Dead Sea Jewels

On a spring day in 1947, among the barren Judean foothills that rise above the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, a goat in search of greener pasture precipitated the most significant religious discovery in recent history. As a Bedouin shepherd pursued the animal, he stumbled on a hidden cave. For Biblical scholars, the cave contained green pastures indeed: the first of the now famous Dead Sea Scrolls.

The shepherds, who had hoped for treasure, were disappointed to find eight crumbling manuscripts wrapped in linen and stored in large jars. In Jerusalem, they eventually found two buyers: the Hebrew University and Metropolitan Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel of the Syrian Jacobite Church.

Scholars identified among the manuscripts a full text of Isaiah, a commentary on the Book of Habakkuk, a collection of hymns, a scroll tentatively thought to be the Book of Lamech, a heretofore unknown work called the War of the Children of Light Against the Children of Darkness. The manuscripts apparently dated back to the second or third century B.C. and antedated the oldest existing Hebrew Biblical manuscript (Codex Babylonicus Petropolitanus, A.D. 916) by more than a thousand years.

Tests of Authenticity. As soon as a respite in Arab-Israeli war permitted, a French Dominican priest, Pee Roland de Vaux of the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique null in old Jerusalem, and English-born G. Lankester Harding, director of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, visited the cave, which was in Jordan in an area called Khirbet Qumran (stone ruin). They found hundreds of additional manuscript fragments and pieces of broken pottery, later discovered more than 40 previously unknown caves, many containing ancient manuscripts in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. Altogether, the manuscripts included parts of almost every book in the Old Testament, apocryphal works and literature of various Jewish sects, dating to the first and second centuries B.C.

Partly because it had been thought that such manuscripts could not survive that long, a controversy soon arose about their authenticity. "The Bedouin story smells," huffed a professor of rabbinical literature. Others insisted that the manuscripts were forgeries. One scholar, disputing the manuscripts' antiquity, contemptuously referred to them as a "garbage collection." But the antiquity of the scrolls was soon proved conclusively by paleographical and archaeological evidence and by carbon-14 and other tests.

Manual of Discipline. The age of the scrolls fixed, the scholars turned to their origin. Archaeologists de Vaux and Harding had already searched the ruins from which Khirbet Qumran took its name, concluded from the evidence they found that it had been the habitation of an ancient Jewish sect called the Essenes, one of the three major religious bodies within ancient Judaism (the others: the Pharisees and Sadducees). Their conclusions: 1) the manuscripts found near Khirbet Qumran were once part of an Essene library; 2) the sectarian documents, i.e., The War of the Children of Light and a discipline manual, were Essene writings.

The Essenes, sometimes called the Sect of the Covenant, were reported to have numbered 4,000 and lived ascetic lives in communities that were both hierarchical and egalitarian. They kept a monastic rule of poverty, chastity and obedience. Their rules, as set down in their unearthed Manual of Discipline, are strikingly similar to many practices of Christian monasticism. As Pee de Vaux reconstructed it, the Essenes must have lived at Khirbet Qumran, except for a few years, from about 100 B.C. or a little before, to A.D. 66-70. During the open Jewish revolt against the Romans, they presciently hid their library in nearby caves before the Romans sacked their monastery.

In addition to the new light they shed upon the Essenes, the Biblical manuscripts have given scholars priceless opportunities to compare them with the only two translations extant of the Old Testament: the Greek Septuagint of the third and second centuries B.C. and the medieval Hebrew text. Scholars have been unable to agree on which text the new documents follow most closely, hut to date, no important variations from accepted Bible texts have been revealed.

Figure of Mystery. Most startling disclosure of the Essene documents so far published is that the sect possessed, years before Christ, a terminology and practice that have always been considered uniquely Christian. The Essenes practiced baptism and shared a liturgical repast of bread and wine presided over by a priest. They believed in redemption and in the immortality of the soul. Their most important leader was a mysterious figure called the Teacher of Righteousness, a Messianic prophet-priest blessed with divine revelation, persecuted and perhaps eventually martyred.

Earthly life was to the Essenes a war between the powers of light and darkness. In the Manual of Discipline appear the lines:

And He assigned for man two Spirits

By which to walk until the season of His Visitation:

They are the [two] Spirits of truth and perversion.

In a spring of light is the source of Truth,

And in a fountain of darkness is the generation of Perverseness.

Many phrases, symbols and precepts similar to those in Essene literature are used in the New Testament, particularly in the Gospel of John and the Pauline Epistles. John the Baptist's use of baptism has led some scholars to believe that he was either an Essene or strongly influenced by the sect. The scrolls have also given fresh impetus to the theory that Jesus may have been a student of Essene thought. It is notable that the New Testament never once mentions the Essenes, though it casts frequent aspersions on the two other leading sects, the Sadducees and the Pharisees.

Matter of Opinion. There are two camps among Biblical scholars on the subject of how the facts are to be interpreted. U.S. laymen now have a chance to look at both sides: Professor Frank M. Cross Jr. of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, who is helping restore the scrolls, last week concluded a series of four articles in the Christian Century. And this week Macmillan published The Jewish Sect of Qumran and the Essenes ($2.50), by Professor Andre Dupont-Sommer of the Sorbonne and the University of Paris, who has studied photos of many of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The two scholars are at loggerheads over the extent to which the Essene documents affect traditional Christianity. Says Dupont-Sommer, a former Roman Catholic priest: "All the problems relative to primitive Christianity henceforth find themselves placed in a new light, which forces us to reconsider them completely." Christ, he feels, is a prototype, "in many respects an astonishing reincarnation" of the Essene Teacher of Righteousness. This implies that Jesus might have found in Essene thinking a role readymade for him. But Dupont-Sommer emphasizes that

"Christianity is no copy or replica of Essenism ... It has no direct affiliations."

Uniqueness of Christ. Dr. Cross finds many of Dupont-Sommer's views "flamboyant," his theses "methodologically unsound," i.e., Cross thinks the French scholar may have been misled by later Christian interpolations in some Essene documents. Moreover, Presbyterian Cross believes that Dupont-Sommer often bases his arguments on mere word play. There is no proof in the scrolls, says Cross, that the Teacher of Righteousness was considered a Messiah or that he was martyred. Cross concedes the similarity between the teachings of the Essenes and early Christianity, but holds that this in no way invalidates Christian teaching or puts to question the role of Christ.

"The New Testament and Essene writers," he says, "draw on common resources of language, common theological themes and concepts, and share common religious institutions . . . For God chooses to give meaning to human history, not suspend it. This means he uses its continuities, its language, its events, its institutions in speaking to men and in building his church . . . No Christian need stand in dread of these texts ..."

Meanwhile, in Palestine, a few miles from where Christianity was born, Dominican de Vaux, Archaeologist Harding and an international group of scientists and scholars are busy unraveling the crumbling scrolls, piecing together the tiny fragments, correlating texts. Current reports from Jerusalem tell of an important discovery that is still top secret, pending full evaluation. The work of the next ten to 50 years may open unsuspected possibilities for modern man, in the words of Dr. Cross, to "become 'contemporaries of Christ' in historical understanding and, with God's grace, also in the knowledge of faith."

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