Crucifixion Before Christ

The manuscripts known as the "Dead Sea Scrolls," found almost nine years ago by a shepherd in a Jordan cave (TIME, Sept. 5, 1955), have raised some haunting questions. Is there any relation between the first Christians and a sect of Jews who founded a religious community at Qumran in Jordan a hundred years before Christ? Is there any relation between Jesus Christ and the Qumran community's "Teacher of Righteousness"? These questions constitute the great cliff hanger of contemporary Christian studies. Last week fresh hints came from John Allegro, a lecturer in Semitic Philology at England's University of Manchester, one of a team of scholars who have been working on the crumbling documents at Jerusalem.

The Qumran settlement, he said, was founded by a group of "religious extremists," the Essenes. They probably fled into the desert from Jerusalem's evil priest-king, Alexander Jannaeus, who ruled from 103 to 76 B.C. The unpopular Jannaeus was once pelted with fruit on the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkoth). According to Professor Allegro, this was the man who descended on Qumran and arrested its leader, the mysterious "Teacher of Righteousness," whom he turned over to his mercenaries to be crucified.

"Already, in Jerusalem, this Jewish tyrant had displayed his bestiality by inflicting the same awful death on eight hundred rebels," says Professor Allegro. "A Qumran manuscript speaks in shocked tones of the enormity of this crime . . .

"When the Jewish king had left [the community] took down the broken body of their Master to stand guard over it until Judgment Day. For they believed that the terrible events of their time were surely heralding the visitation of God Himself, when the Kingdom of Heaven [would] come in ... They believed their Master would rise again and lead his faithful flock (the people of the new testament, as they called themselves) to a new and purified Jerusalem."

The Qumran community looked for the coming of two Messiahs--their own Teacher and a Messiah from the line of David. "At one time it was all so clear, but now everything seems to be in the melting pot. What is clear is that there was a well-defined Essenic pattern into which Jesus of Nazareth fits. What theologians make of that is really outside my province. I just give my findings."

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