What they found in the caves

...Yet even if this text did refer to a messiah, it would simply fit in with other Qumran writings that mention the expectation of "a prophet and the messiahs of Aaron and Israel," a well-known tenet of Qumran eschatology...

...But let's go back to the beginning...

...They are so tiny and contain so few letters that they could be fragments of almost anything...

...But now this title has turned up in a striking form in a first-century B.C...

...Isaiah scroll A from Cave 1 preserves all sixty-six chapters, save for a few words lost in some columns, and is dated to 100 B.C...

...Because the text is broken, the person of whom the title is used is unknown: "[X] shall be great upon the earth, [O King...

...They attest to the fidelity with which scribes copied the biblical text over the centuries...

...Then began the giant jigsaw puzzle...

...165 B.C...

...68)—were being withheld from the public by members of the international team of scholars who were sitting on texts entrusted to them for publication thirty years earlier...

...In short, while you don't expect much from tabloids like the Sun, it's remarkable to find such dubious hypotheses retailed by the responsible press...

...They were preserving their own turf...

...Aramaic fragment (4Q246...

...Though that decision caused a storm of protest—from the scholars to whom the materials had been entrusted and from the Israel Antiquities Authority— nothing could be done about it...

...By June 1960, 511 4Q texts had been identified...

...But the texts have also brought to light unsuspected recensions of some biblical books...

...In the mid-1980s the cards were photographed and bound into several volumes...

...A copy of it came to Hebrew Union College, where Wacholder and Abegg used it to reconstruct the texts of as-yet-unpublished 4Q documents...

...and a.d...

...One might have thought that with this the brouhaha would have died, but no...

...Thus the majority of those documents became available to anyone who could read and decipher them...

...This text[s] provide the background for Luke 1:32-35, the words of Gabriel to Mary in the infancy narrative...

...Robert H. Eisenman and James M. Robinson), containing 1,787 photographs of 4Q texts...

...But I doubt whether the Sun, or Madonna, for that matter, will be interested in such things...

...On the basis of this text some have claimed that the community was Sadducee rather than Essene...

...About 40 percent of these have seen publication...

...From 4Q has come not one complete scroll, but, according to the official report, "at least 15,000 fragments," a highly conservative figure...

...That the Qumran community used these phrases in reference to an expected messiah is admissible, but that does not mean that this Qumran text refers to Jesus the Messiah...

...A Qumran collection of beatitudes shows that the way the Matthean and Lucan Jesus uttered the beatitudes in a group (Matt...

...That it has anything "to do with Christian origins in Palestine" is a figment of Eisenman's imagination...

...Despite such maverick claims, scholars today recognize that the Scrolls have shed light in unexpected ways on the Palestinian matrix of many things in the New Testament...

...An international and intercredal team of seven scholars was set up to work on the puzzle and prepare the texts for publication in the Clarendon series, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert [DJD...

...29:1819—not messianic passages...

...Yet even Ostling had to admit "that none of the Dead Sea Scrolls mentions Jesus by name" and the Qumran "writings...clearly reflect the Jewish situation in the second century before Christ...

...The Scrolls dispel the tendency, once, to refer to the Judaism of this period, especially in its pharisaic-prerabbinic form, as "normative...

...enty other fragmentary Hebrew and Aramaic texts...

...A press release at that time from the State University of California, Long Beach, where Eiseman teaches, said that "The text is of the most far-reaching significance because it shows that whatever group was responsible for these writings was operating in the same general scriptural and messianic framework of early Christianity...

...Harvard graduate students have been given 4Q texts for their dissertations, of which about two dozen have been issued in some form...

...up to shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem (a.d...

...and] uses messiah-related terms such as 'the staff,' 'the Branch of David' and the 'Root of Jesse'" (the Washington Post, September 8, 1991...

...In Cave 5 were found eight fragmentary Old Testament texts and eighteen nonbiblical writings...

...In early November 1991, Eisenman claimed that he had discovered among texts made available by the Huntington Library one (4Q285) that "describes a 'leader of the community' being 'put to death' and mentions 'piercings' or 'wounds...

...So far no mention is made in any Qumran document of Christians, of Jesus, or even of John the Baptist, partly because the texts come from pre-Christian centuries, or from the early part of the first Christian century...

...the task of putting the words of nonbiblical texts on cards was continued by Raymond E. Brown and Willard G. Oxtoby...

...2. The Scrolls have contributed to our knowledge of ancient Palestinian Judaism...

...In 1956 Bedouin discovered Cave 11 and rather thoroughly cleaned it out...

...That the Scrolls might somehow "foreshadow Jesus" (Ostling's thesis) surprises no one acquainted with them...

...16: 18 December 1992...

...It is a classic example of what authors will do to make a buck out of a topic so titillating...

...others were bought from the Bedouin...

...A samizdat form reveals how it stresses the legal prescriptions which the Qumran Jews insisted on against some opponents...

...He shall be called the son of] the [G]reat [God], and by his name shall he be named...

...Within the following decade, ten other Qumran caves yielded written materials, dating from the end of the third century B.C...

...2:42), but broke with them when they became more politically oriented and the high priesthood was usurped by one of their kings...

...This is particularly noteworthy for Aramaic...

...The Lord may send a messenger who will do such things, which are described in phrases echoing Isaiah (61:1...

...Luke 6:20-22) follows a well-established Jewish pattern...

...Cave 7 produced a surprise: nineteen Greek fragments, two of biblical writings, and seventeen of contested identification...

...Either such Essenes emerged from the Hasidim ("Pious Ones"), who at first associated with the Maccabees (1 Mace...

...This small clique had delayed publication because they wanted to write lengthy commentaries on each text...

...so they broke with the Jerusalem priesthood and its tainted TempleCommonweal service to withdraw to a desert retreat to establish there "a trustworthy house in Israel...

...These four areas, therefore, underscore why the Scrolls merit scholarly attention...

...One text supplies a shorter Hebrew form of Jeremiah, previously known in the Greek Septuagint...

...Then the Biblical Archaeology Society of Washington, D.C., published the first fascicle of Wacholder and Abegg's reconstructed texts, A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls...

...Inspired by Eisenman's opposition to what he has called the "consensus" among interpreters who hold that the Scrolls have nothing directly to do with Christianity, the authors claim that the real culprit behind the delay in publishing the 4Q texts was the Vatican, which feared that the Scrolls contained material detrimental to Catholic faith and was seeking to suppress such information...

...to a.d...

...today that number has reached 575...

...From Cave 3 came three fragmentary biblical texts, eleven nonbiblical writings, and a copper plaque recording buried treasures...

...He did not then know what was yet to come...

...Yet one still awaits the publication of roughly 70 percent of 4Q texts...

...1. A gap that long existed in our knowledge about the languages of Palestine in the first centuries B.C...

...Cave 4 (4Q) had been discovered by Bedouin in 1952...

...This cave proved to be most important...

...Last June, HarperSan Francisco published Barbara Thiering' s latest book, Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a masterpiece of sensationalism (Jesus crucified at Qumran, secretly revived at the Dead Sea, and wed to a woman bishop in a.d...

...In November 1991 the Biblical Archaeology Society published a two-volume Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed...

...Such a respected journalist as Richard N. Ostling (or his editors) could not resist headlining his article in Time (September 21,1992) "Is Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls...

...How did the Dead Sea Scrolls, the fragmentary literary remains of the "Qumran'' community and the object of so much arcane scholarship, end up in the supermarket check-out aisle...

...The subject of the preceding sentences in lines 3-5 is not "the messiah," but "the Lord" (adonay...

...All (peoples) shall] make [peace], and all shall serve [him...

...It's a long story, which I will get to later...

...In Cave 1 were discovered seven major scrolls and some sevJOSEPH A. FITZMYER, S.J., is professor emeritus of biblical studies, The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., and author of The Dead Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and Tools for Study (Scholars Press, 1990) and of Responses to 101 Questions on the Dead Sea Scrolls (Paulist, 1992...

...the scrolls include eye-popping predictions for top celebrities like Kevin Costner and Madonna" (Sun, February 18, 1992...

...Then came the humdinger, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (Summit Books, 1992), by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh...

...From Cave 9 came a tiny Hebrew papyrus, and from Cave 10 an ostracon inscribed with a Hebrew name...

...Eventually the Israel Antiquities Authority modified its position and permitted scholars access to photographs under its control...

...WHAT THEY FOUND IN ,oseph a THE CAVES LET'S GO TO THE SCROLLS s a biblical scholar, I can testify that the Dead Sea Scrolls are of the utmost importance to our understanding of the origins of Christianity...

...It contributed only thirteen paltry text-changes to the translation of Isaiah in the RSV of 1952...

...200...

...35:5-6...

...50)—sheer hokum...

...Yet apart from two German writers who have supported O'Callaghan, such an identification of these scraps has fallen on deaf scholarly ears...

...But 4Q has been the major problem, partly because of their jigsaw puzzle nature...

...They give striking support to the account of Josephus about the different "sects" among Palestinian Jews, that is, to the pluriformity of Judaism in his day...

...As might have been expected, there is no mention in the text of a "messiah," and the crucial line in it reads, not "they put to death the leader of the community," but "the prince of the congregation will put [or has put] him to death" ("him" being unknown because of the broken state of the fragment...

...But that 4Q521 refers "to the com14.18 December 1992 Commonweal ing messiah," says that he "will 'heal the wounded, resurrect the dead [and] preach glad tidings to the poor,'" and thus resembles "the words of Jesus in the Nazareth synagogue (Luke 4)" is another matter...

...That identification, however, raises more problems than it solves...

...But even I was somewhat taken . back by the significance attached to the Scrolls in a recent supermarket tabloid: "A nuclear disaster will leave millions dead or homeless and America will find itself going to war in 1992, according to predictions gleaned from the mysterious Dead Sea Scrolls...

...Moreover, it is far from certain that "the Branch of David" (a messianic title used in other Qumran texts), follows as an appositive of "the prince of the congregation," an authority figure otherwise known in Qumran texts, but not as a messiah...

...When the scrolls of Qumran Cave 1 were discovered in 1947, they were said to be "the greatest manuscript discovery in modern times...

...has now been filled...

...Whether one accepts or not the identification of the Qumran community as Essene, these documents have supplied us with firsthand information about a form of life, a theology, and a mode of biblical interpretation in use among Palestinian Jews from roughly 150 B.C...

...Shanks brought the matter to the attention of the public-at-large and began a campaign against such team-tactics...

...70), and they confirmed his original assessment...

...That concordance was begun by me in 1957-58, working as an assistant to the team in the scrollery...

...atters came to a head a year ago when, as the New York Times (September 5,1991) headlined it, "Computer Hacker Bootlegs Version of Dead Sea Scrolls...

...In September 1991, William A. Moffett, director of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, announced that he would make available to scholars photographs of unpublished texts, of which the library had copies...

...This Essene identification of the Qumran community has recently been questioned because of text 4QMMT, miqsat ma ase hattorah, which is still officially unpublished...

...Similarly, Robert H. Eisenman has long been ignoring these recognized methods of dating and maintaining "the controversial theory that the Scrolls were written by a Jewish sect that was somehow connected to the movement that spawned Christianity" (the New York Times, November 8,1991...

...Jewish to the hilt, these pre-Christian Palestinians led an ascetic communal life, with at least some of them celibate...

...The Scrolls have also revealed literary activity in Aramaic and Hebrew in the period between the final redaction of the Hebrew Scriptures (ca...

...The major scrolls included two copies of Isaiah, the Manual of Discipline, the War Scroll, Thanksgiving Psalms, a commentary on Habakkuk, and the Genesis Apocryphon...

...the best solution is still the Essene identification...

...Or the Essenes emerged from Jews who had returned from Babylon in the second century, having heard about the success of the Maccabean movement and the restoration of theocracy in the land...

...For her John would be the Teacher of Righteousness, Jesus the Wicked Priest...

...So William Foxwell Albright, renowned Palestinian archaeologist of Johns Hopkins University, hailed them...

...most of the 23 texts from Cave 11 have appeared, and the remaining few are to appear shortly...

...he significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls is hard to underestimate...

...Forms of the Hebrew Scriptures found in the Qumran Scrolls now take us back more than a thousand years before the time of the oldest manuscripts known prior to 1947...

...In 1972 the Spaniard Jose O'Callaghan startled the scholarly world by claiming to have identified tiny Greek fragments of Cave 7 as New Testament texts, in particular 7Q5 as Mark 6:52-53...

...Qumran writings now clearly manifest considerable Aramaic literary creativity: Genesis Apocryphon, Enochic literature, Targum of Job, and other texts of lesser moment...

...This should surprise no one, for Jesus of Nazareth was a Palestinian Jew, and the Scrolls furnish firsthand evidence about the milieu in which Christianity came into being...

...It occurs, of course, in the Old Testament: for angels, the people of Israel collectively, the king on the Davidic throne, and even for an individual upright Jew...

...3. The Scrolls have also taught us much about the history of the transmission of Old Testament texts...

...And as for some of those who go by the name of scholars, they might just as well publish in the Sun...

...Fragments of 1-2 Samuel and Jeremiah have revealed forms of these books that differ from the medieval Masoretic text-tradition...

...Another text contains the repetitious and expanded form of Exodus previously known in the Samaritan Pentateuch...

...See my article, America, February 15, 1992...

...When added to 212 from the minor caves and 23 from Cave 11, the total number of Qumran texts is about 810...

...Their accusation that the Biblical Commission and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger were dictating policy to the Catholic members of the international team is ridiculous—sheer humbug...

...Milik and other members of the team have issued preliminary studies of other 4Q texts...

...These fragments were brought to the "scrollery" of the Palestine Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem...

...they began to clean it out but were eventually stopped by Jordanian authorities so that archaeologists could control the excavation...

...Cave 6 yielded seven biblical texts and twentyfour nonbiblical fragments, again of sectarian character...

...Again, the title "Son of God" is used of Jesus in New Testament writings...

...4. Perhaps most important of all is the impact that the Scrolls have made on the study of the Palestinian Jewish matrix of Christianity...

...He shall be hailed the Son of God, and they shall call him Son of the Most High...

...Initially, scholars thought that the Qumran community was Essene...

...The delay in the publication of such important documents has created the recent brouhaha about the Scrolls...

...Having emigrated from Babylon, they did not find things in "Israel" as ideal or as traditional as expected...

...Among the 127 biblical texts of 4Q every book of the Hebrew canon is represented save Esther...

...But this most recent outbreak of interest in the Scrolls can be traced to the mid-1980s, when Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, realized that scrolls from Qumran cave 4—where the community had deposited its library before the destruction of its center by the Romans (a.d...

...and the beginning of rabbinic literature (ca...

...The "deception" in all of this is the Baigent-Leigh book itself...

...Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin G. Abegg, of Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, had reconstructed 4Q texts from a preliminary concordance of nonbiblical texts...

...Cave 2 yielded eighteen fragmentary Old Testament texts and fifteen nonbiblical fragments of sectarian writings...

...But her contentions ride roughshod over archaeological evidence connected with the texts and their palaeographic and radiocarbon dating...

...Polish scholar Jozef T. Milik and British scholar John M. Allegro published fifty-nine texts in the definitive DJD series, and the Frenchman Maurice Baillet published thirty-nine others...

...In unexpected ways they have contributed to our knowledge in four areas related to the Bible: ancient Palestinian languages (Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew), the history of ancient Judaism, the transmission of the Old Testament text, and the Jewish background of Christianity...

...In all, Caves 1-3, 5-10 yielded 212 documents...

...5:3-11...

...Again, Australian Barbara Thiering has tried to interpret the Qumran texts as speaking covertly of John the Baptist, Jesus, and Christians...

...We have learned much about the trilingualism of the people of that time and place...

...It yielded twenty-three manuscripts, including a Psalms Scroll, the sectarian Temple Scroll, and others...

...In Cave 8 were discovered four fragmentary Old Testament texts and one nonbiblical hymn...

...All the 212 texts from Caves 1-3, 5-10 have been published...