Feb. 19, 2005. 01:00 AM
Who wrote Dead Sea scrolls?
Scholars have long believed that Essenes, a Jewish sect, had written
the documents in Qumran Now Israeli archaeologists claim Essenes
didn't live there or write the scrolls, writes Neil Altman
More questions about the authorship of the Dead Sea Scrolls are being
asked today than any time since the documents were discovered 57
years ago.
The ruins of Qumran, where many scholars theorized that a Jewish
monastic brotherhood known as the Essenes copied the books of the Old
Testament, have yielded new evidence that casts doubt on the Essene
theory.
Itzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg, Israeli archaeologists who spent 10
seasons in the digs at Qumran, announced last summer that the
evidence they found all but proves that the Essenes didn't live there
and didn't write the Dead Sea Scrolls.
What they uncovered in the course of digging and sifting at Qumran
included jewellery and imported Italian pottery — not the sort of
things that an order of poor monks would have.
Magen and Peleg also came away from their work believing the Essene
theory should have died decades ago based on evidence that one
archaeologist, the late Roland de Vaux, couldn't have missed. A
respected scholar priest, de Vaux excavated Qumran for five years in
the 1950s and helped turn the Essene theory into dogma.
"It is impossible to say that the people who lived at Qumran were
poor," Peleg told Israel's Haaretz newspaper. "It is also impossible
that de Vaux did not see the finds we saw. He simply ignored what
didn't suit him."
A core of scholars who still support de Vaux's theory, including
scholars who have become famous for their research, articles and
books on the Dead Sea Scrolls and have much at stake in the debate,
have rejected Magen and Peleg's conclusions.
But archaeologist and Qumran expert Katherine Galor, a Brown
University professor, said that while some scholars are having a hard
time accepting the new research, many others no longer accept the
Essene theory.
Galor, who agrees with Magen and Peleg's conclusions that the Essenes
had nothing to do with the scrolls, noted that if Qumran had been the
place where hundreds of scrolls were written, the evidence would have
been all over the site. But it wasn't.
Not one scroll nor one scrap of writing has been found at Qumran, she
said, adding that nothing at Qumran — from its architecture to the
archaeologists' finds — suggest it was different from the other non-
religious communities in the vicinity.
There is evidence now to suggest that an Essene sect wasn't
established until after the time of Christ. But in the early 1950s,
scholars, looking for a way to connect the newly discovered Dead Sea
Scrolls to Qumran, revived a theory first put forth by biblical
critics in the 1800s.
Long before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars who
questioned the truth of the Bible developed the Essene theory to
account for the origins of Christianity. They speculated that it
sprang from a sect of pre-Christian Jews. These scholars also
suggested that John the Baptist and Jesus himself were Essenes. Yet
nowhere in the New Testament are the Essenes mentioned, though other
sects are, including the Zealots, Herodians, Sadducees and Pharisees.
In fact, the writers of the scrolls never called
themselves "Essenes." Rather, they referred to themselves as "the
poor" or "poor in spirit," which also happen to be terms applied to
the early followers of Jesus.
Today, a growing number of scholars say the writers of the scrolls
should not be referred to as "Essenes" but as the "Qumran sect."
The records of historians Pliny and Philo, who were writing in the
decades after Jesus' death, include sketchy details about sects. Dead
Sea Scroll scholars combined several sects into one — the Essenes —
to account for the authorship of the scrolls.
Josephus, a prominent Jewish historian of the same period, also wrote
about such a sect, calling its members city dwellers who lived
in "every town in Israel." They didn't live in a desert or
wilderness, like the Dead Sea region. In 1998, respected Israeli
archaeologist Yizhar Hirschfeld created a stir by asserting that
Essenes lived not at Qumran but at Ein Gedi, a Dead Sea community 20
miles south of Qumran. But Hirschfeld found a striking similarity
between that community and the monasteries built centuries later by
Byzantine Christians.
In a letter two years later, Hirschfeld wrote, "The remains I
uncovered at Ein Gedi fit better the description of Pliny the Elder.
This adds another proof that the site of Qumran had nothing to do
with the Essenes."
Peter Pick, an archaeologist and the former dean of arts and sciences
at Columbia Pacific University in California, added a nail to the
coffin of the Essene theory when he told Newsday in 1997 that "the
most telling thing was there was no synagogue at the Qumran site."
First-century Jews built synagogues in places where they lived for
only a few years, such as the fortress at Masada. Why, Pick asks,
wouldn't the Essenes have built a synagogue at Qumran where they
supposedly lived for more than a century?
Comparing the secular sites of Masada and Herodium in the light of
Peleg and Magen's discoveries at Qumran led Pick to say in October
2004 that "Qumran is not a religious site but a secular site."
But people called "Ossaeans" did live along the northern shores of
the Dead Sea after A.D. 68. Some scrolls scholars believe they were
the Essenes.
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First century Jews built synagogues in places where they lived only a
few years
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Epiphanius, a church father of the third and fourth centuries A.D.,
wrote that the "so-called heresy of the Ossaeans ... originated from
the regions of Nabataea and Ituraea, Moabitis and Arielitis, from the
regions that are situated at the other side of the lake that in the
Holy Scripture is called Dead Sea." The fact that Epiphanius calls
them a "heresy" suggests that they had a Christian background.
Other groups lived not far away in the Golan Heights region. Claudine
Dauphin, a French archeologist, found that Judeo-Christian sects
emerged after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and continued into the
medieval period.
"At two of the sites," she wrote, "we started finding bizarre stuff —
Christian symbols intertwined with Jewish symbols ... like a menorah
covered by a ship, representing the church, whose mast was a cross,
or a lulav (palm branch) whose top branches formed a cross."
This may explain why some lameds — the tall Hebrew letter for "L" —
found in a Dead Sea Scroll called the Copper Scroll are turned into
crosses and why there are Xs in the margins of passages in the Isaiah
Scroll that speak of the Messiah.
Another important clue in the search for the Essenes is offered by
Athanase Negoitsa in Revue de Qumran. He writes about a document by
Nilus the Ascetic of the fourth century A.D. that indicates the
Essenes lived then. Nilus praises their "meditative and lofty moral
life." But he regrets that the Essenes do not follow in the true
philosophy of the gospel of Christ, implying that they were a
heretical Christian group.
Is there a source that clearly states the Essenes originated in the
Christian period and not before?
In the writings of the Christian church fathers, the Jews who
believed in Jesus were called "Nazarenes" and kept the laws of Moses
and the customs of the Jewish people. That dispels the gentile myth
that the Jewish people rejected Jesus. But between the time of the
first gentile believer — the Roman centurion Cornelius — and the time
that large numbers of gentiles in Antioch were converted, what name
differentiated gentiles?
Epiphanius wrote: "All Christians were called Nazoraeans (Nazarenes)
once. For a short time they were given also the name Iessaeans
(Essenes), before the disciples in Antioch began to be called
Christians."
Epiphanius thus contradicts the theory that the Essenes were a pre-
Christian sect. Many scholars regard Epiphanius as an extremely
important source. In Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, German scholar
Rainer Riesner states, "According to reliable tradition in
Epiphanius, the Jewish Christian community left the Holy City at the
outbreak of the Jewish War (A.D. 66-70) to settle at Pella in the
Decapolis."
Negoitsa writes: "Epiphanius was born in Palestine ... spoke five
languages,Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, and Aramaic. Thus he was able
to read all the documents and writings ... (had) precise information
regarding the sects of Palestine and especially those in the region
harbouring the Dead Sea." But even Negoitsa doesn't mention
Epiphanius' statements about "Iessaeans." What is the derivation of
this Greek word, and does this have any bearing on Christianity?
Phillip Comfort, former professor of Greek and New Testament at
Wheaton College and senior Bible editor at Tyndale Publishing House,
said the word "Iessaeans" or "Essenes" comes from the Greek
word "Iessaios," which means Jesse, the father of David.
"The early Christians may have called themselves this because the
Messiah was called the Son of Jesse (Isaiah 11:10, Romans 15:12),"
wrote Comfort, whose analysis offers further insight into Epiphanius'
statements that the Essenes were a Christian sect. How then could the
Essenes be the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which supposedly date
as far back as 300 B.C.?
The discovery of the scrolls "merely revived (this) old, long
discarded theory," claims Millar Burrows in More Light on the Dead
Sea Scrolls.
Scroll scholar A. Dupont-Sommer explains that the Essene theory was a
product of 18th-century biblical criticism. It speculated that
Jesus "was imbued with Essene ethics, which in their turn, owe much
to Zeno," who was a Greek philosopher of the 5th century B.C.
In The Essene Writings from Qumran, Dupont-Sommer said the Christian
apologists saw this philosophy as "a weapon, a devilish theory
designed to sap the originality and transcendence of Christian
revelation.
"It is, therefore, not difficult to understand the very lively
opposition of a number of Christian historians, Catholic and
Protestant alike, in the 19th century and during the first half of
the 20th."
In fact, the Essene theory had become a scholarly attack upon Jesus,
the uniqueness of his teaching, his Jewishness, his early years and
his divinity.
Though soundly refuted in the last century, the Essene theory began
gaining acceptance again in the 1950s. Jewish scholars, such as
Zeitlin and P. R. Weiss, were among a growing number who challenged
the early dating of the scrolls as well as the theory that the
Essenes wrote them. They believed the scrolls dated from the medieval
period, rather than 300 B.C. to A.D. 50.
Zeitlin wrote that "ascribing ... the scrolls to the pre-Christian
period (was) theologically motivated." The scrolls were being used as
propaganda against Christianity, he said, by back-dating them to the
pre-Christian era. Many scholars who no longer held to historic
Christian doctrinal beliefs revived the Essene theory to attack the
Judeo-Christian heritage. Ironically, it was the Jewish scholars who
defended Christianity.
Curiosity about the Dead Sea Scrolls continues as new pieces to the
puzzle of their origin are put into place and access to the Dead Sea
Scrolls becomes less restricted. Scholars now must search for the
true identity of those who wrote and carefully stored them in 11
caves near Qumran.
