- yesterday
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00The Judean Desert, the wilderness where many believed Jesus walked on his final journey
00:16to Jerusalem. But more than a century before Christ's birth, an extreme Jewish sect also
00:22retreated here. They left behind them written evidence of their form of Judaism. Their writing
00:29writings describe a set of beliefs and practices that may now call into question the uniqueness
00:34of the Christian Gospels. Their words may even suggest that the monastic ideal followed
00:57by Christian monks like these today owes more to Judaism than to the inspired teachings
01:03of Jesus. True or not, many believe the answer lies in the preserved fragments of scrolls
01:11found near the Dead Sea in 1947. Ever since their discovery, the Dead Sea Scrolls have fired
01:18controversy not only about religion, but also about the nature of scientific scholarship.
01:25These pre-gospel texts are the only first-hand accounts written when Jesus was still alive,
01:32but many of them had remained unpublished for over 40 years.
01:38The end of the long and bitter struggle to liberate the scrolls came when two American scholars released
01:44translations which they claim could radically alter what Christians and Jews have believed for almost
01:50two centuries.
01:57A few weeks after their book was rushed through for publication, the two authors met with their
02:03colleagues at a scrolls conference in New York. Even for members of this stormy field accustomed
02:08to controversy, passions ran high. Co-author Robert Eisenman, professor of Middle East religions
02:15at California State University, had given a paper on his controversial theory of the origins of Christianity.
02:22Go on, hit me, hit me. Come on, Larry.
02:26I like to hit you too.
02:27This is a lot of fun, right?
02:28Right, let's keep at it. We can go all night with you. As long as I'm up here and you're down there.
02:32This theory is nonsense. It's nonsense because of the fact that it places the corpus...
02:38That's not the way I talk about your work. I think you should leave it a little more respectful.
02:41This theory is unacceptable. You may be right, in which case I apologize.
02:45One thing Larry does is he speaks so loud and aggressively, even more so than I do,
02:49that he tends to bulldoze all of his interlocutors, whether on a podium here or the audience,
02:56and it's always difficult to respond to him. His presentation of my views is so tendentious
03:02and absolutely fails to come to the essence of what I'm doing. I don't have to go through this
03:07kind of sophomore criticism.
03:10The scrolls are very important to a lot of people. We have important ideas here. We have the origins
03:14of Christianity at stake as far as some theories go. We have insights into the Judaism of the time
03:21of Jesus. We have the beginnings of rabbinic Judaism at this point. We have, in other words,
03:26the major religions of the West, two of them, at stake in these scrolls. And these things arouse
03:32great passions with people.
03:33To understand why there's this tremendous antagonism going on, you've got to remember this.
03:39The scrolls were discovered in what was then Jordan, an Arab country. They are written in Hebrew.
03:46They are Jewish scrolls. They were given to a committee of Christian scholars who sat on
03:52them for 40 years. No Jews were allowed. Now, for the first time, the scrolls are available
03:59to anybody. We are now seeing a struggle for regaining control of the scrolls for Judaism.
04:09Interpretation is being taken away from Christians, given to Jews. Are they Jewish scrolls?
04:13Are they Jewish heritage? Or are they Christian scrolls?
04:22That struggle started one winter's morning in 1947, when a young Arab boy was searching
04:28for his goat in caves near the Dead Sea. Inside one of these caves were several earthenware jars
04:34containing cloth-covered bundles. When he tore aside the cloth, he could see the blackened surface
04:40of a leather scroll. Back in their camp, the Bedouin unwrapped a scroll the length of one
04:48of their tents. Unknown to them, they were handling a book of Isaiah, a thousand years older than
04:53any copy known to exist.
04:55The Bedouin were unable to read the Hebrew writing on the parchment, but the next day they decided
05:06to carry the scrolls across the desert to the market town of Bethlehem. They sold them to an
05:10antique dealer called Kando. The Bethlehem dealer was tracked down, and after weeks of negotiation,
05:18the scrolls in his possession were bought. The Arabs began their scroll hunting in earnest. It became a tribal sport,
05:26and a profitable one. The Bedouin continued to comb the cliffs. The greatest discovery of all was to come
05:36at the end of September 1952. The Bedouin unearthed another cache of scrolls in a chamber hollowed out of a plateau.
05:43It's certainly a lot more difficult getting down here than it was 30 years ago when this was much less
05:51eroded. But I still remember this fantastic view where you could stand right on the edge and look out
05:57towards the Dead Sea. This gully didn't exist in the first century. This gully was eroded subsequently.
06:03This would have been part of the flat surface around the settlement. But all of that view, of course, is of much less importance
06:09than what they found in here. This was the greatest, richest discovery that they made.
06:17The Romans came a little more quickly than they anticipated, and before they fled, they just dumped the stuff here.
06:23In fact, it must have been so late that some of the soldiers obviously saw it, because you can see that some of the manuscripts were torn.
06:29You see? So they were spread out, something like 15,000 fragments of over 500 manuscripts.
06:35Then, you see, this very soft, marly rock. You see, I could take it apart with my fingers.
06:41That then had the added disadvantage of, as this crumbled, it spread itself all over the manuscripts.
06:47That would have taken several centuries to form. And so it's one of the most important arguments for showing
06:53that they were not put in the caves at, say, the beginning of the 20th century.
06:57The Bedouin found about 10,000 fragments. Then the archaeologists found others.
07:01And they had to sift every bit of clay or sand, because even a single letter would be important.
07:07It was King Hussein's government in what was then Jordanian East Jerusalem that initially gave the scroll team to the
07:17control of the Jewish manuscripts. They went to the French archaeological school, the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem,
07:24and set up a team of scholars who would prepare these manuscripts for publication.
07:29That team was led by a Dominican priest, Roland de Vaux.
07:35Although these were Jewish scrolls, the team consisted only of Christian scholars.
07:41The fragments had to be individually cleaned, photographed, and then pieced together.
07:50Pressed flat, the pieces were laid out in a room in the Rockefeller Museum called the Scrollery.
07:57It's hard to overestimate the atmosphere of acute anxiety when these documents were being translated.
08:03Many of the manuscripts were copies of well-known books of the Old Testament.
08:07But some of the scroll fragments reflected the thinking of Jews during the period when rabbinic
08:13Judaism and Christianity were just starting. For the Christian scholars working on them,
08:19the contents were astounding. Imagine Protestant Christian scholars translating this commentary.
08:26And out of this commentary emerges a story, a story of a leader who's given the name Teacher of Righteousness.
08:35He's persecuted by a wicked priest. He's opposed by a liar.
08:43His followers are telling his life out of the biblical text where it is prophesied.
08:48The things that happened to him include persecution, exile, possibly death.
08:59The death of his opponents is also foreseen.
09:01And all this takes place against the background of an oppressive foreign ruler.
09:07The writers of this commentary were followers of this now dead Teacher of Righteousness.
09:12And for them, faithfulness to that teacher was the very essence of their being.
09:18Now, imagine the 1950s, Protestant Christian scholars.
09:24Are they thinking to themselves, have we read something like this before?
09:27Well, Father de Vaux went back to where the manuscripts had been found to look for other clues about the authors of the scrolls.
09:36A mile or so away from Cave One were the remains of an ancient settlement called Qumran, long noticed but never before investigated.
09:45Once manuscripts had been discovered in the caves and the cliff behind me, that's then when de Vaux decided that this would be worth excavating.
09:53They had to try and work out where did these manuscripts come from.
09:56Did they come from Jerusalem, from Jericho, or perhaps from here?
10:00So we started excavating here, I suppose about 49, and did four or five seasons, in the course of which he resurrected the whole history of the site.
10:09De Vaux discovered that Qumran had been occupied over a period of about 300 years, but was abandoned when the Roman legions attacked in 68 AD.
10:19In the course of his excavations, Father de Vaux uncovered a number of different artifacts.
10:24The most important were earthenware jars identical to those found in the caves.
10:29When the jars were analyzed, they were found not only to be the same shape and pattern, but also to be dated to the same period as the site itself.
10:38All the evidence suggested the scrolls had been written by the people living at Qumran.
10:43One of the rooms down there was identified by de Vaux as a scriptorium, simply because on the floor, mixed up with a lot of bits of broken plaster, he found two inkwells, one bronze and one in earthenware.
10:59They came from a room above.
11:01We know that there were two stories because we have stairs going up to a second story.
11:05Now, some of the ink in one of the inkwells matched the ink in some of the manuscripts.
11:12That's one, I mean, it could be a very common ink, it's a very common combination, it's really just soot, carbon, and a gluey base, that's all you need for ink.
11:20So that, I mean, I wouldn't put too much on that.
11:22The bits of plaster were assembled together to make tables, which now, I think, were used for preparing, not writing the manuscripts, but preparing the skins.
11:35You see, they had their own animals, and they obviously prepared their own parchment, and sewed it together, ruled it.
11:43That would have been the use of these tables. They're too awkward to sit on or to write at.
11:48That would have been the use of these tables.
11:49Devaux believed these were the remains of a monastic community described by first-century historians as a religious group called the Essenes, who lived on the shores of the Dead Sea.
12:04According to the scrolls, the Essenes had many things in common with Christians today.
12:09Baptism, sharing communal goods.
12:12There was even a ritual meal that they had in anticipation of the day when the Messiah, having blessed them,
12:18would give them bread and wine.
12:24Many theories were put forward to account for these parallels.
12:28Perhaps John the Baptist had lived at Qumran, and passed on Essene ideas to Jesus.
12:34Was the story of Jesus based on that of the Essenes' own leader, the teacher of righteousness?
12:40There are three things you can do with these kinds of parallels.
12:42One, you can say, these are Christian texts.
12:46Very few people took that road.
12:49And if they did, they really got nowhere.
12:53No one was prepared to listen to that kind of an argument.
12:55Other people said, Christianity has been anticipated.
13:01Christianity is simply following a pattern that we can see happened earlier.
13:05We've got, if you like, a Jesus of Nazareth 100 years earlier.
13:09The third way is to say, these parallels are accidental, casual, occasional, not really very important.
13:19And that was the view that ultimately prevailed.
13:23Forty years later, the debate over links between the scrolls and Christianity had not advanced.
13:28While other scholars waited for the contents to be revealed, members of DeVoe's team were criticized for being possessive and secretive about the texts to which they alone had access.
13:39When members died, they bequeathed their rights to trusted colleagues, who themselves excluded others.
13:46John Strugnell was a member of the team when the fragments were assigned.
13:49They were given this restricted access for a very simple reason, that they were doing, in many cases, they were doing this work, belonging to the team and the like, for no money whatever.
14:06And this was a way of attracting them, attracting good scholars into the team.
14:14They were saying, you will have the works that you publish, you will have the right to work on undisturbed until you're ready.
14:22Even when I went to Israel to try to get hold of somebody who could give me permission, I got bounced around from one place to another.
14:30It was also frustrating because I was researching on one of the scrolls.
14:35And I knew that there were fragments of this document, unpublished, sitting on somebody's desk.
14:41And I knew that whatever I said could be entirely contradicted by something that somebody else had, wasn't working on, wouldn't let me see.
14:54And you can imagine any scholar working in that position, where there's a kind of threat over his head, that if he wants to say anything about this text, there's somebody that could prove him wrong.
15:06And that person is not prepared to do anything about it.
15:09That's an impossible situation to be in.
15:11I would have understood if the person had said, look at the texts, you can't publish them, but if you want to satisfy yourself that there's nothing in there you really need, fine.
15:20I didn't even get that.
15:21Over the next 40 years, less than 100 of the 500 manuscripts were published.
15:31These publication delays led to some colourful conspiracy theories.
15:36Even the Vatican was accused of wanting to suppress their contents.
15:40Recent discussion of the scrolls have been dominated by a conspiracy theory, that a prescient Vatican, long before any of the scrolls were read, realized they would be tremendously dangerous, and so slipped in people in inquisitors' robes to ensure that the scrolls were never published.
15:56That's an absolutely ridiculous theory.
15:58The Vatican isn't interested in controlling historical research, first century and the other century.
16:04Dogmatic theology, yes, but not, say, the background of the New Testament.
16:07I don't think anybody in the Vatican could even read the Dead Sea Scrolls, or even cared about the Dead Sea Scrolls.
16:13The problem is not that there was a conspiracy to withhold the scrolls by Christians.
16:17The problem simply is that the Christian intellectual approach to the scrolls tend to interpret it at all as a kind of proto-Christianity.
16:24Why weren't they published? Why were they held in private? A lot of reasons.
16:28Alcoholism, death and disease of some of the scholars, selfishness, greed, the ability to use it to place your students,
16:35all types of motives which never should have existed.
16:39But I don't think it's a religious conspiracy. I think it's one of the great scandals.
16:44The publishing stranglehold exerted by the official team was to be released suddenly and unexpectedly.
16:50It began, innocently enough, in the basement of the Rockefeller Museum in Israel.
16:57Here, for 30 years, had lain an invaluable tool for piecing together the unpublished texts.
17:04It was a dictionary-like listing of all the words in the scrolls called a concordance.
17:09In 1988, Professor Strugdell made 30 copies available to certain institutions under strict guidelines.
17:19One of these copies ended up in the library of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.
17:26Using a computer program, a graduate student ignored the restrictions and tried to reassemble the unpublished texts.
17:34So, with that information, we were able to follow the various fragments and manuscripts,
17:39thereby actually reconstructing the manuscript right on the computer screen.
17:44Over the next year, Martin Ebeg and his tutor, Ben Zion-Wacholder, filled in the missing Hebrew words.
17:51The manuscript here reads, Lehipach.
17:54When the reconstruction was published, the work was condemned as theft.
17:59For 30 years, this committee had kept the treasures of civilization under lock and key,
18:09depriving us, depriving the world, and depriving all the scholars that have died in those years
18:17for words that tell the root, that give us the roots of civilization, the roots of culture, and the roots of humanity.
18:27The science journal Nature commented,
18:30The fact that a small group of scholars has kept such historically important data secret for so long is appalling.
18:37If scientific data were at issue, the research community would rise up in righteous wrath, demanding access.
18:45The next challenge came from an unusual source, the Huntington Library in Los Angeles.
18:51In 1990, a new director had been appointed.
18:54In the course of acquainting myself with the library, I discovered this specially constructed vault at the end of one of the workrooms.
19:02I had been told it was a gift of a donor, a Mrs. Bechtel, an enthusiast for photographing biblical materials.
19:08I was told that it contained photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
19:11But I knew little about the recent disputes.
19:14What I knew was that the humidity controls didn't work, so this expensive vault always stood open.
19:19As I walked across to the photographer and asked just how many of the Dead Sea Scrolls photographs we had in the vault,
19:28his answer was, we have everything.
19:32It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
19:35I went back to my office and, by sheer coincidence, found a letter from Eugene Ulrich,
19:40the senior American editor of the Scroll Committee, who was asking me to surrender our negatives.
19:45It was clear the cartel were concerned.
19:48They didn't control the photographs.
19:50By late July, we had decided to make a direct challenge to the cartel to resolve the situation for ourselves
19:57and hopefully for others by freeing access to our collection.
20:02But how to do it?
20:04We were warned that there might be a legal challenge,
20:06and indeed we were trying to, frankly, avoid being taken to court.
20:10But we knew that if we were taken to the court of public opinion, we could win.
20:15And that's what we elected to do, to take the high moral ground of intellectual freedom,
20:20of access to information that is rightfully in the public domain.
20:24The cartel was crumbling.
20:27The last and final blow was yet to come.
20:30Unknown to the team in Cincinnati or the director of the Huntington Library,
20:34Robert Eisenman had his own set of scroll photographs.
20:37He'd been receiving regular deliveries from an unnamed source.
20:42Eisenman had always been an outsider.
20:44This was his big chance.
20:46People contacted me and made it clear to me that they had photographs
20:50and that they were prepared to make them over to me
20:53through an intermediary in Long Beach, a lawyer in Long Beach,
20:56who was basically the person they were using as the go-between.
21:00And pictures started coming to me in fall 1989.
21:03Over the next 18 months, Eisenman continued to receive deliveries of the unpublished texts.
21:10Two months after the Huntington Library offered free access to their negatives,
21:14Eisenman published a complete edition of his photographs, 1787 of them.
21:20The reason was to open the field, to open the field, let a thousand voices sing, as I put it,
21:26let free debate, free competition, a free flow of ideas move.
21:29So the whole thing was to get away from scholarly commentary,
21:32to get away from scholarly editing, get it all out there.
21:36With the cartel finally broken,
21:39Eisenman decided to translate these unpublished manuscripts
21:42and contacted Michael Wise, a young scholar at the University of Chicago.
21:47When I first came to Bob Eisenman's house,
21:50I saw just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of photographs
21:53strewn all over the room, some in piles and some just lacking all organization,
21:57and I was just astounded
21:59because I hadn't realized the richness of what I had never been allowed to see.
22:05When I began my graduate work at the University of Chicago,
22:07I came to realize that the Dead Sea Scrolls was an area where we really were at the beginning.
22:13You could go right to it and do it from the ground up,
22:16and that was very attractive to me,
22:18even though, of course, it's also very difficult and very challenging,
22:21and it's risky because you're always more likely to make mistakes
22:25when you're doing something that no one's ever done before.
22:28Now, why did he choose me?
22:30Well, there were two basic reasons.
22:32First of all, he needed somebody who was a specialist in the working of manuscripts,
22:36Aramaic and Hebrew manuscripts, and that's not his own specialty.
22:39And secondly, he needed somebody he got along with.
22:42And both categories are rather small,
22:44and you put them together, it's an even smaller category.
22:47So I went out there to California and looked over all the materials,
22:51and we sort of hit upon a quid pro quo arrangement
22:53where he would supply me with photographs,
22:55and I would supply him with transcriptions and translations.
22:59It was my thinking that if I didn't do this,
23:01I would never see these scrolls for many years.
23:03Since the way things were going, it looked like it would be 2015
23:06before the scrolls were published by the Oxford Press.
23:10I spent the next week just poring over them
23:13and trying to get some mental concept of what there was,
23:17almost like those who first found the fragments.
23:19There are portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls that may shake people up.
23:35It's similar, I think, to the situation that existed in the Middle Ages
23:38when Galileo and Copernicus began to talk about
23:42the earth going round the sun, not the other way round.
23:44That was extremely disturbing to many people,
23:47and it was, of course, disturbing to the religious authorities.
23:51But it was true,
23:53and eventually what happened is religious dogma adjusted.
23:57Any Christian who is a Christian in the deepest sense
24:00will realize that truth is not their enemy.
24:02What Michael Wise was to discover in these unpublished scrolls
24:07was to raise disturbing questions
24:09about the uniqueness of Christian imagery and language.
24:13Not only was the teacher of righteousness
24:15claimed to be the Messiah by his followers,
24:17but like Christians today, the writers believed in resurrection.
24:21This was the first reference to resurrection
24:24ever found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
24:26The translation of which is,
24:43It's interesting that the text seems to be saying
25:04that it's the Messiah who will resurrect the dead,
25:06because the usual Jewish thought,
25:07as far as we can tell from the day,
25:09was that it was God who would do the resurrecting.
25:11And in fact, that concept is even repeated today
25:13at the synagogue in the second benediction.
25:16But this text seems to be saying
25:18that it is the Messiah who will do it.
25:19And we know, of course,
25:20that that was the Christian concept
25:22that came to enter Christianity.
25:24We never knew exactly where it came from,
25:26if it was new or if it was something borrowed.
25:28And now we see that it was an idea
25:30extant in the Judaism at the time of Jesus,
25:33and that this is yet one more element of Christianity,
25:36which is borrowed from the mother religion, so to speak.
25:39It's not new.
25:42Michael Wise had concentrated on scrolls
25:45that showed common links with Christianity.
25:48Robert Eisenman was more interested
25:49in those which supported his own controversial theories
25:53about the nature and origins of Christianity.
25:56When I came out to Cal State Long Beach in California in 1973,
26:00I was in the Religious Studies Department.
26:03The Dead Sea Scrolls was something
26:04I found tremendously attractive,
26:06and we began teaching that here on a term-by-term basis.
26:08When I started reading the New Testament in a serious manner,
26:12and reading the letters of Paul, particularly Galatians,
26:15it blew my mind, frankly.
26:17As time went on, I began to see the parallels,
26:20certainly in the Pauline correspondence,
26:21then the Book of Acts.
26:22Those kinds of documents,
26:24and the kind of ideology and recovery we're getting at Qumran.
26:29All right.
26:29What we'll talk about today is the relationship of early Christianity
26:33and the Dead Sea Scrolls a bit.
26:35I first wanted to get into the subject of Paul and James with you.
26:40And many of you have perhaps heard of Paul,
26:44but I'm sure a lot of you have never heard of James.
26:47In the early church literature,
26:49he's always referred to as the Just One.
26:52In Hebrew, the word is tzaddik,
26:54which means the Righteous One.
26:56And that, of course, is the same name
26:58that is always applied in the scrolls
27:00to the leader of the scroll group, the Moreh Chatzetic.
27:03Robert Eisenman believes that the Yassim's leader,
27:06the Teacher of Righteousness,
27:07is really the code name for James,
27:09thought to be Jesus' brother,
27:11and the leader of the early church after the death of Jesus.
27:14One of his opponents, the Liar,
27:17is the code name for St. Paul,
27:19the founder of modern Christianity.
27:21Eisenman finds parallels in the New Testament
27:24between the life of James and the Teacher of Righteousness
27:27and St. Paul and the Liar.
27:30The scrolls are infuriating
27:31in that they use a code.
27:34They use a code all of the time.
27:35They talk about all of the people
27:36that they're speaking about
27:37with this infuriating code,
27:40righteous teacher, wicked priest,
27:42liar, spouter of liar,
27:44spouter of lying, scoffer, etc.
27:48However, we find in this early Jewish Christian tradition,
27:51this Palestinian Jerusalem community material
27:53of the 40s to the 60s AD in Palestine,
27:57similar language being used about the enemy.
28:00Paul, for instance, in Jewish Christian tradition,
28:01is rarely called Paul.
28:03He's called the liar or the enemy.
28:05So we are finding in the letter of James,
28:07the opponent is called the lying tongue.
28:10He's called the tongue.
28:11Go to the scrolls, we find the same tongue imagery.
28:15All this has alarming implications for Christianity.
28:19If the scrolls really are the writings
28:21of the early Christian church,
28:23then the information in the Gospels
28:25must have been distorted.
28:27Christians believe that Jesus started a pacifist religion
28:30and urged us to love our neighbor
28:33and turn the other cheek.
28:35Eisenman believes that many of the scrolls
28:37depict a violent, aggressive group bent on vengeance.
28:40He thinks St. Paul deliberately altered Jesus' militant teachings
28:45to make them more palatable to the Romans.
28:47The problem with Jesus is that the data we have concerning him
28:53is very thin.
28:54All we have are the Gospels.
28:57Now, in my view, Qumran is antithetical to the Gospel picture.
29:01In my view, the literature at Qumran
29:02gives you a real picture of what was happening
29:04in 1st century B.C., 1st century A.D. Palestine.
29:08If you compare the kind of material we have at Qumran
29:10with the Gospels, the Gospels are not history.
29:13They're something else.
29:14What are they?
29:14In my view, they're sort of Hellenistic romances.
29:20Whatever Jesus was,
29:22he's not like the picture we have in the Scripture.
29:24He's more like the Qumran materials,
29:26and I think that's what's so frightening about my ideas.
29:32Eisenman's theory of Christianity
29:33can only be right if the scrolls crucial to his theory
29:37were written in the Christian era
29:38not long after Jesus was crucified.
29:42If they were written any earlier,
29:43then the teacher of righteousness
29:45would refer to someone other than James.
29:52Eisenman believes that one of the unpublished texts
29:55called the Damascus document
29:56tells of St. Paul's visit to Damascus.
29:59For him, another name for the settlement at Qumran.
30:02It was crucial to find out when the important scrolls were written.
30:08The dating of the manuscripts
30:10is determined by the type of script.
30:12Some manuscripts were copied in the Herodian period,
30:15which could possibly make them contemporaneous
30:17with New Testament events.
30:19But the internal contents of those documents
30:22would indicate that they were composed much earlier,
30:24that they were in fact composed either in the 2nd century B.C.
30:28or, at latest, in the 1st century B.C.
30:31That makes it impossible that any events alluded to
30:35in those documents should refer to the New Testament.
30:39And attempts by Eisenman, for example,
30:42to relate it to the New Testament,
30:43I think is very far-fetched.
30:45You realize that not all the scrolls are clearly dateable,
30:48so it's not inconceivable that texts among the scrolls
30:50actually post-date Christianity's rise.
30:53But presumably, most of them antedate Christianity,
30:55so most of the time we're talking about texts
30:57that existed before the time of Jesus
30:59and before the time of Christianity.
31:02Over a number of years,
31:03Eisenman pushed the official team of editors
31:06to date the scrolls scientifically,
31:08using the technique of carbon dating.
31:13In July 1990, he partially succeeded.
31:16The Israel Antiquities Authority
31:19decided to date some of the documents.
31:21But because this was a preliminary test,
31:23they concentrated on scrolls
31:25already dated by other methods.
31:28But none of these documents
31:30were crucial to Eisenman's theory.
31:33Small pieces from eight Qumran fragments
31:35were sent to the laboratory in Zurich,
31:37which had carried out similar tests
31:39on the Turin Shroud.
31:41The results confirmed earlier attempts at dating
31:43by analyzing handwriting.
31:46Six were definitely pre-Christian.
31:49Another two were possibly pre-Christian.
31:53Robert Eisenman was not satisfied with these results.
31:56They didn't date the Damascus document.
31:58They didn't date the community rule.
32:00They didn't date the document known as MMT.
32:02In fact, the documents that they chose were a weird lot.
32:05Besides that, there were no safeguards.
32:07And you have to understand that carbon testing
32:10is a very imprecise art.
32:12That is, it tends to make manuscripts
32:13look older than they are.
32:14The dated documents that were tested
32:17actually came out older than the actual date of them.
32:21So you have to put a margin of error in for that.
32:25If you move the margin of error up 50 or 100 years,
32:28you're right in the area that we say
32:29the latest documents are emanating from.
32:31The carbon-14 dating basically proved
32:34that the system of dating by letter shapes,
32:37what we call paleography,
32:39was considerably accurate,
32:41although it requires some correction.
32:43What Robert Eisenman argues
32:44is that the key document,
32:46the Damascus document, was not dated.
32:48And I agree with him
32:49that we have to date that document,
32:50but I'm also certain of what is going to emerge.
32:53What is going to emerge is
32:55that no matter when those copies were made,
32:59that document on literary and historical grounds
33:02should be dated to at least 100 BCE.
33:07And I don't care when it was copied
33:09because I can buy a Bible that was printed in 1992
33:12and it's got nothing to do
33:13with when the Bible was authored.
33:15This document was written in the pre-Christian period
33:18and his theory is wrong.
33:20For Eisenman, proof that these documents
33:22were written in the Christian period
33:23comes from the texts themselves.
33:26When you have a text like the Habakkuk Pesher,
33:29which talks about the foreign armies
33:31invading the country,
33:32sacrificing to their standards
33:33and worshipping their weapons of war,
33:36that relates to imperial Rome.
33:38There is no way that you can date that text
33:40to any period earlier than that.
33:42And even if the carbon testing
33:43or the paleography came out to counterindicate it,
33:45I would not accept it.
33:49I believe that his logic is an associative logic
33:51in which parallels between one thing and another
33:54lead to historical conclusions that are not justified,
33:58which would not emerge
33:59if he began from the close study of the text,
34:02taking into account the text in toto,
34:04not simply those parts in which one finds parallels.
34:07Now, I think the example of this text
34:09and the parallel of the Last Supper
34:10is really a legitimate example
34:13of the question of Christianity and the scrolls,
34:15rather than the nonsense examples that we keep hearing.
34:18These are not documents which, first and foremost,
34:20are important for the study of Christianity.
34:22They are the most important documents that we have
34:25and probably will ever have
34:26for the understanding of what was going on in Judaism
34:29in the period from approximately the 2nd century B.C.E.
34:33to the early 1st century C.E.
34:36We knew previously the Jewish literature
34:39of the Hebrew Bible,
34:40what Christians call the Old Testament,
34:42and we thereafter knew about the great rabbinic corpus
34:45of the Mishnah and the Talmud
34:47and the rest of that literature,
34:49which is dated from 200 of our era on.
34:52What we knew very little of was the period in between,
34:55and for that period in between,
34:57these are the books which were authored
34:59and composed by Jews in the Hellenistic period.
35:03This is the literature of the Jewish people of that period.
35:06Having discovered the first reference to resurrection
35:08in the unpublished scrolls,
35:10Eisenman and Wise sent new shockwaves
35:13through the scholarly community
35:14when they claimed to have found the first reference
35:16to the crucifixion of a Messiah.
35:19If this interpretation is correct,
35:21it seems to be suggesting that a son of David,
35:25this messianic-type figure known as the prince of the congregation,
35:28will die.
35:30And, of course, the idea that a messianic figure will die
35:33is central to Christianity,
35:36but had not been known to us
35:38in the Judaism of the time of Christianity.
35:42And so it was quite sensational and very controversial.
35:44Many of my colleagues around the world
35:46were unhappy with this suggestion
35:47and chose instead, and have chosen since,
35:51to read the text as speaking not of the pierced one
35:54or the one who is the Messiah
35:56as the one who is being killed,
35:59but rather as the one who is doing the killing.
36:02Now, all of that hinges on the way one reads
36:04one particular word.
36:06You understand that the Hebrew language is not vocalized.
36:09There are no vowels in it.
36:10So, therefore, the reader supplies those
36:12as reading while reading the text.
36:15And one supplies different vowels
36:17according to how one understands the text,
36:18and one understands the text
36:19according to how one supplies the vowels.
36:21So, there's a circle going on
36:22of interpretation and understanding
36:24between the reader and the text.
36:26Now, the particular line in question,
36:28we suggested, could be read,
36:31and they will kill the prince of the congregation.
36:36Now, other scholars have suggested
36:38that the line be read,
36:42and the prince of the congregation will kill him.
36:45Some him, we don't know who that him is.
36:48No one has a good idea, really, of who that might be.
36:50The line is ambiguous in the Hebrew,
36:53and the controversy has raged around
36:55how that ambiguity might be resolved.
36:57If I were to try to work on this document,
37:03I would have at least tried to see it
37:07in the context of the other ten or so fragments
37:11from the document,
37:13whose pictures Eisenman prints,
37:15prints, but he hardly does a thing with them,
37:18to try to find out in what sort of work
37:21these various pieces come,
37:24and whether then, in such a piece,
37:26an account of the leader of the community
37:30putting someone else to death,
37:32or the leader of the community,
37:35the branch of David, being put to death.
37:37What I think is possible is
37:39that there was a development in the ideas
37:41about this figure over the 200 years or so
37:43during which these texts were copied down.
37:46And one might say that in later years,
37:49especially as we come up to the time of the war with Rome,
37:52that there were many messianic figures in Judaism
37:54who were being put to death.
37:55It was happening almost every day.
37:57It's a little bit of exaggeration to say that,
37:59but certainly we know that there were
38:00messianic figures being put to death in Judaism.
38:03And Josephus, the historian of the Judaism of that period,
38:07tells us of numerous figures,
38:08and we must assume there were others.
38:10So the idea that a messiah would die was not new.
38:15It's just that it was not written down in a text before this
38:18by the group who believed in him.
38:23There had not been any evidence
38:25that a Jewish community before the crucifixion of Jesus
38:28expected a messianic figure to die.
38:30The pierced messiah text
38:33had been the responsibility of Father Millic,
38:36a member of the team in Jerusalem
38:38when John Strugnell was in charge.
38:41I do remember he discussed with me
38:43this ambiguity in the text.
38:46We looked around for any clues,
38:49but we didn't find anything
38:51that tilted the argument one way or the other.
38:56We didn't try to hide it.
39:02It was put into our concordance
39:04and things like this.
39:06But, you know,
39:08there were enough things
39:09that were of great importance
39:11where we were fairly sure
39:13of the interpretation
39:14which we put out in those days
39:18to avoid...
39:21Not to avoid,
39:22but, yeah,
39:23this didn't have any high priority.
39:28The controversy over Eisenman and Wise's
39:34translations and interpretations
39:36continued.
39:38They travelled to New York City
39:39to talk to colleagues and opponents.
39:41You can't tell me I don't have a right
39:43to come in and say,
39:44OK, look,
39:45let me finish.
39:46Besides learning that stuff,
39:47I want to learn something else.
39:49Fair enough.
39:50But don't you think
39:50that learning about the rap
39:51is important?
39:52Sure,
39:52but it's your usual preconception.
39:54It's OK.
39:54I didn't have a chance
39:55to respond to this Christian nonsense.
39:56You come at this thing.
39:57You come at this thing.
39:59He's making statements
40:00for the oppressor.
40:01You come at this thing
40:02from the preconception
40:04of rabbinic Judaism
40:05which you're always only interested in.
40:07No, you come with
40:08a preconception of Christianity
40:09which you impose on the whole thing.
40:10I come from Islam.
40:13As the conference carried on,
40:15speculation was rife.
40:17A group of scholars
40:17signed a statement
40:18claiming that Eisenman and Wise
40:20had plagiarized
40:21a number of texts
40:22in their new book.
40:23The group was led
40:24by Lawrence Schiffman.
40:25You don't return
40:26the other cheek.
40:27They beat this guy up already.
40:28I'm not returning
40:29the other cheek.
40:30That's a different problem.
40:31Once the guy's been beaten up,
40:32you can forgive him.
40:33Supporters of Dr. Wise
40:34feared the controversy
40:35would ruin his career.
40:39I'm not worried about my answers.
40:40And it'll help Mike's position.
40:41How will it help Mike's position?
40:42It will show that he thought about it.
40:43That's the only thing
40:44that I want to put in.
40:45Let's see what's in Mike's.
40:46He says,
40:46I am sorry that documentation
40:48was incomplete,
40:50that I did not more fully
40:51express indebtedness.
40:53I'm always a little taken back
40:55in a personal way
40:56by the amount of,
40:58the intensity of the feelings involved
41:00and the amount of identification
41:01between ideas and ego
41:03that happens in this field.
41:05Because ideally,
41:06it seems to me,
41:07as what we might call scientists,
41:09we should have some objectivity
41:11and some distance
41:11between ourselves and our ideas.
41:13But that is often
41:14not the case in this field.
41:15At the conference,
41:22we've had a kind of inquisition
41:24directed against us
41:25to try to discredit us
41:27in the public eye,
41:28to try to make our ideas suspect.
41:30What I see what's going on
41:31at the conference
41:32was really a last gasp
41:34of a dying establishment
41:35to still control the turf
41:38that they've been in control
41:39over for the last 35 or 40 years.
41:41What is it about my ideas
41:43that so worries them?
41:44In fact, I think the problem
41:45with my ideas
41:46is that it would contradict
41:47a good deal of what we see here.
41:50The vision we have here
41:51of Christianity
41:52is a kind of peaceful,
41:55cosmopolitan feeling
41:56of good cheer.
41:58The kind of thing
41:59that we're talking about
41:59in our new view
42:00of the Dead Sea Scrolls
42:01is that we have in Palestine
42:03a messianic movement
42:04that is much more aggressive,
42:07much more apocalyptic,
42:08much more militant,
42:10and much more
42:10this-worldly oriented,
42:11a kind of army of God
42:13in camps
42:15along the Dead Sea
42:17or out in the wilderness,
42:18a group preparing
42:19for a final apocalyptic war
42:21against all evil
42:22on the earth.
42:23It contrasts very,
42:24very starkly
42:25with some of the imagery
42:26that we have
42:27before us here.
42:30Eisenman is probably wrong.
42:32We can't prove that.
42:33And until we can prove
42:34that he's wrong,
42:36we really do need
42:37to take those ideas seriously.
42:38But what is involved
42:39by taking them seriously?
42:40What does it mean?
42:42Can we really shrug our shoulders
42:43and say,
42:44well, maybe the origins
42:46of Christianity
42:47aren't as we thought they were?
42:49Who cares?
42:50Who's going to say that?
42:52If Eisenman is right,
42:54then we have to rethink
42:55De Vaux's original hypothesis
42:57that the scrolls
42:58were written by the Essenes.
43:00We know from the
43:01first century historians
43:02that the Essenes
43:03were a pacifist,
43:04monastic group.
43:06Eisenman believes
43:07the true authors
43:08of the scrolls
43:08were living in camps
43:10in the desert,
43:10gathering their forces
43:11and waiting for the right moment
43:13to attack their enemies.
43:17To help settle the debate,
43:19the École Biblique
43:20brought in a Belgian
43:21husband and wife team
43:23of archaeologists
43:24to re-evaluate
43:25the material and notes
43:26collected by De Vaux
43:27but never published.
43:29They found
43:31an enormous quantity
43:32of pottery,
43:34like the little plates
43:35you have there,
43:36which seemed quite unique
43:37at that time,
43:39just as the inkwells
43:40which they then found.
43:41The inkwell you see there
43:42comes from Jerusalem
43:43and just like the pottery,
43:46it shows that
43:47there are so many other sites
43:49which since then,
43:51in the last 40 years,
43:52have produced material
43:54which is very much related
43:57to the Gilbert-Cumran material.
43:59What was surprising
44:02was the discovery
44:03of large quantities
44:04of pottery jugs
44:05found in the same area
44:06as a hoard of coins.
44:09Now, just one of these juglets
44:11was found
44:12in one of the caves
44:14very near to Gilbert-Cumran.
44:16It was still wrapped
44:17in a palm leaf
44:18and it had a vegetal essence
44:21inside.
44:22It appeared to be
44:24opo-balsam,
44:25the very expensive
44:26perfumed balsam
44:28that we know
44:29was being produced
44:30in the Jericho Valley.
44:34The Belgian team believe
44:36all the evidence suggests
44:37that far from being
44:39a secluded monastery,
44:41Qumran played
44:42an important part
44:43in the economy
44:43of the area,
44:45producing and selling perfume.
44:46Traditionally,
44:49perfume was manufactured
44:50by macerating herbs,
44:53plants, flowers
44:54in shallow water.
44:56The Belgian team
44:57discovered a number
44:58of installations
44:59on the site,
45:00like this one,
45:01that appeared to be designed
45:03to hold shallow water.
45:05One of the working hypotheses
45:07we are using now
45:09is that this shallow basin
45:11and this heating system
45:13may have been used
45:14in this context,
45:15especially considering
45:16how the whole area
45:18around this
45:19was kept clean.
45:21The identification
45:21of installations
45:22to heat liquids
45:24and macerate flowers
45:25supports the hypothesis
45:26that Qumran
45:27was a part of the balsam
45:29producing industry
45:30on the Dead Sea.
45:33The Belgian team
45:34has gone on
45:35to challenge Deveau's hypothesis
45:36that there was
45:37a scriptorium
45:38on the site.
45:39When they examined
45:40the reconstructed
45:41plaster furniture
45:42from this room,
45:43they realized
45:44pieces had been put together
45:45in the wrong way.
45:47They rearranged
45:48the components
45:48to form not tables
45:50on which the scrolls
45:51had been written
45:52or copied,
45:53but dining tables.
45:56Far from being
45:57a Spartan monastic settlement
45:59with a scriptorium,
46:01these tables
46:02had been designed
46:02to lie against the walls
46:04of a three-sided dining room
46:06on the top floor
46:07with a view
46:08over the Dead Sea.
46:09The only relation
46:11we can really establish
46:12between the scrolls
46:13and the site
46:14is that it's not
46:16the people who wrote them,
46:18the people who copied them
46:19or the people who read them
46:21that we know had
46:24where in a close relationship
46:26with the people
46:27who lived here
46:28on the site,
46:29but only a relation
46:31between the people
46:32who hid the scrolls
46:33and the people
46:35who lived here
46:36because it's really
46:37in their very close
46:38vicinity,
46:40in their back garden
46:41that they hid them.
46:43Pauline Dunsile's work
46:44tends to the conclusion
46:46or tends to the implication
46:47that these scrolls
46:49were not composed
46:50at the site of Qumran.
46:51I'm very happy
46:52with that conclusion.
46:53I had arrived
46:54at that conclusion myself
46:55on the basis
46:56of the manuscript evidence.
46:58For example,
46:59the hundreds and hundreds
47:00of different scribal hands.
47:02Simply,
47:03that phenomenon
47:04doesn't fit
47:05with the idea
47:05of these things
47:06being composed
47:06at one place
47:07by one small group
47:08and it implies
47:09that they came
47:10from the broader Palestine.
47:12I am particularly impressed
47:13with some of the connections
47:14the scrolls seem to have
47:15with the groups
47:16that Josephus knows
47:17by the name Zealots,
47:19those who were freedom fighters
47:20and anxious to throw off
47:21the yoke of Rome.
47:22Because we have
47:23some of the very same texts
47:24at the site of Masada,
47:27Josephus tells us specifically
47:28we can actually put a name
47:29on this group.
47:31He calls them
47:31the Sikari'i
47:32or the sword men
47:34and they were another subgroup
47:36among this broader movement
47:37of Zealots
47:39or freedom fighters
47:40and they were reading
47:42some of these very same texts
47:43that we find in the scrolls.
47:44I don't think
47:44that's a coincidence.
47:45I think we ought to look
47:46more carefully
47:46at those connections.
47:49Eisenman and Wise
47:50have raised again
47:50the question of Jesus'
47:52originality.
47:53How original was Jesus?
47:55What did he bring
47:56that was different?
47:56I think the answer
47:59we have to give
48:00is nothing really.
48:03Everything about Jesus' life
48:06and his teaching
48:07and even his death
48:08fits in to one
48:11of a number of patterns
48:12that we can see
48:13already being established
48:14in the thoughts
48:15and beliefs
48:16of people of his time.
48:17It's almost as if
48:18there was a script
48:20or a series of scripts
48:21waiting there
48:22for somebody
48:23to come
48:24and fulfil it.
48:26Could the writings
48:27of freedom fighters
48:28living in wilderness camps
48:29be responsible
48:30for the roots
48:31of Christianity?
48:32Did they write
48:33the script
48:34for Jesus of Nazareth?
48:35If they had swelled
48:36a number of converts
48:38to Christianity
48:38then their rituals
48:40and messianic expectations
48:41could have been adopted
48:43as Christian beliefs.
48:45Perhaps they were
48:46the earliest Christians
48:47as Eisenman claims.
48:48If so
48:50then Jesus of the Gospels
48:53is not who
48:54we thought him to be.
49:18THE END
49:22DO saya
49:23SEE
49:24THE END
49:25DO Я
49:25SEE
49:26THE END
49:29DO PIEN
49:30THE END
49:31DOCTOR
49:32DO
49:33THROP
49:34DIA
49:34DO
49:36DO
49:37NO
49:37DO
49:37DO
49:38DO
49:39NOT
49:40DO
49:41NOT
49:43DO
49:44NOT
49:45DO
49:46NOT
49:46DO
49:47NOT
49:48DO
Recommended
49:07
|
Up next
45:12
58:55
1:18:14
59:15
50:22
58:39
57:40