The Dead Sea Scrolls are going digital- and why we should care
Sep 2nd, 2008 | By Chris Ray | Category: FeatureTaken at face value, virtually the entire Gospel account of the life of Jesus reads like a deeply disturbed and unbelievable fantasy. An itinerant Rabbi wanders a Roman backwater spouting a bizarre, remarkably un-Jewish eschatology, he offers a litany of incomprehensible parables as substitutes for real teachings, and cooks up completely new interpretations of the Prophets for any who will listen. He sprinkles his vision of the world’s fiery demise, a notion that has no parallel anywhere in Jewish prophecy, with cherry-picked snippets of familiar Jewish scripture in an attempt to substantiate his wild-eyed sermons and harsh condemnations of local authorities and foundational Jewish religious traditions. He dwells in a nightmarish psychosis where demons spread madness and infirmity across the land, spur his enemies against him, and war endlessly with the coming Kingdom of God; despite being mentioned only twice in all of pre-Christian canonical Jewish scripture, demonic invaders are the cornerstone of his moral cosmology. Meanwhile, he is followed by a band of twelve disorganized, unconfident, illiterate peasants who are so dissatisfied with their themselves that they are willing to abandon their livelihoods and their families often at the beckoning of a single sentence to travel with a virtually unknown exorcist on his journey to warn all Israel about their collective impending doom, and the terrestrial holy paradise to follow that is less than a generation away.
At the end of it, this cultish streetcorner pencil-peddler, this hapless and much-despised gadfly declares himself king of all Israel, is deserted by the courts who probably viewed him as but a novelty until Rome grew weary of his quaint nationalism, and is murdered on a tree before the eyes of his own family. The executioner, a cynical, barbaric tyrant by the name of Pontius Pilate, is presented by later chroniclers as a weak-kneed incompetent who is almost dissuaded from his legal duties by his wife’s fever dream, and his flagging cult is revived only when his followers append a confusing and purely theological resurrection narrative (a staple of Greek mythology that is virtually unheard of in Jewish scripture) to his untimely, undignified demise.
This story is historical gobbledygook. It is riddled with anachronisms, theological meddling, latter-day Gospel appellations to the historical record, and general myth-making of every stripe. How are we to make sense of this story, which is the only documentation that exists of the beginning of the world’s most successful religious tradition? Who is this Jesus? Where does he come from? How could such a person’s ideas find any traction in Israel, a waning society of squabbling political parties whose corrupt elders openly collaborate with the Roman occupiers and whose economy is so upended that five thousand would gather at the promise of a single bucketful of fish? For centuries, we appeared doomed to swallow the whole, improbable story on the basis of the most dreaded word in the secular skeptic’s vocabulary: faith.
But nearly two thousand years after the deserts of Judah gave us the question, they gave us the answer. Starting in 1947, a network of caves near the bleaching rubble of an old Jewish installation at Kirbet Qumran has yielded to us a priceless treasure. A number of documents belonging to an enigmatic sect of aesthetes called the Essenes were revealed to scholars and archaeologists, and the story they tell is remarkable.
According to the thousands of recovered pages of what have come to be called the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Essenes were a secretive cult of world-rejecting Jews who broadly tarred all non-Essene Jews as “Convenant-Breakers” and whose scribal obsessions included the architecture of the Jewish Temple, preserving the Jewish canon, and augmenting it with elaborate tails of a cosmic, light-versus-dark struggle that will one day consume all the world. One of their most interesting documents tells of an anonymous “Teacher of Righteousness“, a deeply pious elder locked in endless struggle with a “Wicked Priest” who reinterprets the Prophets and speaks in riddles.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, which are about as fragile as one would expect 2,300-year-old parchment paper to be, are finally being preserved digitally. No longer will a provincial tribe of scholars horde them to themselves; now we can all see them for ourselves in their original form. We don’t have to buy expensive translations of them or rely on this or that redaction edition: we can read them for ourselves.
Hopefully, the parallels between our itinerant apocalypticist and the theology of the Essenes is clear. The in-group/out-group politics, the fierce condemnation of contemporary political authority, the frequent calls to utterly abandon all material possessions, the demons, the Prophet exegesis, the impending apocalypse, it’s all there. But, why should we care?
Given that one of the chief motives of the modern secular movement is a rational investigation of history, we must realize that the Dead Sea Scrolls’ value to the investigation of Christianity is incalculable. Rather than being awed (even persuaded) by the staggering growth of what started as the “Jesus cult,” we now instead know that this was a perfectly normal theological mutation of a highly similar group of religious fanatics whose religious beliefs needed only a little fire and brimstone to kick-start a global enterprise. Instead of dismissing Jesus as mere madman, we see that instead his teachings were based on a perfectly rational interpretation of religious ideas that far predated Christianity, and in a way that maybe prove even more impenetrable than the Christian-pagan comparisons made by Earl Doherty and Robert M. Price.
We can learn so much about the character of the disciples who, at first blush, look simply nuts. Fictional or not, we could never understand how anyone could even plausibly mistake their behavior for realistic until we understand that world-rejection may have bordered on the commonplace in ancient Israel. Jesus himself is revealed as the mouthpiece of a far vaster underground countercultural movement; rather than let him be buried in the nonsense about virgin births and wandering stars cooked up by Hellenized followers decades after the fact, we see that he would have made perfect sense in the vocabulary of his contemporaries.
Most importantly to our inquiry, we understand that he was not by any stretch the first of his kind. Similarities to the Apollonius or Mithra cult no longer need to be stretched since we have nearly a perfect match between the Gospel Jesus and the Teacher of Righteousness. Christianity is revealed not as God’s complete overthrow of history, but rather as a mere sect of a sect, merely a new strain of a mutant, dissenting form of Judaism.
The Dead Sea Scrolls will be online soon in their original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. And we, as secular inquirers whose thirst for understanding of religion vastly outmatches that of most of the religious themselves, have no greater prize. Once endangered by Middle Eastern strife, exposure to air, and the slow rotting of time, they are now immortalized in a free, open form for everyone. The Scrolls may be safe, but their secrets will never be safe again. And that is a victory for free inquiry.
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Well said!
The publication of the Scrolls is indeed a great gift to secular historians. It will also allow us to (should it really be necessary) further dispute the claims of gentlemen Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln who often refer to information in the scrolls that they have had special (of course) access to.
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Great posting! I especially liked your summarization of the story of Jesus. Also very interested in learning a bit more about this Wicked Priest vs Teacher of Righteousness dichotomy.
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[...] of my last few articles have been either essentially academic statements on religion or politics, or they have been current events. But I, like most college students, do (somehow) grow [...]
Well, what a diatribe of incoherency. Let me first state that your stunted treatise is an exhuberant and vehement expulsion of verbosity that displays amply (when read by someone who has obviously studied the bible(s) you have so rudimentarily ignored) a lack of historical familiarity with the Jewish Scripture and a philisophical impetus motivated purely by YOUR “study” of religion(s) rather than an honest search for the reality of a person who has, purportedly, identified himself as God.
Philosophy is an idea based on hypothesis. Tthe Hebrew and Christian statements of their religions through their scriptures identify God’s requirement for personal relationship with One (Him) whom you cannot see. They do not argue conduct nor present it as the means to an end regarding relationship with God except from the standpoint of the deity. If you believe in, and have a relationship with the God of the Jewish bible and the Christian bible, then your conduct will be dictated by that relationship, not by a litany of the Do’s and Don’ts that the people demanded of their God in the first place. It wasn’t His idea to give them the law. They were arrogant enough to think they could obey whatever He dictated in the way of performance. There are still fools who believe that.
Frankly, I am suspicious that you are a descendant of that lineage. It’s the relationship that changes a person, not the legalities of conduct. If your motive is to obey to keep from being damaged, then you admit if there were no penalty, you’d pursue your own selfish ends to the detriment of everyone else around you.
By the way, the only way you will ever know if their is a real God, is by asking that God to reveal himself to you. When asked sincerely to do so, so that you may accept him as your God, He quite readily “proves” himself to whomever calls upon him. When you arrogantly demand the proof of his existance to confirm your theories or avoid “the consequences”, you will most assuredly hear the undeniable and reverberating sound of silence…until later.
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Chris Ray Reply:
September 8th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
“Well, what a diatribe of incoherency. “
What a sentence of incoherency!
“Let me first state that your stunted treatise is an exhuberant and vehement expulsion of verbosity that displays amply (when read by someone who has obviously studied the bible(s) you have so rudimentarily ignored) a lack of historical familiarity with the Jewish Scripture and a philisophical impetus motivated purely by YOUR “study” of religion(s) rather than an honest search for the reality of a person who has, purportedly, identified himself as God.”
Your ability to substantiate a claim with evidence is rivaled only by your ability to substantiate a claim with typos!
“By the way, the only way you will ever know if their is a real God, is by asking that God to reveal himself to you.”
So in order to believe in God, you first have to talk to God, thereby implying that you already believe that he exists, and then you believe that he exists? Airtight!
“When you arrogantly demand the proof of his existance to confirm your theories or avoid “the consequences”,”
Where in this article have I done any such thing?
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It’s amazing you know before they’re published what sort of revelation they’ll make.
That said, I’ve seen the Dead Sea Scrolls in person, and they are compatible with modern Christianity, with no bombshells that will turn the world on end. Unless you take the fact that Goliath was only 6′6″ instead of 9′ tall to be earth-shattering.
Also, not all of them are fragile as you think. One was made out of hammered bronze. =)
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Chris Ray Reply:
September 10th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
I know what they say because they have already been published, several times. There is a good edition of them from Penguin books in your local bookstore right now. If you had actually read the article, which mentions this fact, you would have noticed that. Also, had you read the article, you would have never gone under the impression that I think that the Dead Sea Scrolls are the death of Christianity. I do not think that any literate person could ever get anything even plausibly mistakable for this impression from the content of my article. You have, though, and that makes me wonder.
The point that I was making, as I said in the article itself (you really should give it a second look-over) is that the fact that they will soon be available for the entire world to see means that all scholars will now have free access to translatable close-ups of the originals. This can only be a good thing from the perspective of honest historians who want to understand the true religious context of Christianity.
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[...] place on a fishstick. Mainstream Christian belief is obsessed with the death and zombification of a wandering Palestinian schizoaffective exorcist, but has no place for calls to impoverish yourself in order to put you near something that, totally [...]
[...] place on a fishstick. Mainstream Christian belief is obsessed with the death and zombification of a wandering Palestinian schizoaffective exorcist, but has no place for calls to impoverish yourself in order to put you near something that, totally [...]