is completely misconceived. Such an attitude was foreign to them, as it was also to the members of the Qumran community, who were exhorted to practise the virtues of humility, poverty and loving-kindness. As anyone familiar with late Second-Temple Jewish literature knows, warlike imagery is part of the apocalyptic style, but it does not necessarily entail violent political action, any more than the bloody metaphors in the description of the rider on the white horse (Revelation 19) would suggest that the early Church conceived of the returning Messiah as a cruel war-lord. Finally, any presumed hint in the Scrolls concerning James and his adherents would postulate a mid-first-century AD date for, not the copies, but the actual composition of all the Qumran writings containing historical allusions. This flatly contradicts the common opinion of Qumran scholars, including those from Israel who are unlikely to be motivated by Christian apologetical considerations. For all of them, most of the writings belong to the second or first century BC. Their argument relies on the combined evidence of archaeology, palaeography, literary analysis and radio-carbon dating. The last method deserves special attention. Professor Eisenman has the merit of having successfully lobbied the Israel Antiquities Authority for a Carbon 14 testing of Scrolls by an independent laboratory. In 1990, one of the leading establishments, the Institut fur Mittelenergiephysik at Zurich, performed the tests on fourteen manuscripts from the Judaean Desert, some dated, some undated, including eight Dead Sea Scrolls. The results, which I was privileged to release to the press on June 24, 1991, substantially confirmed the palaeographical datings. Six Qumran texts were definately, and the other two possibly, pre-Christian, and only one of them, the Hymns Scroll, known to be a late copy in any case, could derive from the period of the Jerusalem Church. These data do not seem to have met with Eisenman's approval. In The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, we read: Eisenman and [Dr P. R.] Davis [of Sheffield University] first proposed the application of this technique [Accelerated Mass Spectroscopy] in the 1989 letter to the Israel Department of Antiquities .... But the process is still in its infancy, subject to multiple variables, and too uncertain to be applied with precision to the kind of materials we have before us. No further comment is required. The Eisenman-Wise theory is unproven, and in my opinion unprovable. It does not arise from, but is forced on, the evidence. The only matter their book has demonstrated without a shadow of doubt is that the conspiracy theory, on the concealment of "explosive" texts by the Vatican-led original editorial team, according to the loudly trumpeted thesis of The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, is a total figment of those authors’ imagination. If the fifty documents included in the Eisenman-Wise volume are the most revolutionary among the unpublished material, I for one find them, as the by now familiar saying goes, about as explosive as a wet mop. To end on a more positive note, three of the documents may, and two definitely do, provide new information. 4Q521, "The Messiah of Heaven and Earth", reveals for the first time in the manuscripts a clear allusion to resurrection. Since, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, the Essenes rejected belief in the revival of dead bodies, the fragment in question would not fit in with the Essene hypothesis. On the other hand, 4Q521 includes no trace of sectarian thought, and may be identified as a specimen of pre-Qumran apocryphal poetry. The second text (4Q477) is definitely sectarian; it is a very fragmentary relic of a disciplinary record, akin to one of the large compositions known as the Damascus Document. The Scrolls customarily refer to individuals by code-names (such as the Teacher of Righteousness, the Wicked Priest, the Last Priests of Jerusalem). Here, however, for the first time, we encounter genuine names, those of individuals caught out in some breach of the rules and reprimanded. The first was called Yohanan ben ..., the second Hananiah Nitos, and the third another Hananiah son of Sim[on?]. These three frail members of the ascetic Qumran community show that we are dealing with real human beings of flesh and blood. The third document, a religious poem (4Q448), is said to undermine the majority view that the opponents of the Qumran sect were the Maccabean and Hasmonean priestly rulers of Israel in the second and first centuries BC. According to Eisenman and Wise, this fragment reveals, on the contrary, that King Jonathan, or Alexander Jannaeus (103-76 BC) was honoured with a "paean". If their decipherment is accepted, the text reads: "A sacred poem for King Jonathan and all the Congregation of Your people Israel, who are [spread] in every direction under Heaven, may they all be well, Perfect before You, and a Commonwealth in Your Name." Should this be true, a question-mark might be placed after the Maccabean theory, but only if the text were judged to be sectarian. There is, however, not the slightest terminological evidence that this is so. Still, if it were so, it would create a problem. Nevertheless, careful examination of a computer-enhanced photograph demonstrates that some of the Eisenman-Wise readings are wrong, and one, previously suggested by three Israeli scholars, appears to me doubtful. If my decipherment is correct, not only the term "paean", but also even the name Jonathan disappear, and the text turns out to be a new hymn, similar to the Zion Psalms in the Bible and the Apostrophe to Zion in the Psalms Scroll from Qumran Cave 11. So to conclude this review on a happier note, let us use it to praise Jerusalem:
------------------------------------------ Geza Vermes is Director of the Oxford Forum for Qumran Research and Emeritus Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford. |