What We've Learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls

What We've Learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls

Sixty years ago, a dramatic discovery promised to revolutionize our understanding of the Bible. Has it?

by Kevin Dale Miller

God must have chuckled when he picked a sheep—and a mischievous one, at that—to make the archaeological discovery of the century.

The year was 1947, and the world was a'swirl with change—World War II had ended, and the United Nations was preparing to allow the Jewish people of Palestine to form the modern nation of Israel.

But for shepherd boy Abu Dahoud tending his father's sheep on rocky hills next to the Dead Sea, the biggest problem was tracking down one sheep that had scampered off—again. As Abu Dahoud surveyed one rocky cliff where the sheep might have climbed, his eye caught a small opening.

 

 Ironically, the scrolls show that the most important manuscripts are the ones we've always held in our hands—the Old and New Testaments.   

 

Hoping to scare the sheep out, Abu Dahoud picked up a stone and tossed it into the hole. Instead of his bleating sheep, however, he heard the sound of breaking dishes. His curiosity piqued, he and a friend climbed up to the small cave. When their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they saw several large clay jars holding tattered scrolls.

Little could Abu Dahoud have known that one of the jars contained the oldest existing copy of the Old Testament book of Isaiah. Neither could he have realized how his discovery would rattle the ivory towers of a world far removed from his own.

The world of Bible scholars is normally one of journals and conferences and musty university offices. It is a world in which academics attempt to piece together in new ways what the authors of the New Testament and Old Testament really said and meant when they wrote their books millennia ago. Sometimes the scholars produce enlightening discoveries, but just as often pose intriguing but fanciful hypotheses.

Take, for example, Rudolph Bultmann, a New Testament professor in Germany who died in 1976. Highly educated, he came to doubt that the stories of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John closely represented what they claim to represent: the life and words of Jesus. He sought to show, for instance, that because the Gospel of John was written by Christians generations after Jesus and his disciples had lived, the portrait it painted of Jesus was one Jesus himself would never have recognized because it was so "Greek," and not Jewish. (The widely publicized Jesus Seminar continues to popularize this kind of "research" to this day, once a year publicizing their "discoveries" of more Gospel sayings Jesus supposedly couldn't have spoken.)

Other scholars have questioned the reliability of our present Bible texts. They suggest that something akin to the game of telephone has happened to the texts of the Bible—changes were made as they were copied, recopied, and re-recopied over the centuries. They taught that so much has been dropped or added or altered that we could never be confident of what the biblical writers originally wrote.

A library of scrolls

Then Abu Dahoud and his sheep found Isaiah, which the experts determined was made one hundred years before Jesus was born in nearby Bethlehem. (While we will never know, it is not unthinkable that when Jesus as a boy read from the Prophets in the Temple, he might have held this very Isaiah scroll in his hands.)

Soon more manuscripts were discovered, including 100,000 manuscript fragments, in other nearby caves in Qumran (the name of the area northwest of the Dead Sea where Abu Dahoud found his scrolls). When the explorations were finished, scrolls and fragments of every book of the Old Testament except Esther had been found. One leading scholar of the day, W.F. Albright of Johns Hopkins University, quickly declared the scrolls and fragments "the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times."

Fifty years have elapsed since the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered. Abu Dahoud is now an old man (several Dead Sea scroll researchers have interviewed him on videotape within the last several years). And still the scrolls ignite the public imagination as much as they did five decades ago.

But what have the manuscripts shown us that we didn't already know? This question must be answered at several levels.

At one level, the answer is a surprising, "Not much." That is, there have been no dramatic findings proving or disproving the central tenets of the Jewish or Christian faiths, as some had predicted. This lack of surprises is in itself very revealing.

Take the Isaiah scroll. Until 1947, the oldest manuscript of Isaiah was a Masoretic text that had been copied in the late 900s. Although any book or scroll produced 1,000 years ago is very old, the Masoretic text is actually very "young" when you consider the prophet Isaiah lived 1,600 years before that (around 700 B.C.). This means it had been recopied many times during that interim, with plenty of opportunity for errors to be introduced. With the Qumran Isaiah text, 1,000 years older than the Masoretic text, how accurate was the later text? How significant was "the telephone game" problem?

"Despite the fact that the Isaiah scroll was about a thousand years older than the Masoretic version of Isaiah," says James VanderKam of the University of Notre Dame, "the two were nearly identical except for small details that rarely affected the meaning of the text." In other words, a word like "over" in one text might read "above" in the other—not the kind of difference that rocks your faith in the reliability of the Bible texts. Though the Isaiah text had been "whispered" down the telephone line through generations of scribes, God had carefully protected his Word.

Uncovering Jesus' world

Besides the copies of the Old Testament scriptures, the Dead Sea caves also contained other kinds of writings, including commentaries on the Bible, a plan for rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem, fanciful writings about Adam, Eve, and other Old Testament characters, and writings about a coming war between the forces of Darkness and the forces of Light. Many refer to a Righteous Teacher and a coming Messiah who will save the faithful.

Together they give us a picture of how the Jews who lived at Qumran between 200 B.C. and A.D. 70 lived and thought. Having discovered their library, we can compare their sacred writings to those of the New Testament, which would have been composed after A.D. 50.

Interestingly, the comparison has knocked down some long-cherished liberal theories about the New Testament. If we take Bultmann's claim that the Gospel of John is Greek, and therefore foreign to how Jesus would have really taught, we find today a respected expert like Edwin Yamauchi of Miami University writing: "John's Gospel, once considered by critics to be late and Hellenistic (Greek), is now shown by the Qumran parallels (in the Dead Sea scrolls) to be the most Jewish of the Gospels."

Rudolph Bultmann, needless to say, would find this hard to swallow, since John focuses on the divine nature of Christ—that before he was born in Bethlehem he was "with God, and was God." This was "Greek thinking" at its worst, Bultmann believed, and because Jesus was Jewish, he wouldn't have accepted this description of himself, much less taught it to his disciples. Now the Dead Sea scrolls show how wrong Bultmann was—Jesus was a Jew of his day, and there is nothing anti-Jewish with John presenting him as God incarnate.

Today research on the Dead Sea scrolls is moving along faster than ever. Photocopies of the scrolls, which until the early 1990s were available to only a handful of overly busy scholars, have been made available to all scholars. Undoubtedly, we will continue to learn more about the world in which Jesus lived and in which the New Testament was written.

Ironically, however, the scrolls serve to show that the most important manuscripts are the ones we've always held in our hands—the Old and New Testaments. They not only tell us directly about the Jew named Jesus (unlike the Dead Sea scrolls), but through divine inspiration they reveal why he was the true Teacher of Righteousness and Savior for whosoever will believe.

The scrolls also remind us not to put our trust in what biblical scholars may teach in any given generation, but in the One who "was pierced for our transgressions" because "we all, like sheep, have gone astray, each one has turned to his own way."

Isaiah's words are somehow a fitting perspective for a story that began sixty years ago with a shepherd boy named Abu Dahoud and his straying sheep.

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine.

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July/August 1997, Vol. 35, No. 4, 36

WHAT'S NEW(S) ABOUT THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS? 

By Daniel J. Harrington 

Scholarly squabbles and radical revisionism make headlines, but new understandings of Christian origins and the formation of the Judaic canon are the deep religious contribution of the scrolls. 

The "news" and the "new" are not always identical. The "news" is what every day we read in our newspapers, hear on our radios, watch on our television sets, and (if we are truly people of the 1990s) call up on our computer screens. The "news" is chiefly about events and personalities. It thrives on conflicts, scandals, the overturning of orthodoxies, and the embarrassment of apparently powerful persons and institutions (with care, however, not to offend too many patrons, advertisers, and the truly powerful).[1] 

The "new" in the present context refers to what may be genuinely important in the long run, to the significant and epoch-making. The "new" may first appear in technical journals and monographs; its repository is the handbook or encyclopedia. In everyday life the "new" has a lasting and widespread effect long after what constituted "news" is forgotten. The "new" changes how we look at or do things. 

In the nearly fifty years since their first discovery the Dead Sea scrolls have provided both "news" and the "new." Their discovery and subsequent study have produced colorful characters, weird events, and plenty of conflicts. They have challenged (and enriched) conventional understandings of both Judaism and Christianity. At the same time, the Dead Sea scrolls have given us "new" ways of looking at the He brew Bible and early Christianity that will outlive the "news" about the scrolls. 

The basic information about the Dead Sea scrolls and the people behind them is familiar to most readers. The term "Dead Sea scrolls" refers to the series of manuscript finds in Palestine near the Dead Sea beginning in 1947. The first and most important discoveries took place at Wadi Qumran where scrolls and manuscript fragments written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek were found in eleven caves between 1947 and 1956. Other texts and documents were found near Qumran at Wadi Murabba'at (1951), Khirbet Mird (1952), Wadi Seiyal/Nahal Se'elim (1952), and Wadi Habra/Nahal Hever (1960-61). Although these secondary sites have yielded very important materials, the term "Dead Sea scrolls" often refers more narrowly to the larger and richer Qumran discoveries. 

What did the eleven caves at Qumran yield? Their most familiar contents are texts of the Hebrew Bible-texts (mainly quite fragmentary) for every book but Esther. There are also works based on or related to the Hebrew Bible, sometimes called the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. Among them are Hebrew and Aramaic texts of works transmitted in secondary versions (1 Enoch, Jubilees, Sirach), as well as previously unknown works (Genesis Apocryphon, "pesharim" or biblical commentaries on the Prophets and Psalms, targums of Job and Leviticus). Moreover, there are many previously unknown "rules" for community life (Community Rule), for the eschatological battle (War Scroll), and for the ideal-temple city (Temple Scroll). Finally there are poetic and liturgical pieces (Thanksgiving Hymns, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice), wisdom instructions, legal rulings (4QMMT), horoscopes, and even a treasure map (Copper Scroll).[2] 

Who were the people behind the Qumran scrolls? The language and contents of the scrolls establish that they were Jews. That they lived at Qumran between the second century B.C.E. and the late first century C.E. (with some interruption) is indicated by the archaeological excavations of the main buildings at the site, the palaeographical analysis of the scripts in which the scrolls were written, the allusions to historical figures and events, and the results of Carbon 14 tests. 

An early and still widely accepted hypothesis is that the people behind the Dead Sea scrolls were Essenes-a Jewish sect that originated or took shape in the dispute over the Jewish high priesthood and the control of the Jerusalem Temple under the Maccabean leaders Jonathan and Simon in the mid-second century B.C.E. The figure known in several scrolls as the "Teacher of Righteousness" may have been the rightful claimant to the high priesthood. The move of the group to Qumran might have been a protest against the Maccabean usurpation of the priesthood and the Temple. The Community Rule (or, Manual of Discipline), one of the first texts discovered and published, is often considered to have been the rule followed by the Essenes at Qumran. If that is so, it is not surprising that scholars quickly began describing the group behind the scrolls as "monastic," since the text envisions a community life devoted to prayer and biblical study.[3] 

What's "News"? 

Since their discovery in the late 1940s, the Dead Sea scrolls have excited the popular imagination and gained the attention of the media.[4] Perhaps one of the reasons for this was the fact that they were found near the Dead Sea-the lowest place on earth, where nothing lives. Perhaps it was the early association with the Essenes-a mysterious Jewish religious brotherhood described by Philo and Josephus, and the subject of speculation concerning Christian origins even before the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered. Perhaps it was that the discovery of the scrolls coincided historically with the birth of the State of Israel and the absorption of Arab Palestine into Jordan-a time of political confusion and intrigue that influenced the story of the scrolls from the start. Perhaps it was the 1955 New Yorker report on the scrolls by critic Edmund Wilson, a famous literary figure of the 1950s and 1960s, and its subsequent appearance in book-form.[5] 

An aura of mystery has surrounded the Dead Sea scrolls from 1947 onward. Before their discovery it was a commonplace among biblical scholars and archaeologists that such a find was impossible. They believed that the conditions of soil and climate in Palestine rendered unlikely the preservation of written materials such as had been found in great abundance in Egypt during the late nineteenth century. But the accidental discovery of Qumran Cave 1 by the Bedouin shepherd "Mohammed the Wolf" in 1947 proved the experts wrong. 

The rapid publication of the scrolls from Qumran Cave 1 confirmed the importance of the discovery and whetted the popular appetite for more. There were two copies of the book of Isaiah, a commentary on the book of Habakkuk, an expansive paraphrase of parts of Genesis in Aramaic, a hitherto unknown Community Rule, a War Scroll outlining the final battle between the forces of light and darkness, and a collection of Thanksgiving Hymns. These texts (apart from the Genesis Apocryphon) were quite well preserved, and it was relatively easy to publish photographs and transcriptions of them. The discovery of further texts in other caves at Qumran, the archaeological excavation of the site, and the exploration of other sites in the Dead Sea area added to the popular interest and enthusiasm. 

Although many scholars accepted the hypothesis that the scrolls from Qumran Cave 1 were part (indeed the core) of the library of an Essene community who lived at the site, a few doubted the antiquity of the Qumran scrolls, assigning them to the Middle Ages. Some contended that Qumran was a Zealot military camp-the training ground for a revolutionary Jewish movement defeated by the Romans in the Jewish Revolt of 66-73 C.E. Still others who accepted the Essene hypothesis speculated that John the Baptist and Jesus had once been members of this community. Some even contended that allusions to Jesus and early Christian figures could be detected in the scrolls. Such claims proved irresistible to newspaper and magazine writers in search of their annual Christmas and Easter/Passover "religion" stories. 

The early days of Dead Sea scrolls research featured some colorful characters: William Foxwell Albright, the polymath professor of oriental studies at Johns Hopkins University, who proclaimed the antiquity and importance of the scrolls; the Syrian Metropolitan Samuel, who brought some scrolls to the USA and offered them for sale through an advertisement in The Wall Street Journal; Yigael Yadin, the young Israeli general turned archaeologist, who enlisted Professor Harry Orlinsky under the disguise of "Mr. Green" to verify the authenticity of the archbishop's scrolls; Pere Roland de Vaux, O.P., the archaeologist of Qumran and the first director of the publishing project; and Kando, the Arab antiquities dealer who set himself up as the go-between between Bedouin cave explorers and Western scholars. 

Although the manuscripts from Qumran Cave 1 were published rapidly, it was clear that the many small fragments from Cave 4 and from the other caves required more extensive and complicated treatment. And so there was formed an international and interconfessional team of seven young scholars (Patrick W. Skehan, Frank M. Cross, John Strugnell, John Allegro, Josef Milik, Claus-Hunno Hunzinger, Jean Starcky) to work at editing the fragments. (Politics dictated that because the team was to work in Jordanian Jerusalem, there were, sad to say, no Jewish representatives.) The task of the team was to assemble, decipher, transcribe, and translate the texts, and to provide commentaries to be published in the official series issued by Oxford University Press under the title "Discoveries in the Judaean Desert" (known as DJD). The first task of sorting and assembling was like being faced with thousands of pieces from many different jigsaw puzzles all mixed together, and being asked to reconstruct the pictures without knowing what they were. After preliminary joins were made, the team worked at deciphering and interpreting the texts. A concordance listing every word in context was made to assist the editing process. 

The work of the team started well, and it seemed that the remaining Dead Sea scrolls would be published rapidly. Between 1955 and 1968 five volumes in the official DJD series were published, followed, however, by only two from 1968 to 1989. The political changes after the Six Day War in Jerusalem, the academic commitments and personal problems of members of the editorial team, and the magnitude and complexity of the task all contributed to the slowdown. Still by the late 1980s about 80 percent in quantity of the Dead Sea scrolls had been published in some form. But many of the fragmentary works, especially from Cave 4, had not appeared in a form accessible to other scholars and to the general public. 

The patience of the academic community regarding the unpublished texts was wearing thin, and the relative quiet surrounding Dead Sea scrolls research was shattered in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Geza Vermes called the nonpublication of the Qumran texts "the academic scandal of the twentieth century." Hershel Shanks (editor of Biblical Archaeology Review) and others mounted a public media campaign to "release the scrolls"-a campaign that issued in articles in major news magazines, op-ed pieces, and even an editorial in the New York Times. 

The campaign achieved one of its goals when the chief editor of the project, John Strugnell, was removed from his position after an interview in an Israeli newspaper in which he referred to Judaism as a "terrible religion." In fact, Strugnell had opened up the project to Israeli scholars and had set a timetable for the work to move forward. Because of his poor health and erratic behavior induced by manic depression, he was replaced by Emanuel Tov, Eugene Ulrich, and Emile Puech, who expanded the team further and developed an even tighter publication schedule. 

In the fall of 1991 other scholars sought to speed up publication even more. Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin Abegg, using the concordance prepared as a working document for the original team of editors, began to reconstruct the texts of Cave 4 documents with the help of computer programs.[6] Robert Eisenman procured and published a set of photographs of unpublished texts;[7] about the same time the Huntington Library in California made accessible its set of photographs to "all qualified scholars." In 1993 E. J. Brill, Inc., of Leiden, with the cooperation of the "official" team and the Israel Department of Antiquities, produced a microfiche edition of the full set of scrolls,[8] making them available to any library or individual scholar that could purchase the microfiche. 

Having access to the pictures of the scrolls is only the first step, however; it is also necessary to transcribe and translate them, and to provide appropriate philological, historical, literary, and theological comments. Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise in 1992 infuriated many of their scholarly colleagues by providing introductions, transcriptions, and translations for fifty Cave 4 documents.[9] The problem was that they skimmed off the "cream" of the Cave 4 texts and did their work badly:[10] their transcriptions and translations are often inaccurate, and the introductions place the texts within a hypothesis that almost all scholars reject: that the Qumran scrolls came from the "messianic movement" in Palestine that included Palestinian or "Jamesian" Christianity. 

The controversies about the publication of the Qumran scrolls reopened the debate about their relation to Christianity-modern and ancient. Carrying on a tradition represented by John Allegro (a member of the original editorial team), Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh charged in 1991 that since the Qumran scrolls contain material that is embarrassing and even fatal to the traditional claims of Christianity, the Vatican has carefully directed a plot to suppress their publication.[11] Despite the fact that these claims were patently absurd to those who know, their work became a publishing sensation not only in English-speaking lands but especially in Germany. About the same time, Barbara Thiering, an Australian scholar, used what she called the "peskier" method to assert that Jesus was part of the royal priestly line of the Qumran sect, was born out of wedlock, performed no miracles, did not die on the cross but was drugged and later revived in a burial cave, married twice and fathered three children![12] The "evidence" for these claims is set out in great detail, but in the last analysis the evidence is worthless and indeed nonexistent. 

What's New? 

Though what is "news" and what is "new" are not always identical, they are not mutually exclusive either. By simply following reports about the Dead Sea scrolls in the popular media one can learn a great deal but still may miss what is truly important about them. When we step back from the events, personalities, conflicts, and scandals, and try to discern what is genuinely significant about the Dead Sea scrolls, what emerges are new ways of looking at the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish world of Jesus (also called Second Temple Judaism), and Jesus and Christian origins. 

Hebrew Bible. Before the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls the oldest extant manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible were dated around 1000 C.E. The Dead Sea scrolls enable us to trace the history of the Hebrew text back a thousand more years, even to 200 B.C.E. in some cases.[13] The Qumran caves have yielded manuscripts of every book of the Hebrew Bible but Esther (whose absence may be accidental, or deliberate-since the Hebrew version of Esther does not mention God's name). Although the manuscripts of Isaiah found in Cave 1 are very extensive and in relatively good condition, most of the biblical fragments came from Cave 4, and give us only small portions of text. The bulk of these biblical fragments can be dated to the first century B.C.E. or C.E. Most were written in the familiar Hebrew square script with vegetable or carbon ink on scrolls made out of leather. There are, however, examples of biblical manuscripts written in the paleo-Hebrew or ancient Canaanite script. 

The biblical manuscripts from Qumran provide an eloquent witness to the variety of Hebrew textual traditions in Jesus' time. This textual diversity should not be exaggerated to the point of imagining radically different books of Genesis, Exodus, or whatever. But the Qumran manuscripts make clear that there was no uniform or official version of the Hebrew Scriptures such as the Masoretic Version came to be in Judaism; there is a significant amount of textual variation in the Qumran biblical scrolls. What once had been attributed to the free or poor translation techniques of those who produced the Greek Septuagint or other ancient versions in many cases turned out to be accurate renderings of different Hebrew originals. 

While the Qumran discoveries provide the earliest evidence for the books that make up the canon of the Hebrew Bible as we know it, it is not clear if and how the people behind the scrolls distinguished between canonical and noncanonical books. The discoveries do show that the books of the Bible were read by these people and regarded as important, but there is no list of canonical books and no obvious external distinctions between biblical and nonbiblical books. There is simply no way of knowing whether the Qumran people had an idea of "canon" in the sense of a fixed list of books regarded as normative, or to what books they might have accorded or refused authoritative status. 

Second Temple Judaism. Although we cannot know what the Qumran people regarded as canonical Scripture, we do know that their chief texts included the books of our Bible. This is proven not only from the multiple copies of biblical books but also from the different kinds of composition based on the Bible. These include imaginative expansions and paraphrases of biblical narratives (Genesis Apocryphon), "commentaries" showing how biblical prophecies were fulfilled in the life and history of the Qumran community (Pesharim), Aramaic translations and paraphrases of difficult Hebrew texts in the style of what later came to be known as targums (on Job and Leviticus), and biblical and other laws expressed directly by God as the speaker (Temple Scroll). Even in compositions that are not directly based on biblical books, the Hebrew language and style are thoroughly biblical. These people (and other Second Temple Jews) understood creativity as saying "new" things in "old" ways; that is, they used biblical words and phrases in new combinations to express what they regarded as new. 

If the Qumran scrolls represent the library of a sect of Essenes (or Sadducees-see below, p. 473), then they tell us about a Jewish religious movement around Jesus' time. The usual theory is that in the face of invasion by the Roman armies around 70 C.E. the inhabitants of Qumran placed the contents of their library in the hills surrounding the main site for safekeeping as they fled. Allowing that it is dangerous to deduce the beliefs and practices of a group from the contents of its library, the Community Rule (or, Manual of Discipline) looks much like the handbook for the theology and practice of a Jewish "monastic" group. Among the first Cave 1 texts to be published and studied, the Community Rule was quickly assumed to be the rule by which the Qumran people lived. As other "rules" appeared, there were efforts to relate them to the Community Rule and thus to chart the history of the Qumran movement. It is not impossible, however, that these rules applied to different Jewish movements or that they were simply products of religious imagination ("map without territory"). Whatever their origin and use, the rules provide evidence for variety and diversity within Second Temple Judaism. The early document known as 4QMMT details the legal and cultic issues on which "we" differ from those in control of the Jerusalem Temple. 

Whereas before the discovery of the Qumran scrolls scholars divided Jews into Pharisees and Sadducees, now it is clear that there were many groups and movements in Second Temple Judaism: Pharisees, Sadducees (perhaps several kinds), Essenes, Samaritans, Zealots, Christians, and probably many more. These discoveries in turn inspired a restudy of the so-called Old Testament Pseudepigrapha[14] and a thoroughgoing reassessment of the sociological map of Second Temple Judaism. It is now clear that Judaism not only in the Diaspora but also in the land of Israel was open to Greek influences from the third century B.C.E. onward in the areas of language, economics, military strategy, politics, culture, and even religion.[15] Scraps of ancient Greek biblical texts were found at Qumran, and a first-century C.E. scroll of the Twelve Minor Prophets in Greek was discovered at nearby Nahal Hever. Even Jews as isolated as the Qumran people and their neighbors near the Dead Sea were affected to some extent by Hellenism. 

Christian Origins. The major reason why the Dead Sea scrolls have been "news" for almost fifty years is that they have repeatedly been connected with Jesus and the early Christians. In the effort to get at the "real" story the combination of Jesus and the Dead Sea scrolls has been irresistible. But attempts to demonstrate a direct relation between them turn out to be based on flimsy evidence and cannot be taken as in any way proved. Moreover, the claim that Qumran Cave 7 contained fragments of the Greek New Testament is very dubious.[16] Rather, the Qumran movement and early Christianity are best seen as independent and parallel groups within Judaism in the first century. The real significance of the Dead Sea scrolls for Christian origins is that they fill out and enrich our understanding of the Jewish world in which Jesus and the early Christians lived. 

The closest parallels between the Dead Sea scrolls and the Christian Scriptures occur in theological language, eschatological mindset, and community organization.[17] For both groups, the Hebrew Bible was the major source of theological words and concepts ("covenant," "thanksgiving/confession," etc.). For both groups theological creativity consisted in using old terms in new ways and new contexts. Both groups shared a lively interest in the present and future "fulfillment" of Scripture. The obvious difference is the centrality accorded to Jesus as the focus of early Christian theological language. 

Both groups viewed themselves as living in the "last days." They saw the present as a struggle between light and darkness that would soon end with a definitive divine intervention. Both operated out of a schema of modified dualism-one that protected God's sovereignty in creation and at the end-time, while handing the present over to the Prince of Light and the Prince of Darkness. The most complete presentation of this dualism appears in columns 3 and 4 of the Community Rule: "From the God of knowledge comes all that is and shall be.... He has created man to govern the world, and has appointed for him two spirits in which to walk until the time of His visitation: the spirits of truth and falsehood." A similar schema underlies the theologies of Paul and John, Jesus' teachings about God's kingdom in the Synoptic Gospels, and the visions of John the Seer in Revelation. Again, the obvious difference is that the Christian Scriptures place more stress on the present or realized dimensions of God's reign through the decisive event of Jesus' death and resurrection. 

Despite (or perhaps because of) their convictions about the imminent intervention of God and the coming of God's kingdom, both groups placed great emphasis on community structures. The group envisioned in the Community Rule had a leader or teacher (maskil) and an "overseer" (mebagger) an inner circle or executive committee of twelve men (standing for the twelve tribes of Israel) and three others (representing the three priestly clans descended from Aaron), and the body of the community called "the many." There are intriguing parallels here to the place of the Twelve Apostles in earliest Christianity, the development of the office of "overseer" or "bishop" (episkopos in Greek), and the references to the whole Christian community in Acts as "the many" (plethos). The obvious difference is the urban and open character of the early Christian community. 

There are other fascinating but in the last analysis less convincing parallels: the Qumran practice of community of goods and the sharing practiced by the Jerusalem Christians according to Acts; the ritual washings practiced by the Qumran people and the baptisms of John the Baptist and Jesus' followers; the community meals anticipating the eschatological banquet at Qumran and the Lord's Supper/Eucharist among early Christians; the solar calendar used at Qumran and the chronological discrepancies in the Gospel passion narratives. In each case there are impressive surface communalities but also profound differences, illustrating the basic contention that these were independent and parallel movements within Second Temple Judaism. It is not impossible that John the Baptist once belonged to something like the Qumran movement and that members of such movements became Christians. But early Christian claims about Jesus set Christianity apart from the Qumran and other Jewish movements. 

Present and Future "News" 

If the "news" deals with events, personalities, and conflicts, then the Dead Sea scrolls have been a rich source of "news" for almost fifty years. If the "new" refers to significant changes in our understanding, then the Dead Sea scrolls have given us "new" ways of looking at the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, and Jesus and the early Christians. What is happening now, and what can we expect in the future?[18] 

The most obvious and important "new" is the flood of competant studies of unpublished and published Qumran texts that are appearing in scholarly journals, collections of papers given at conferences, and volumes honoring distinguished scholars. These studies, produced by young scholars trained in large part by members of the original Qumran publication team (especially John Strugnell and Frank Cross), will feed into the "official" DJD series that should be completed by the year 2000. 

The revival of interest in the Dead Sea scrolls has brought with it a reopening of the debates about the nature of the Qumran site and the people who lived there, raising questions about the "monastery" interpretation, mainly because the analogy was too easy and does not explain all the evidence. Some regard Qumran as a meeting place or "retreat center" for a Jewish religious movement. Others want to revive the theory that it was a military camp or training center. Still others deny any real connection between the main buildings at the site and the scrolls, on the assumption that the scrolls were transferred to Qumran from Jerusalem in the face of the imminent attack by the Romans in 70 C.E. The archaeologists now charged with publishing the final excavation report suggest that the main building complex is best understood as a Roman villa (which, of course, does not exclude later uses as a monastery, retreat center, or military camp). 

There is also criticism of the identification of the Qumran people as Essenes. In the text known as 4QMMT and other legal texts there are agreements with the positions attributed in later Jewish sources to the Sadducees over against the Pharisees. Were the people behind the scrolls Sadducees rather than Essenes? Were the Essenes an offshoot of the Sadducees? Did the term "Sadducee" in the second century B.C.E. mean what it did in the first century C.E. and in the Christian Scriptures? 

What these debates about the site and its people will conclude is hard to predict. I suspect, however, that the theory of Qumran as an Essene "monastery" still has much to be said for it. And what the debates about the relation of the Qumran scrolls to early Christianity will conclude is also hard to predict. I suspect, however, that most scholars will continue to look upon the Qumran and Christian movements as independent manifestations of the diversity within Second Temple Judaism. Thus far the Dead Sea scrolls have been full of surprises. Who know what will be "news" and "new" about them in the years to come? 

Notes 

[1] Paul Vallely, "The Media, the Church, and the Truth," Priests &People 8 (1994) 175-80. 

[2] See Geza Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (3rd ea.; Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1987); and Florentino Garcia Martinez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in English (Leiden-New York: Brill, 1994). 

[3] Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective (London: Collins, 1977). 

[4] For a chronicle, see Vermes, "The Present State of Dead Sea Scrolls Research," Journal of Jew*k Studies 45 (1994):101-10. 

[5] Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1978). 

[6] A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew and Aramaic Texts from Cave Four (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1991- ). 

[7] A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Prepared with an Introduction and Index (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1991). 

[8] The Dead Sea Scrolls on Microfiche: A Comprehensive Facsimile Edition of the Texts from the Judaean Desert (Leiden: Brill, 1993). 

[9] The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered: The First Complete Translation and Interpretation of 50 Key Documents Withheld for Over 35 Years (Shaftesbury, U.K.: Element, 1992). 

[10] Daniel J. Harrington and John Strugnell, "Qumran Cave 4 Texts: A New Publication," Journal of Biblical Literature 112 (1993): 491-99; and Garcia Martinez, "Notes al margen de The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered," Revue de Qumran 16 (1993): 123-50. 

[11] The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (New York: Summit, 1991). For a refutation, see Otto Betz and Rainer Riesner, Jesus, Qumran and the Vatican (New York: Crossroad, 1994). 

[12] Jesus &the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Unlocking the Secrets of His Life (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992). 

[13] Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992). 

[14] James H. Charlesworth, ea., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983, 1985). 

[15] Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism. Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974); and Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World. Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). 

[16] For a defense of this identification see Jose O'Callaghan, Los papiros griegos de la cueva 7 de Qumran (Madrid: Editorial Catolica, 1974). For a revival see Carsten P.Thiede, The Earliest Gospel Manuscript? The Qumran Papyrus 7Q5 and its Significance for New Testament Studies (Exeter, U.K.: Paternoster, 1992). 

[17] James H. Charlesworth, ea., Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Doubleday, 1993). For earlier collections, see Krister Stendahl, ea., The Scrolls and the New Testament 

By Daniel J. Harrington 

DANIEL J. HARRINGTON, S.J., professor of New Testament at Weston School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been general editor of New Testament Abstracts since 1972 and is a past president of the Catholic Biblical Association. The most recent of his fifteen books are Matthew in the Sacra Pagina series (which he edits) and Paul on the Mystery of Israel (Liturgical Press). 

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Qumran and Early Christianity 

A sort of detective story, and a personal view of Christian origins.

by Sid Green (Revised October 23, 2001) 

Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls 

The popular view of Qumran is not undisputed. Some say that the place had nothing at all to do with any Essenes — and they may be correct. [1] The Dead Sea Scrolls of course were found in caves, not all of them very close to the ruins of Qumran. Furthermore, Pliny’s identification of an ‘Essene’ site is taken as Qumran, but there are arguments that weigh against this. 

Firstly, Pliny was not the most reliable of reporters, being on a par with many of the Church Fathers in his record of outrageous assertions, and secondly he can be interpreted as indicating a different location, not far away, but not Qumran. 

We should not forget that the Scrolls that we have are not all that were concealed in the caves. We know for a fact that the simple Bedouin who discovered them were careless with them before their value was understood. There have always been rumours of privately traded scrolls and dark dealings, and it is certain that some scrolls have been accidentally destroyed.

We have also to consider the fact that the scrolls are not a homogeneous collection; not all of them suggest anything of a sectarian community. Those that do however form an anchor point for further examination. 

The Messiah and Sectarian Judaism

Because of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we now know that early first century Jewish eschatology varied somewhat between sects. Most Jews however expected the End of Days to come at an indefinite future date, when, to prepare them for the End, the Davidic throne would be restored to God’s Anointed. Many in Palestine at this time felt that the End was near, and were tensely awaiting this Messiah. He would bring righteous rule to the Jewish people, eviction of alien occupiers, retribution for evil doers, justice for the oppressed. Under his guidance they would approach the day when God’s kingdom would be established on earth, ‘as it is in heaven’, with the dead resurrected, their bodies incorruptible. 

But from where would this Messiah come? This was not to be some process akin to that of finding the next Dalai Lama. There was no point in the people searching for some righteous prince — he was to be the Anointed of God, not man’s choice of leader. He would not be elected by popular vote but would be expected to reveal himself in some way that was unmistakable. How could such a person escape notice until the hour of his appearance? And then, when he did at last reveal himself, who would believe him? 

The gospel narratives overcome this not inconsiderable problem in a manner that is well known, and in doing so they present a Messiah that has been said to be distinctly different from that which Jews generally expected. We know now however that to some Jews, such as those who wrote or used the Scrolls, the character and style of the gospel Messiah was exactly right — perhaps made to measure for the role?

The Scrolls give considerable information about the Messianic expectations of the sectarians. They expected a priestly Messiah, the Messiah of Aaron. They also believed in a royal or Davidic Messiah, a blood descendant of King David, the Messiah of Israel. They also expected that a Teacher would be sent to them as a precursor of the Messiah, to interpret the Law for the people. 

The founder of the movement described in the Dead Sea Scrolls was known to the sectarians as ‘The Teacher of Righteousness’, and many scholars see the references to the Interpreter of the Law as referring to him. This of course implied that he would be resurrected for the job, since he had been dead for 150 years or so. 

The two Messiahs and the Teacher are confusingly presented in the Scrolls. Scholars took time to reach a consensus on the issue of whether there were two Messiahs or just two aspects of the same one. The latter concept is now the normal understanding. A foremost commentator, Joseph Fitzmyer, these days admits the possibility that the Teacher and the two Messiahs are to be seen as a single entity. [2] Some years earlier he had insisted that the two Messiahs of the sectarians contrasted with the one Messiah of the Christians, so eliminating any direct connection. [3] If however the three are combined, we see a Messiah who is of Davidic descent, of priest-like humility and wisdom, and a great teacher and upholder of the Law. 

Some close similarity to the gospel Jesus is obvious here. The Teacher of Righteousness was however a known personage and he really existed. It is not surprising that those who later had visions of a resurrected person whom they believed to be the Messiah, should identify that person with the Teacher. Dupont-Sommer, one of the scholars who worked with the Scrolls soon after their discovery, came to exactly this conclusion. Dupont-Sommer was shouted down of course, and he retreated, his scholarly credentials badly damaged as a result of his temerity. Perhaps the best qualified of the scholars on the original Scroll team — some would say the only qualified scholar — was the late John Allegro. He too thought that the Scrolls were about to ‘blow the lid off’ traditional ideas of Christian origins, but he went too far too quickly, giving great offence to the Church and losing most of his credibility in the process. As is well known, the work of the international team thereafter became a secret monopoly, with access refused even to other genuine scholars. It took almost a half century before all that they had under their control was released, condemned as a major scandal by all responsible observers. Today, Alvar Ellegård has joined the small list of scholars who have dared to identify the Teacher of Righteousness with the Messiah of the Essenic sectarians of the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

‘Essenes’ and other Identifying Names

A second anchor point we can use to construct a basis for further examination is provided by Josephus, who gives the name ‘Essenes’ to the subjects of two of his discourses that will interest us. [4] They are, he says, one of three principal sects that characterise the Judaism of the early first century, the other two being Pharisees and Saducees. His description of these people and their beliefs and practices, is much more thorough than he affords the other two factions, which is in itself a point of some interest, since modern Judaism usually disregards Essenism as having any relevance. As Fitzmyer points out however, rabbinical Judaism is Pharisaic and wrongly portrays Pharisaism as normative of second Temple Jewish thinking. [5] The well-known appeal of ‘not invented here’ is also readily observable in much Jewish commentary when Essenism is discussed. Tuckett, noting the observations of Neusner, reasons that the period of Pharisaic dominance really arose only after 70AD [6]. As the Saducees were uniquely concerned with the Temple itself, the question inevitably arises as to whose teachings the bulk of the population would have followed before that time. We will note here however that the gospel Jesus spends a lot of time bad-mouthing the Pharisees and the Saducees, so that we can be sure that he was not perceived as being closely linked to either of them. 

Josephus confirms much of what we learn from the Cairo Damascus document, (CD), discovered in 1896 by Solomon Schechter half a century before any Scrolls appeared. Later, the Scrolls too were seen to agree broadly with the Josephan account of Essene practice, and are clearly of the same sectarian provenance as the CD, which is now classified as part of the inventory of sectarian Scroll material. From this we learn that Essenism began when a group of ‘Zadokites’ withdrew from Temple-based observances because of what they saw as corruption in the religious establishment. After a few years the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ joined them, making a ‘New Covenant’ for them in the ‘land of Damascus’. This New Covenant, or New Testament, was an agreement and a protocol for ensuring the observance of the Law of Moses but it did not supersede the original Covenant made between the Hebrews and their God. For the Essenes, as for the Jesus of the gospels, the Covenant was everlasting, and the Law was set in stone and immutable, an issue on which Paul disagreed profoundly.

It is often pointed out that the word ‘Essene’ does not occur in the NT, but nor does it occur in any Scroll text. We shall see that the NT contains an alternative name used for the sectarians, even though attempts have been made to obscure it. Only in third party records of Essenism, such as by Josephus, Pliny, Philo, Hipolytus, and a very few others, do we see the word ‘Essene’. In the Scrolls, the sectarians of the ‘New Testament’ usually refer to themselves as ‘The Way’, ‘The Poor’, and the ‘Church of God’.

The first of these terms, the ‘Way’ is exactly as that used in Acts in a half dozen examples, the first of which is at 9:2. Within the NT, only in Acts do we see this sobriquet used for what we are invited to believe are early Jewish Christians. The Scrolls use the term in an unqualified or absolute sense, exactly as in Acts. [7].

The second term, the ‘Poor’ is ‘Ebionim’ in Hebrew. Paul reports that he was enjoined by the Jerusalem apostles James, Cephas and John, ‘to remember the poor’ in his ministry to Gentiles (Galatians 2:10) — the very thing, Paul protests, that he was intent on doing. The idea that Paul was fighting poverty with some kind of charity organisation is not supported by anything in his writings and so there must be another explanation. If the words mean ‘remember us, the Nazorean community and what we teach’ — then it makes perfect sense in its context.

The words of Josephus, and the early chapters of Acts also come to mind when we read of the gospel Jesus instructing aspiring disciples to sell all that they have and to give the proceeds to the poor. Although the intention here is probably to use the word ‘poor’ quite literally, it is still ‘Ebionim’ in the language of the grandparents of the evangelists of the Dispersion. Perhaps the Palestinian Nazorean nomenclature that they passed on was understood literally by their descendants. These had learned that their grandfathers sold their possessions and gave the proceeds to the community — who were the ‘Ebionim’. The Jesus of whom they write therefore urges his followers to sell their possessions and to give the proceeds ‘to the ebionim’, taken to mean ‘to those in poverty’.

The third appellation is usually rendered in Scroll translation as the ‘Congregation of God’. I choose to say ‘Church’ however, to make a point about language here, because the Greek ‘eklesias’, meaning ‘congregation’ or ‘gathering’ is translated as ‘church’ when seen in the context of Christian usage. ‘Eklesias’ is in fact precisely the correct word for ‘Congregation’ translated from the Hebrew and Aramaic of the Scrolls. Among the early writers Paul frequently uses this sectarian term, and it is still known and used by the author of Acts half a century or so later. (Acts 20:28). If we look beyond the lexicons that dictate the vocabulary of modern translations, we have a matching set of descriptors for the main characters of our pièce de théatre.

One name however is not found in the Scrolls. This is very probably because it was not in use at the time that the Scrolls were written, but came about as a direct result of the events that started the movement that became Christianity. Acts informs us that Paul, on trial before Felix, was accused by Tertullus of being a leader of the sect of the ‘Nazoreans’. (Acts 24:5) This is the last surviving example in the NT of the Greek word ‘Nazoraios’ used to mean a member of a sectarian group, rather than to mean ‘a citizen of Nazareth’, as NT lexicons would have it. [8] There are a few passages in the NT that contain similar orphaned references — words that betray a meaning that has elsewhere been modified, as in this example. Remembering that an obvious objective of Acts here is to portray Paul as a leader of the proto-Christian movement, rather than an irritant thorn in the sides of its Jerusalem-based leaders, removal of the passage would diminish the kudos being attributed to Paul. This example however cannot absorb the new meaning without making Paul, who came from Tarsus, the leader of a sect comprising the citizens of Nazareth. In fact, that is exactly what NT lexicons suggest that it does mean, but to translate it so would draw attention to the anomaly rather than to allow it to rest quietly.

The Messiah of the Early Writers

The gospel stories about Jesus arose at the end of the first century, long after the events that they purport to describe. We shall put these to one side for the moment, and consider only those who wrote much earlier about the supposed events. Unfortunately, there are no examples is of pre-gospel writings, where the author unmistakably knows the story of the life and teaching of Jesus, as would later be related by the evangelists. 

To the early writers the Messiah is a resurrected being, who becomes divine by virtue of this resurrection, and whose arrival marks the beginning of the End. This contrasts with the message of the gospels, where the human Jesus is portrayed as the Messiah, becoming divine through the intervention of the Holy Spirit, most commonly portrayed as happening at the baptism. To those who wrote prior to the gospels, his birth and biographical data, his family, his place of origin, baptism, teaching, parables, miracles, disciples, or even his trial and his passion are all unremarked by anyone. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor gives the short but exhaustive list of what we learn about Jesus’s earthly life from Paul: He was a Jew, of the line of David, and he had a mother. He was betrayed and crucified, as a result of which He died and was buried. [9] Murphy-O’Connor goes on to give the usual apologetic explanation of how we can be assured that Paul really was thoroughly familiar with Jesus’s teachings. The evidence he gives for this however falls short of his assurances in the matter.

The pre-gospel writers tell us that following his earthly existence the Lord was resurrected and that he was the long-awaited Messiah. Specifically, Paul also tells us that upon resurrection the Messiah was ‘appointed’ as the Son of God. [10], that he appeared in visions to some members of a brotherhood, [11] and that everything that he, Paul, knew of the Lord he had learned in visions from the resurrected Lord himself. [12] 

None of this gives any hint that underlying the picture painted by Paul, and other early writers, is the massive volume of information that they supposedly knew but never mentioned. We hear of it only when it first appears in the gospels. It is in fact what we mean when we speak of ‘the gospel’. It is not at all what Paul meant when he used that word. If that doesn’t prompt us stop to think, then perhaps it should. 

Obviously Paul and the evangelists must share some knowledge of the sectarian process that became Christianity. Both were involved with it in some way and both were contemporary with a phase of its development, with only a half century or so separating them. It would be absurd to suggest that the evangelists knew nothing about what Paul had believed, or that the totality of what they both knew would be catalogued in Paul’s epistles. Nor should it surprise anyone that the evangelists put words into the mouth of Jesus that Paul had written before their gospels appeared. Yet such a sequence of events is never acknowledged as being a possibility in Christian apologetics, even though it is highly probable that through his correspondence some words of Paul should be known to one or another of the evangelists. Apologists prefer to posit a ‘synoptic tradition’ dating from the resurrection, that was known to Paul, as well as to the evangelists who later put it into writing for the first time. 

The case made here therefore is not that there is absolutely nothing in common between Paul’s writing and that of the evangelists, nor that what little exists is inexplicably trivial. The case being made is that the very few examples of connecting text, or phrases or even ideas, are susceptible to far more reasonable explanations than this apologetic cure-all. Even the fact that Paul sometimes delivers teachings that run directly counter to those of the gospel Jesus scarcely occasions comment, and certainly is never acknowledged as any reason to suppose that he is not au fait with the ‘synoptic tradition’. 

And yet, allowing for some movement in early Christian understanding in the half century that separates Paul from the gospels, we can see that the risen Messiah of Paul and the resurrected Jesus of the gospels are broadly the same. It is the flesh and blood Jesus of the evangelists, his life story and his teaching that seem to be virtually unknown to earlier writers. 

Apologists are inclined to excuse Paul by telling us that in those days it was unusual for a writer to give credit to other people that were quoted. This is served up to us without conceding that the words of the Messiah, Son of God sent to redeem the world, need be differentiated in any way at all from the words of any less illustrious person. There is more than a little difference between Paul quoting the prophets without giving credit, although he usually seems to do so, and Paul quoting the central figure dominating his life. The words of the redeemer of mankind and He whose intervention in men’s affairs is the cause to which Paul has devoted his life, might reasonably be thought to be worth mentioning from time to time. 

There does however seem to be evidence that allows us to infer that whoever the Messiah of the early writers was in his earthly existence, some of his words may have been known. It is also very possible that different communities had differing quantities of such sayings at their disposal. The ‘Q’ source, extracted from Matthew and Luke, is the best known evidence for this, but other sayings are present in small quantities in Mark, while the Gospel of Thomas from the Nag Hamadi find contains a rich source of additional sayings. 

Again, Paul may have known something at least of such sayings and teachings. It is not improbable that Paul knew the Essene teaching prohibiting divorce for example, as this is the only time when he may be attributing a teaching to the Lord’s words, (1 Cor. 7:10-11). It is very possible that Paul believed these to have been the words of the Messiah — whether the gospel Jesus or the Teacher. If so however, he makes a blunder by prohibiting something that was in any case impossible either for Essenes or any other kind of Jew: a wife divorcing her husband. The same blunder made in the first gospel is probably an example of Pauline information being used by the evangelist rather than any ‘synoptic tradition’. Remembering that the supposed gospel story was enacted in Palestine, by Jews, it is hardly likely that such a faux pas would be present in a ‘tradition’ founded by them.

The only other instance where Paul refers to the words of the Lord is in the recital of the Eucharistic words. (1 Cor. 11:23-25) However, here Paul claims to have learned the words at first hand, through his visionary experiences, ruling out the possibility of the ‘synoptic tradition’. Mysteriously, his supposed co-religionists, Cephas, James and John, did not discuss such matters with him, nor apparently with anyone else. Had they done so, it would be seen that Paul had no need of visions to learn of public domain information. In reality, Paul’s words here, written years after the visions, are probably original. It would have been part of his solution to the fast disappearing hopes of the Nazoreans that the End was really happening and that the Messiah was about to establish himself on David’s throne. The empty chair at the Eucharistic table was an embarrassment and would have to go. (see below)

Paul’s silence about the majority of all the facts and issues about which the NT concerns itself, is an abiding mystery. It has frequently evoked declarations of bafflement even from noted Christian theologians. The mystery however is much preferred to the explanation, and is therefore allowed to stand. The explanation of course requires the presupposition of Paul’s familiarity with the gospel story to be abandoned, so imperilling the entire house of cards. 

Historical Records Compared

Josephus, writing after he had been ‘turned’ following his capture by the Romans during the first Jewish revolt, 66-70AD, tells us that Essenes in his day lived in every town. Some of them however, he gives a figure of four thousand, lived a communal existence, each selling his property and giving the proceeds to ‘stewards’ to provide for the community. [13] 

Acts of the Apostles, in many ways a frank and revealing book, tells us that after the resurrection the believers lived a communal existence of several thousands, each selling his property and giving the proceeds to ‘apostles’ to provide for the community. [14] 

This parallel, long since observed by many, typically drives Christians into apologetic overdrive. Sadly, many sceptical observers who have based their arguments on a historical interpretation of the gospel stories are just as defensive, and inventive of implausible explanations. It is therefore to be much admired that Fitzmyer, a Catholic theologian and a Jesuit, should write of these coincident accounts, scarcely raising a question mark over the self-evident fact that they report one and the same phenomenon. [15]

By the time that Josephus was writing, the Essenes had disappeared as an organised major sect. He reports their sufferings under torture by the Romans, and it may be the case therefore that they played a major role in the revolt. (He gives the name of one guerilla commander as John the Essene). That the revolt was fomented and led by Essenic zealots has been suggested in the context of seemingly related Scroll material discovered at Masada, but is not proven. A reasonable basis for presuming it to be so would be the belief in the arrival of the Messiah, whose ultimate victory, even over an enemy as formidable as the Roman legions, was a foregone conclusion.

The NT Historical Setting 

The earliest of the gospels, the prototype of the Markan gospel, began with a human Jesus becoming divine with his adoption as God’s Son occurring at his baptism, rather than at the resurrection. [16] The very fact of an attempt to describe the Messiah’s earthly life, introducing a previously unrevealed story, required divinity at the opening of that story. 

For Paul, the story began with the visions, when he, like others shortly before him, underwent an encounter with a resurrected person who was recognised as the expected Messiah. We cannot speak of Christianity in any meaningful way prior to the visions, as described by Paul and which mark the point of the resurrection for Christians. Prior to this, we have only Judaism, regardless of what messianic belief a particular group of Jews might hold, and afterwards we have a Jewish heresy on its way to becoming Christianity. 

From what Paul tells us in his epistles, we can judge that the visions that he and others observed were in the mid-30s, the approximate date suggested by the evangelists for the crucifixion and resurrection. According to Acts, before his own visions Paul was actively involved in the persecution of followers of ‘the Way’. Matthew Black has written that a German scholar, Rudolf Macuch, pinpoints exactly this period for the well-known exodus of ‘Nazoreans’ from Palestine, fugitives who settled in Mesopotamia to form what is now the community of the Mandaeans, of whose intrinsic Gnosticism we shall make note for future reference. A Mandaean document, ‘Haran Gawaita’, numbers the migrants at 60,000. [17] 

The Mandaeans revere John the Baptist, but denounce the Jesus of the Christians as an imposter, or perhaps as a fiction. The Lukan birth narrative seems to be uneasily aware of the importance of the Baptist, dividing the angel’s address, borrowed from Judges 13, between Elizabeth and Mary. Not only does he suggest that John will be a nazirite, but Jesus too is referred to as ‘holy one’, the literal translation of ‘nazirite’ into the Greek rather than a transliteration. [18]

Paul the Apostate Sectarian

According to the CD, the Essenes had a two-year induction process for novices, following an unspecified period of probation. Josephus agrees, but specifies one year for the probation, making a total of three years induction for novices. He even claims to have undergone the process personally. He notes that the Essenes expelled those who transgressed their rules, but killed any who denied the Mosaic Law — the most heinous form of apostasy. [19] 

The CD also tells of the Essene ‘camps’ in the ‘land of Damascus’. Scholarly opinions vary as to what ‘Damascus’ refers to. It may possibly have meant Qumran, or it may have meant the whole of Transjordan, [20] but all are agreed that it did not mean the city in the Roman province of Syria. However, armed with the warrant of the High Priest Saul went with a gang of thugs to round up followers of the ‘Way’ in Damascus. (Acts 9:2)

The NT of course here assumes the Syrian city, but we do not have to. No one has ever explained how the authority of the High Priest could possibly extend to a Roman province. Even Murphy-O’Connor concedes that ‘neither the High Priest nor the Sanhedrin had judicial authority outside the eleven toparchies of Judaea proper’. [21] Nor has anyone explained why such an epic journey was necessary in the first place, simply to round up a few dissidents who were already outside the jurisdiction and out of the hair of the Judaean authorities. When we consider that Acts claims that Judaea itself was teeming with several thousand much easier targets, the matter is all the more bewildering. Murphy-O’Connor does not provide answers, but chooses, rather disloyally, to cast aspersions on Luke’s veracity!

As is well known, Paul was converted to the Way before he could complete his mission. He tells us that he did not go back to Jerusalem afterwards, pace the author of Acts, but went to Arabia, and later returned to Damascus, where he stayed for three years. The circumstantial connection with the three-year noviciate is hard to ignore, and if Qumran was an important Essene ‘camp’, then Paul’s sojourn there for training makes perfect sense.

Paul was not the first to have these visions, and we can expect a changed mood in the camp, as the long wait for the Messiah gave way to the excitement of imminent worldly transformation. Is this close to the moment in history where Essenism was becoming Nazoreanism, which would in turn become Christianity? 

Essenes were zealous for the Law, but Paul was not, and his well-known views on this subject, once voiced, would have marked him for death, as Josephus records. We know however that he escaped in a basket lowered from the walls of Damascus. (2 Corinthians 11:33)

At Damascus Paul would have learned of three essentials of Essenic belief that would endure beyond all the many future changes. Firstly, they spoke of a New Testament. Secondly they were a baptising sect, where the act of baptism was a symbolic cleansing of sins. Thirdly they observed a ritual meal, where bread and wine were consumed. At the meal a place was laid for the Messiah, [22] who might be expected to participate physically after the visions began. As Roman Catholics know, the Messiah’s physical presence at the Eucharist celebration is said to have been Church teaching from the earliest times. 

Paul tells us, in 1 Corinthians 15, of the visions of the risen Messiah witnessed by Cephas, (Peter), then the Twelve, then 500 of the brothers, and then, lastly by his unworthy self. This account of the appearances contrasts starkly with the gospels. The four gospels disagree one with another, but there is some similarity, however slight, between any two of them. No similarity with the early account by Paul can be recognised. We recognise from Paul’s account however that the visions were seen as the arrival of the Messiah, creating the flood of converts of whom we read in Acts.

Who were the Twelve? We are invited to think that they were the disciples, but as all four gospels agree there were only eleven of them at the time. Further, the word ‘disciple’ occurs nowhere in anything written by Paul, nor in any other canonical early writing. The sectarians however had a ruling council of twelve elders, who were versed in all aspects of the Law, with three priests in addition. [23] 

We can see that if Paul was an apostate from the sectarian seminary, then the Jerusalem apostles with whom he disagreed over the matter of the Law were the council of Law experts. If these elders were the twelve who experienced the visions, then they believed in the resurrected Messiah — otherwise we would never have heard of the visions. If they believed, then the rank and file would mostly follow. This would mean that the conversions were not Essene to Nazorean, but Pharisee to Nazorean — and this would be guaranteed to upset the Sanhedrin and invite a reaction.

Acts, we must remember, reports that thousands were being converted, even priests. Essenes avoided the Temple tradition and so had no priests as such, but the priestly role was taken up by their nazirites. [24] This offers a very logical solution to one enduring mystery from the pages of the NT. James is referred to as ‘the brother of the Lord’, and while Catholics protest that this is not what is meant, many have assumed it to be so. This is a big advantage for the ‘historical Jesus’ argument, because it implies that Jesus lived in the early first century. 

Hegesippus however tells us that James was a nazirite, so that if we are correct in the rest of our detective work, he had a priestly role with the Nazoreans. To call him a ‘brother of the Lord’ is therefore simply circumlocution, a way of saying that like the Teacher he was a member of the brotherhood of nazirites. The three apostles who monitored Paul therefore would have been two of the ‘Twelve’, Cephas and John, and one of the three ‘priests’, i.e. James.

The Jerusalem apostles could not lawfully kill apostates in the Diaspora, and they were reduced to argumentation as their weapon. They gave somewhat relaxed guidelines for dealings with Gentiles, but insufficiently to suit Paul, and they clearly tried to rescue Jews — with whom Paul had not been authorised to work — from the Pauline ‘heresy’. 

Separation from Nazoreanism

Pauline material gives an essential insight into much that we wish to know, but it would be a mistake to imagine that Diaspora Nazoreanism was centered on him alone. His following was probably inconsequential as a percentage of the total number of displaced Nazoreans learning to live in Gentile country. We see from his own epistles that there were established Nazorean communities that were not his, that were established before his time and to where he had never been. It was here that the gospels appeared — we can be sure that Pauline opposition to the Law would not be well received in the communities that put the words of reverence for the Law into the mouth of Jesus. Paul’s teaching frequently ran counter to the teachings of Jesus as related in the gospels.

As for Palestine, a period of messianic fervour can be assumed for the period centred around 30 — 40AD, with expulsion of many Nazoreans. The earliest of these must have had first or second-hand knowledge of the visions of the Messiah. Their grandsons knew what they had been told, that the corrupt religious authorities had contrived the expulsions and had urged the Roman authorities, at that time under the prefect Pilate, to enforce them — as would have been necessary. 

In Palestine, perhaps before 40AD, the persecution ceased. Cephas and the other leaders whom we know from Paul, were operating normally out of Jerusalem and making trips into the Jewish Dispersion. But the Diaspora was a vast expanse of territory where only minimal contact between communities was possible or practicable. Inevitably communities developed differences, but the core belief was shared by all: that the approach of the End of Days, heralded by the Messiah himself, had at last arrived. They would have continued with their baptisms and Eucharistic meals in their synagogues, urging each other not to forget the importance of these observances while they patiently waited, and waited…

Gentiles, without blood ties to Palestine, were increasingly represented in the Diaspora communities, and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70AD eliminated any organised form of Palestinian Nazoreanism. Now the dispersed Nazorean communities were alone in their belief. Those who had brought with them the tales of the visions had passed away, to be replaced by a second generation — and a third would be full-grown by this time. 

But where was the Messiah? They had been told that he had arrived, but they had not seen him. To some, his past appearances, to those of their grandfathers’ generation, ceased to have the same compelling significance. The belief that he had already arrived and that ‘the End’ had begun, could no longer be sustained. ‘He had come’ slowly became ‘he will come’, but meaning ‘come again’. 

The Christian ‘parousia’ concept was essential to the survival of the belief, but in surviving much had to change. The resurrected Messiah had not swept everything away in preparation for the End but had only arrived, with no follow-through. The main part of his mission must therefore be considered as being in some way postponed. This created a two-stage process, with the second stage now promised, but not yet scheduled.

Detail changes would have been necessary. The physical presence of the Messiah during the Eucharist for example, proclaimed but not demonstrable, was rationalised as being the bread and wine itself, transubstantiating to become His body and blood. Such a concept had a much longer-term life expectancy, proof against further disappointment.

No one however had ever known when the Teacher lived or what his earthly life was like, but assumed it to have been contemporary with that of their grandfathers. To the third generation of Nazoreans in the Diaspora, as Ellegård observes, (see bibliography) the assumption would be that his observed resurrection must have followed closely on his death. The co-operation with the Sanhedrin by the hated Pilate led to tens of thousands of believers being evicted from Judaea. The subtle sharing of responsibility between the Sanhedrin and Pilate is readily seen in the gospels. Pilate, naturally enough, was assumed to have killed their Teacher, who thwarted them all however, by being resurrected. 

The decision to write a story about the epic life of the ‘Teacher’ — as often as not named as such in the gospels — set the seal on the transformation of Nazoreanism into Christianity. The acceptance of a two-stage eschatological process made it easy to transform the first stage into a quasi-historical story. It unwittingly time-shifted the Teacher by a couple of centuries, and gave him an invented biography. Into his mouth were placed a few, possibly authentic, words of the Teacher. The known or remembered historical details from the time of the visions also found their way into the story, the names of the Jerusalem apostles mentioned so often, the hated Pilate and the corrupt Sanhedrin.

Thus appeared the first biographical account of the Teacher, a prototype of the anonymously written work we call Mark. Dennis MacDonald has shown that this story was modelled on a Homeric pattern, as were most Greek literary works at the time, and with much material transposed or adapted from the ‘Odyssey’ and ‘Iliad’. [25] Much of the story has no direct connection with anything written by earlier writers, but the inherited knowledge that they did have is incorporated, although without regard to chronology. 

In the early writings, (cf. Romans 1) the mission of the Messiah, to lead Israel into the End of Days, begins at his resurrection where he becomes divine. Indeed, he only appears on the scene at the time of his resurrection — at least as far as concerned the then current generation of sectarian believers. 

By contrast, the first evangelist has Jesus begin his mission by being baptised in the Jordan by John the Baptist, becoming divine by the action of the Holy Spirit. He then recruits a band of disciples, just as Odysseus did in ‘Odyssey’. The first of these was Peter (Cephas). Together, there were twelve, and these twelve were the first to recognise him as Messiah. 

Looking back at the earlier writings, we see that there had to be twelve and Peter had to be the first among them. Who were the first to recognise the Messiah from the visions? Paul tells us that "He appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve". Christians explain Paul’s ‘twelve’ as being the apostles of course, and indeed they were, but the twelve disciples were modelled on the twelve apostles of the sectarian council. The Christian explanation requires Paul to be aware of information assumed as being known also to the evangelists, but it glosses over the fact that there were only eleven disciples at the time of the resurrection. Again, if we accept that some information certainly flowed with time, from Paul’s generation to the evangelists, all becomes much clearer. 

The acute shortage of key material about the life of the Messiah in the work of the early writers meant inevitably that there was little historical or factual material to be incorporated from that source. The evangelists include what little there is, but are obliged to fill in the blanks with their own words and ideas, borrowing freely from Homer.

However, the first gospel successfully — one might say brilliantly — created a focus for the communities whose confidence in the tales of their grandfathers was fast fading, undermined by the passage of time. They needed a firmer basis for their faith.

If one or more of the communities possessed writings from the old country, with sayings of the Teacher such as we find in the Gospel of Thomas or the reconstructed ‘Q’ gospel, words actually spoken by the Teacher during his earthly life, it is odd that they were not used. The early writings, and the Markan gospel too, have only a very few echoes of them. The destruction of Qumran, and Jerusalem, in 70AD must have precipitated a fresh wave of refugee Nazoreans — the last to leave the sinking ship. The possibility must be considered that with them came precious scrolls, collections of the sayings of the Teacher. These were mostly not present in the first gospel, which is usually dated to 70-80AD. The later evangelists use the first gospel as a foundation for their own augmented accounts, weaving the sayings, including the Sermon on the Mount, into essentially the same narrative.

Removing Nazoreanism and Gnosticism

The dualism of the Essenes seems to have become amplified in Nazoreanism, taking on board much of the understanding of Gnosis — and so later becoming Christian Gnosticism, the earliest form of Christian belief. Nazorean fugitives who were isolated in remoter parts of the Dispersion, such as the Mandaeans, never to merge with the gospel group, developed into something quite distinct from Christianity, yet equally Gnostic. The gospels therefore mark the true beginnings of the Christian faith; they proclaim - for the first time - ninety percent or more of what Christians believe. The so-called Christianity of Paul is really no more than heretical Judaism.

The Gnostic component of the belief of those who consolidated around the gospel group, such as Paul’s communities, can be seen to have made a sudden development with the first gospel. Yet another astute Catholic priest and theologian, Raymond Brown, has noticed the movement in the timing of the point where Jesus becomes divine in the various christologies, moving always chronologically backward. [26] At first the resurrection was the critical event, but in the first gospel it was the baptism. Through multiple layers of gospel redaction we see the critical event move even further backward to birth, to conception, finally to become everlasting and eternal divinity in the fourth and final gospel. 

Those who were driving Christianity towards a final and definitive form in the second century must have regretted much that is found in the synoptics, material reflecting local interpretations and inconsistent beliefs. Multiple layers of redaction, employed to swing Christian scripture into line with changing christology, left behind traces of what had occurred. Gnostics, for example, were able to find residual references to support their position for years to come. 

With the disappearance of their Palestinian sectarian progenitors, emerging Christianity had developed a rigid authoritarian control system that operated with precision. They tried to lose all trace of their Nazorean origins, the old belief from which they had diverged so far. Soon afterwards they purged the belief of Gnosticism, a process that continued for centuries. But Gnosticism was a significant part of the earlier belief, and it has left its stamp on Christianity. Just as the blood of the Islamic Moors runs in the veins of the Spaniards who drove them out, so the dualism of the Gnostics and the Nazoreans is present in the DNA of the Church. 

Ridding themselves of their Nazorean ancestry required more than persecution, since all the gospels and Acts speak of ‘Iesous Nazoraios’ — ‘Jesus the Nazorean’ and this could not be changed easily. The subterfuge used to eliminate the old meanings of ‘Nazorean’ and ‘Damascus’ is still faintly visible in the pages of the NT. The words have been most subtly adjusted by using an elegant forgery technique, that of placing the required definition before all other references. This meant that the second gospel had to be placed first in the canon, so that Matthew 2:23 will be seen before other examples of ‘Nazorean’ are encountered. As for Damascus, the first mention of the place by Paul leaves no doubt that he is speaking of the Syrian city. All other references in the NT are simply ambiguous, but can safely be interpreted in accordance with Paul’s unequivocal identification of it with the Syrian city of the Decapolis.

Finally, and here my view is more tentative, I suspect that the fourth gospel may have been intended to supplant the synoptics with the up-to-date christology of the then-current leadership — a sort of ‘definitive edition’ or even an ‘authorised edition’ of the gospels. If so, the attempt failed, as the long-established preferences of the communities asserted themselves. Christianity went forward with a blend of all four gospels, and Christian apologists eventually resigned themselves to a future of ‘contradiction management’. 

My reasons for suspecting this are partly based on my view of the attempts to hide Nazoreanism from Christian history, since the problem of ‘Nazorean’ in the fourth gospel is managed perfectly. Unlike the synoptics, there are no signs of botched attempts to change spelling, and the relationship to the key at Matthew 2:23 is smooth and fits perfectly into the flow of the unravelling story as presented. 

Further, the fourth gospel eschews the words of the Teacher as seen in the ‘Q’ source. By common agreement it was the last gospel of the four, and the evangelist should have had access to the same input, although apologists moot that he did not. Such as there is seems to be paraphrased, but most, including the Sermon on the Mount, is simply absent. I wonder therefore if this gospel pinpoints a time when the inventions of the Church’s christologists were actually preferable to any factual material that might link them with an unwanted history?

The treatment of the Eucharist in this gospel however is strikingly unique. Christians today see the Eucharist through a filter of gospel information from all four evangelists, so that it passes largely unnoticed that here the instruction to devour the Lord’s body and to drink his blood is devoid of any connection whatever with bread and wine. (John 6:53-56) Here we may be seeing an attempt to discard the sacred meal of the sectarians in favour of a metaphorical consuming of the Lord’s body — as a spiritual experience rather than a ritual enactment of lunch. This would sever completely the ties with Nazorean Eucharistic practice, following the temporary expedient of substituting the bread and wine for the absent Messiah.

Conclusion

While the account that I give here is obviously controversial it is not entirely without support. Ellegård seems to have come to the same opinions as I, quite independently, but based on much the same evidence that is available to everyone, not just to scholars. G.A. Wells has been a great source of inspiration in my thinking, and like him, I believe, I put more store in what is feasible, and within the ambit of known human experience, than by what is unlikely, but has long been believed and cannot easily be disproved. This, in my view, is essential for anyone who calls herself a sceptic in this field. Wells does not probe into any aspect of Essenism or the Scrolls, but has also concluded that the ‘Q’ sayings are probably evidence of a teacher figure from before the time of Christianity. To this extent he and Ellegård, and I, all have faint support for ‘a historical Jesus’ while dismissing the Jesus of the gospels as a mighty fiction. 

To reach such conclusions all that is needed is a sceptical but open mind, and a little reading.

Go, and do thou likewise.

Bibliography

Alvar Ellegård 

Jesus: One Hundred Years before Christ

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Bart D. Ehrman  

  

 

The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture

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Dennis R MacDonald  

  

 

The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark

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Elaine Pagels  

  

 

The Gnostic Paul

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G.A. Wells  

  

 

The Jesus Myth

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The Jesus Legend

 Open Court

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Did Jesus Exist?

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The Historical Evidence for Jesus

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Geza Vermes  

  

 

The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English

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The Changing Face of Jesus

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Hyam Maccoby  

  

 

The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity

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Jonathan Campbell  

  

 

Deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls

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Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J.  

  

 

Responses to 101 Questions on Dead Sea Scrolls

 Geoffrey Chapman

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The Semitic Background to the New Testament

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Kurt Rudolph  

  

 

Gnosis: The Nature & History of Gnosticism

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Owen E Evans  

  

 

The Gospel According to St John

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Raymond Brown  

  

 

An Adult Christ at Christmas

 The Liturgical Press

 1978

 

A Crucified Christ in Holy Week

 The Liturgical Press

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Robert Eisenman & Michael Wise  

  

 

The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered

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Matthew Black  

  

 

The Scrolls and Christian Origins

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Jerome Murphy-O'Conner  

  

 

Paul - A Critical Life

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Christopher M. Tuckett  

  

 

Q and the History of Early Christianity

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Notes and References

[1] Norman Golb is a principal spokesman for a small number of scholars who believe that Qumran was a fortress and that the scrolls came from Jerusalem libraries. 

[2] Fitzmyer, 1992, p. 64. 

[3] Fitzmyer, 1979, p. 281. The relevant essay in this volume by Fitzmyer was first published in 1966. The distinction here between Christian and Essene belief uses reference points separated by perhaps a century – the date of the appropriate scrolls for Essenism, and the Christian belief as portrayed in Acts, early second century. The scrolls, once written, did not change – Christian belief certainly did. 

[4] 'War', and 'Antiquities'. 

[5] Fitzmyer 1992, pp.46-47. 

[6] Tuckett, 438ff

[7] For example, 'Those who have chosen the Way...' 1QS 9:17-18. See Fitzmyer, 1997, p. 282 for other examples of the absolute use of 'Way'. 

[8] Darby, invariably translates ‘Nazoraios’ correctly as ‘Nazaraean’ – his variant spelling for ‘Nazorean’. He renders the Greek ‘Nazarenos’ as ‘Nazarene’ – thus showing consistency. The tortured logic of Matthew 2:23 evokes a spelling from him that is used nowhere else - ‘Nazaraene’ – hybridising two words to reflect Matthew’s hybrid reasoning. 

[9] Murphy O’Connor, p.92

[10] Romans 1:1-6. 

[11] 1 Corinthians 15:5-8. 

[12] Galatians 1:11-12. 

[13] 'Jewish War' 2 viii (3). See also Philo, 'Quod omnis probus liber sit' 12 (85-87). 

[14] Acts 2:42-47; Acts 4:32-35. 

[15] Fitzmyer 1997, p. 284ff. 

[16] Few unadulterated synoptic texts of the baptism scene survive, due to Church forgery. The best evidence is the wording of the gospel of the Ebionites in this regard, and among the fund of ‘regular’ texts, the Lukan account in ‘Codex Bezae’.

[17] Black, p. 68. 

[18] The underlying meaning of 'Holy' is 'Separated' hence nazirites, who were 'separated unto the Lord'. Cf. Hebrew 'Nazar' = 'to separate'. 

[19] Jewish War, 2 viii (10). 

[20] Black, p. 91. 

[21] Murphy-O’Connor, p. 66

[22] Messianic Rule, 1Qsa. 

[23] Community Rule, 1QS viii, 1-4. 

[24] Black, p. 167. 

[25] Dennis R MacDonald. (see bibliography)

[26] Brown 1978, p. 7, p. 39, etc. 

Temple and Righteousness in Qumran and Early Christianity: Tracing the Social Difference between the Two Movements 

Eyal Regev

Introduction

Since the beginning of the study of the religious and so-called sectarian texts discovered in the caves near wadi Qumran, scholars have compared them with the New Testament, mostly in order to elucidate the Jewish background of early Christianity, especially the eschatological terminologies or messianic ideas. There are certain similarities between the two movements in terms of the means of atonement and hopes for salvation, and that both tended to transfer sacrificial conceptions into behavioral forms (prayer, ways of righteousness) or set of Christological beliefs that were detached from the Temple cult.

However, did the two movements also share similar views concerning the nature of the existing Jewish society and religious institutions? The purpose of the present paper is to study the social place of these two movements, as portrayed in their own writings. In order to examine their approach towards the surrounding world of those who were non-Qumranic or non-Christian, I will discuss their attitude towards the system of Temple-priest-sacrifices on the one hand, and the rest of the people outside the group who were still non-believers or sinners, on the other hand. Both categories will eventually lead to a reevaluation of the Qumranic and early Christian moral code, emphasizing the difference in their social ethos.

Due to the vast number of relevant sources that can serve as a basis comparison, and the fact that most of them require some interpretation, I will focus only on seminal texts and refer to my pervious articles in which I discussed these problems in a more detailed, but rather isolated fashion. Another obstacle that should be noted in the outset is that the different early Christian communities (and to lesser degree, also the yahad and the Damascus Covenant) were not united in their perception regarding the Temple and the sinners. Consequently, it is impossible to make a precise characterization of each of the various conceptions. Instead, the following discussion has to be limited to a brief overview of the main conceptions that shaped the formation of the Qumranites and the Early Christians.

The Qumranic Withdrawal from The Temple and Its Cult

The Qumran community withdrew from the rest of Jewish society and did not partake in the Temple cult in Jerusalem. Scholars usually conclude that the rift concerning the Temple cult evolved due to halakhic controversies on calendar and sacrificial rites, such as the laws detailed in MMT, the polemic in CD, and the rewriting of the Scriptural cultic laws in the Temple Scroll. However, although it is reasonable to assume that the Qumranites were doomed to stay outside the Temple cult as long as they hold these halakhic restrictions, the Qumranites saw their withdrawal in a different manner. They assert that they condemn the Temple and its sacrifices since the Jewish leaders are morally corrupt and morally defiled.

The Qumran sectarians believed that the Temple itself was also polluted. In one of its compositions, pesher Habbakuk the authors condemn the Hasmonean high priest and leader, who was called "the Wicked Priest", since he was "arrogant, abandoned God, and betrayed the laws for the sake of wealth. He stole and amassed the wealth of men of violence who had rebelled against God, and he took the wealth of people to add himself guilty sin. And abominated ways he practiced with every sort of unclean impurity." The Wicked Priest was also accused of having "committed abominable deeds (îòùé úåòáåú) and defiled God's Sanctuary…. he stole the wealth of the poor ones". 

Similar condemnations were also directed towards another group, "the sons of the pit" in the Damascus Document 6:11-17. Here the members of the community were called to "separate (themselves) from the sons of the pit and to refrain from the wicked wealth (which is) impure due to oath(s) and dedication(s) and to (being) the wealth of the sanctuary, (for) they (the sons of the pit) steal from the poor of his people, preying upon wid[ow]s and murdering orphans". Here the "wicked" stolen money was infected by impurity, and when it was donated to the sanctuary (that is, to the Temple's treasury), it caused the pollution of the cult. 

Early Christian Perceptions of the Temple: Participation, Analogy, Criticism and Rejection

Many studies have been devoted to the approach of Jesus, Paul and different Christian texts or groups to the Temple and its cult. Some of them probably took for granted that the belief in Jesus as Christ, who already had atoned for all human sins was a substitute the need of animal sacrifices and priestly ritual, and thus argued that the early Christians did not feel committed to the Temple and the sacrificial system. Only few scholars, such as D.R. Schwartz and E.P. Sanders, followed the opposite direction and claimed that in the synoptic gospels (especially Luke) there is a positive appreciation of the Temple.

I think that if one examines all the first-century evidence which is relevant vis ? vis the relation to their immediate context and without prejudices, most of the treatments of the Temple and the sacrificial rites will seem quite sympathetic. In a forthcoming article I introduce a classification of the New Testament references to the Temple and sacrifices into four categories: participation, analogy, criticism and rejection. Only the latter really justifies the common view that the early Christians substituted new alternatives for the Temple. 

Indirect participation in the Temple cult, namely, visiting the Temple mount, is attributed to Jesus in Mark, Luke and John. In Luke, for example, Jesus visited the Temple Mount several times. In the age of twelve, when Jesus stayed in the Temple without notifying his parents, he explained that he had to be closed to "his father", thus acknowledging the spatial sacredness of the Temple. In Acts, the apostles in Jerusalem, including Paul, are depicted as taking part in certain activities (mostly prayer and teaching), without the slightest evidence of resisting the sacrificial cult. One may presume that the fact that these sources emphasized such participation does not correspond the scholarly view that Jesus and the belief in Jesus were substitutes for the cult. On the contrary, I think that in Luke-Acts at least, the aim of these descriptions is to demonstrate that the belief in Jesus does not contradict a commitment to the Temple cult. One may also take some of them as historical, attesting to the fact that Jesus or the apostles had a special interest in the Temple cult and the human interactions surrounding it.

Analogies between the Temple/Sacrifice and the community/believer (or between the priest in service and the apostle) are introduced in a positive light in the letters of Paul. I maintain that these "spiritualized" analogies are not meant to "transfer" the cult to new realms but are merely literal expressions of sanctity. There is no indication that the community or the believer substitutes the actual symbol. On the contrary, the analogies draw on the supposition that the Temple, sacrifices, and ministering priests are the archetypes of holiness and sanctity without any attempt to invalidate their image. 

In order to illustrate this point I would like to examine Jesus' saying in the last supper "this is my body" when he cut the bread and gave it to his disciples, and "this is my blood, of the covenant which is poured out for many" when he took the cup and gave thanks and offered it to them (Mark 14:22-24; cf. Luke 22:10-12; John 6:51-58). Some commentators inferred that Jesus substituted the symbols of his own body for sacrifice, transferring himself to a sacrifice of atonement (as in 1 Cor 15:3). This indeed was the manner in which Paul and Mark regarded the Last Supper. However, as Jonathan Klawans recently asserted, the text itself contains only a metaphor of the bread and wine as sacrifice without claiming that Jesus' flesh and blood will substitute for sacrificial rites in the future. Using such a metaphor does not necessarily mean that the signified is fully identical with the signifier. As Klawans emphasizes, the use of such a metaphor or an analogy of a sacrifice as a model for the relationship between Jesus and his followers actually attests to the strength of the sacrificial metaphor within the earliest Christian circles. Furthermore, it seems to me quite remarkable to ascribe to Jesus such an initial rejection of the sacrifice while he is actually dining at the Passover sacrificial meal with his disciples…

I would suggest that this interpretive method may be used cautiously when reading the analogies of Temple and sacrifice in the letters of Paul. Paul portrayed the community of believers as a Temple or a shrine (1 Cor 3:16; 6:19; 2 Cor 6:14-7:1), or as a sacrifice (Rom 12:1; 2 Cor 2:14-15). He also portrayed himself as a priest of Jesus and God who is virtually offering the gentiles and taking care of their sanctification (Rom 15:16, following Isaiah 66:20), or portrayed himself as a libation poured on the sacrifice of the Philippians belief (Philippians 2:17). In 1 Cor 10:16-21 Paul describes the Eucharist as simulating sacrificial meal. 

Now, why did Paul use so many analogies between the believers or the belief in Jesus and the Temple and its sacrifices, and why did he use them in a religiously loaded fashion? It seems that Temple, sacrifices and priest are characterized in these analogies in an extremely favorite light; otherwise it would be a disgrace to draw an analogy between the most sublime Christian idea of believing in Jesus and an irrelevant Jewish cultic practice. 

Although Paul spoke against the authority of the Torah, he never invalidated the Temple and its cult. True, Paul did introduce an alternative mode of atonement, but he never explicitly asserted that the role and function of the Temple were exhausted. One should also bear in mind that scholars are still debating whether Paul's epistles to the gentiles are really indicative of his own religious behavior or Jewish identity. It is indeed puzzling that in Acts Paul is portrayed as an observant Jew who visited the Temple and brought sacrifices. I therefore suggest that since Paul used the Temple and sacrifices as an imaginary model for sacredness and closeness to God, he had some appreciation to the Jewish cult. Whether or not Paul was an observant worshipper of the Temple is another matter that requires a separate discussion.

Criticism of the Temple is quite rare. It may is found in Jesus' "cleansing" of the Temple and in Mark 13 (where Jesus proclaims the destruction of the Temple ). Criticism, however, is not denial. When witnesses ascribe to Jesus the saying that he will destroy the Temple, they also claim that he said the he will built another one "not made with hands" within three days (Mark 15:58). Thus, at least according to this version of the saying, Jesus saw a special importance in the Temple and aspired to a better one. The same approach should be followed regarding the scene of Jesus' "cleansing" of the Temple (Mark 11:15-17 and par.). Although there are many interpretations for what Jesus meant by this remarkable act, most of them regard it as a "prophetic" message of rebuking the behavior of the Jews in the outskirts of the Temple. Rarely was it interpreted as a total rejection of the Temple cult. According to my own interpretation, Jesus did not criticize the priests or the Temple institutions, but rather rebuked the unrighteous people who contaminate the Temple with their corrupted money (see appendix).

Rejection is found only in three texts: John, Hebrews and Revelation. In these texts substitute cultic systems are introduced, imitating major components of the traditional sacrificial rituals. In John. 4:21-24 Jesus implicitly speaks against the Temple worship, and in 2:13-21 his resurrections is portrayed as a new Temple. In Hebrews the traditional cult is explicitly invalidated whereas Jesus is proclaimed as the new high priest as well as the ultimate sacrifice that sanctifies both flesh and spirit. Jesus is serving in the heavenly Temple. In Revelation there is no Temple in the New Jerusalem, since "its Temple is the Lord God, the, and the Lamb" (21:22). Instead of an earthly Temple, there is a heavenly and ideal one, where the (lost) holy ark is placed (11:9). The believers themselves are the priests (1:6; cf. 5:10; 20:6).

I think that it is unwarranted to postulate that positions similar to those of John Hebrews and Revelation were held by Jesus, Peter, Mark, Luke and even Paul. I have tried to show that there are numerous non-polemical references to the Temple and the sacrificial system, those of which I have classified as participation and analogy, and there is also an absence of explicit (or any) rejections and total substitutes for the Temple cult outside John, Hebrew and Revelation. Thus, I conclude that most of the early Christians favorably viewed the Temple and its cult, and that the Temple had a significant role in their belief system. Some of them, presumably Jesus and the apostles, probably felt committed to it in a practical way. 

Since the authors of Hebrew and Revelation rejected the sacrificial system and introduced alternative holiness systems, it appears that they actually acknowledged the importance of its symbolism in order to cope with the strong impact that the Temple had upon their fellow Christians. Their purpose was to virtually tear the traditional Jewish Temple from the heart of the believers in Christ. However, the fact is that in order to do so they had to introduce a very detailed and imaginary sacrificial system that would fulfill the same functions of the sacrifice and worship in the pre-70 CE Jerusalem Temple.

The Moral Code of the Qumran sect as a Sectarian World-View

As seen in the Qumranic attitude towards the Wicked Priest and the Temple, the Qumran sectarians defined the reality in dualistic terms of righteousness versus wickedness. Only those who were assured as just and pious could enter the yahad. The people outside the sect were considered wicked and bearing moral impurity. One of the main pre-suppositions of the Community Rule is that the members of the community "shall separate from the congregation of the men of injustice (àðùé äòåì)." Namely, the members of the community must withdraw from those who might have morally defiled their holy spirit, not their bodies (cf. also CD 5:7-11, 7:3-4). The Community Rule continues the strong association of sin with impurity and thus aims to prevent any contact with the wicked in order to avoid their defilement. Thus, immorality, wickedness and their defiling consequences seem to pervade the entire world outside the realm of the Qumran sect.

As for the members of the Qumran community, According to the Community Rule they aspired to be purified from all sins, and practiced rituals and ablutions in order to be sustained in a state of moral purity. Consequently, novices were accepted after a long, gradual procedure in order to make sure they were entitled to join the sect and would not contaminate the communal meal and "liquids" with their wickedness. Transgressing members who lied about financial issues, gossiped about other members, bore a grudge, answered other members stubbornly or addressed them impatiently were punished by exclusion from the community's pure "liquids" and meals. In cases of grave sins such as transgressing the Sabbath laws, they were expelled from the sect. In Qumran, wickedness and sin had a defiling, coercive and dynamic force that was overcome by prayer, study of scripture and moral behavior. The total overcoming of evil and moral impurity would happen only on the eschatological Day of Judgment.

The fundamental place of moral behavior in their religious system can be illustrated in two passages in which acts of righteousness serve as means of atonement. According to 1QS 9:3-5, justice and righteous behavior (together with prayer) atone for sin and treachery as substitutes for the corrupt sacrifices in the Temple:

…these (men) become in Israel a foundation of the Holy spirit in eternal truth, they shall atone for iniquitous guilt and sinful unfaithfulness, so that (God's) favor for the land (is obtained) without flesh of burnt offerings and without the fat of sacrifices. The proper offerings the lips for judgement (is as) a righteous sweetness, and the perfect of the Way (are as) a pleasing freewill offering.

Thus, there is a contraposition between the immorality of the sect's opponents and the righteousness of the Qumran community. The latter's moral code is posted as an alternative to the traditional cultic system that has been contaminated in wickedness. Furthermore, an analogy between the communal punishment and the sacrifices of atonement and purgation of the sin from the altar (hattat and `asham) is attested to in 4QDe 7 i and 4QDa 11:

Any[one] who [ ] shall enter and make it known to the priest [in cha]rge over the many, and he shall receive his judgment with goodwill as he has said through Moses concerning the one who sins unintentionally that they shall bring his sin-offering and his guilt-offering. 

This attitude towards sacrifices and atonement is revolutionary. Here moral behavior or accepting one's penalty willfully replace sacrifices. Ethics and discipline substitute Temple rituals. 

It seems that since the Temple was infected with moral pollution in a way that made it impossible to atone for sins through Temple rites until the non-sectarian people collectively repented, it therefore follows that the only alternative left for the sectarians would be to adhere to the concept of strict moral behavior that is divorced from the Temple. Since the sectarians believed that the holiness or divine presence was eliminated from the sanctuary because of the sins and guilt of those outside the sect, it is perhaps reasonable that it could still dwell among the righteous, precisely because they do not take part in the traditional sacrificial cult.

Sin, Wealth, and the Acceptance of the Sinners in Early Christianity

Quite similarly to the Qumranites, the early Christian viewed sin as defiling. The most famous expression of this idea is found in Mark 7 1-23. Jesus' reacted to the criticism of the Pharisees concerning his disciples neglecting the handwashing ritual and replied to the Pharisees' rebuking: "There is nothing from outside of a person which, when it goes into a person, is able to defile (koinw'sai) him; but the things that come out of a person are the ones that defile a person" (Mark 7:15). The passage in Mark 7 then continues: "(20) And he said: it is what comes out of a person that defiles. (21) For it is from within, out of the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, (22) adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit (dojlo"), licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. (23) All these things come from within, and they defile." Although it is difficult to ascertain what part of the passage Mark found in his source and what part he himself created, this tradition is undoubtedly rooted in the Synoptic Tradition. Other attestations of this idea are ascribed to Jesus in Q (Luke 11:38-41//Matt. 23:25-26), the Gospel of Thomas 14, ("For what goes into your mouth will not defile you: rather, it is what comes out of your mouth that will defile you"), and Matt. 23:25-26.

The concept of moral impurity had also a special place in the theology of John the Baptist and Paul. John called for and pursued a combination of ritual baptism in the Jordan's water together with moral repentance. Flusser and Tylor followed Josephus' depiction (Jewish Antiquities 18:117) and argued that John demanded moral purity, namely, repentance for one's sins, as a prerequisite for the final ritual purification in the water. However, Klawans understated the role of ritual impurity and concluded that "John's baptism worked as a moral purification, effecting atonement by purifying individuals from moral defilement." In any event, the early Christians believed that Jesus' forerunner called for a certain connection between ritual (or rather, symbolic) purification by immersion, on the one hand, and redemption of sins, on the other hand. Indeed, it is striking that early Christian traditions portrayed both John and Jesus as struggling with the same problem, namely, the connection between sin and impurity.

The idea that immoral behavior produces a certain metaphorical defilement is frequent in the letters of Paul. For instance, According to 1 Cor 5:9-13, what is polluting is internal misbehavior, especially sexual matters. In 1 Cor. 6:9-11 Paul claimed that baptism purifies from moral impurity: adulterers, thieves, greedy people, etc. were washed (ajpolouvw) sanctified and justified in the Spirit of God. Thus, Paul introduces a special elimination rite that purifies the self from moral defilement. 

Among all the explicit and implicit references to immoral behavior in the Jesus traditions in the synoptic gospels, perhaps the most frequent is the corrupting force of wealth. Throughout almost all the traditions about Jesus, and especially in the Sermon on the Mount, Q and the parables, two substantial problems are intertwined: immorality and money. In these traditions, Jesus preaches for moral behavior, emphasizing that immorality produces impurity. He also speaks of the destitute as potentially more righteous than the rich and treats wealth unfavorably. These two teachings lead to an obvious conclusion: Wealth and materialism lead astray from the true worship of God and from moral behavior; "No one can serve two masters... You cannot serve God and Mammon" (Matt. 6:24//Luke 16:13). The perception that wealth is corrupting was central to the development of the early Christian movements and led to a destitute ideology and resentment against the injustice of the rich.

The notion that sin defiles had social characteristics and implications previously unnoticed. It influenced the social interactions of the earliest Christians with the outside society. I would like to show that there is an interesting relationship between this notion and the acceptance of sinners in early Christianity. The close interaction with the sinners is one of the main characteristics of Jesus' activity in Q and Mark. Jesus aroused his critics (the Pharisees) when he associated with the sinners and told them that their sins were redeemed. Those sinners were people who did not concern religious piety (ritual purity, and possibly also studying Scripture or oral Torah) before they joined the Jesus movement. In many cases they were involved in immoral occupations such as monetary transgressions (viz. tax collectors and moneylenders) that consequently produces moral defilement. According to Sanders, Jesus' attitude was exceptional, perhaps even outrageous, since he was ready to consider the sinners as righteous before they completed the traditional redemption procedure that included restitution (when required) and an atoning sacrifice (with the accompanying confessional rite). Thus, from traditional Jewish point of view, the sinners who followed Jesus were not fully redeemed and were still, at least formally, sinners. However, the Jesus traditions imply that they recognized their sins, and that spiritual change was enough, at least in the first stage.

The pattern of accepting people that were excluded by other religious groups, or rather, to overlook socio-religious status and past immoral (even idolatrous) occupations of potential converts, is also typical of John the Baptist, the Jerusalem community and Paul. Although John himself was an ascetic hermit, he was willing to baptize anyone who was willing to repent, including, sinners, prostitutes and roman soldiers. According to Acts, Peter did not screen those who were baptized in the name of Jesus, and even converted Cornelius the God-fearing centurion. Also, Philip baptized the Samaritans and the Ethiopian eunuch. Paul applied to every potential believer, and when he confronted by Jews he and Barnabas turned to the Gentiles. In his letters, Paul advanced the view that even former idolater can be baptized in Christ and be a true believer, and one's sins are redeemed by his belief, the death of Jesus, and God. It is interesting that in his total acceptance of sinners and Gentiles, Paul did not call for repentance, in contrast to John the Baptist and Peter (cf. Acts 2:38). 

In light of the multiple attestation of the perception that sin defiles, one would have expected that Christian communities would reject those who regarded (by some other Jews) as outcasts, or any other individuals that were regarded as dishonest or idolatrous. Indeed, in the Qumran community the notion of moral impurity led to sanctions against the morally impure persons or even exclusion as well as separation from the defiling force of sin. However, the evidence shows otherwise. John, Jesus and Paul tolerated the morally defiled sinners as long as they joined their movements. Luke portrays Peter and Philip as eager to convert formerly idolatrous individuals. In view of the Qumranic background, this attitude seems puzzling. If sin is defiling, how should this openness towards the impure be explained? Is it possible at all to resolve the sayings of moral impurity with the traditions about close relationship with the sinners?

My proposal is that the purpose of the mission to the sinners was to reduce their moral impurity. By congregating with the sinners, Jesus was supposed to lead them back to the path of righteousness. The acceptance was aimed at ameliorating their defiling deeds. By approaching the sinners instead of condemning them, Jesus was supposed to transform the sinners into potentially honest people who would avoid sin and moral impurity. 

Conclusions

New religious and social movements usually mark boundaries and separate themselves from the outside world. The Qumran community is a good example. However, John the Baptist, Jesus (according to the synoptic traditions), Paul, and probably also some early Christian communities acted differently. They determined the boundary of moral impurity, but in a certain sense, chose to cross it over and over again. Their aim was to reduce unrighteous social behavior, sin, and moral impurity within Jewish society. The very definition of moral defilement in early Christianity was quite similar to its parallels in biblical tradition and in Qumran. Coping with the problem of evil, however, was different. In Qumran the moral pollution was a dynamic power that led to total withdrawal from the Temple and the rest of Jewish society. In early Christianity, however, the actual implications of moral impurity were limited, since the notion of moral impurity did not lead to exclusion, separation, or sanctions against the morally defiled.

From the perspective of the sociology of religion, the paradoxical approach to impurity and sin, and especially the acceptance of the sinners, shaped the early Christian communities as a "conversionist group", to use Bryan Wilson's typology. Its aim was to influence the masses and change the social reality through integration. Such an exceptional approach to the problem of religious and social transgression probably led to the relative flourishing of early Christian communities. It combined social critique and missionary activity. People from the wide margins of Jewish society, and later on, Jewish sympathizers and eventually also Gentiles, were able to join the community and feel that they had a challenging alternative to the Jewish religious institutions: they were able to eliminate sin and moral impurity more easily. 

In a sharp contrast to this early Christian trend, the Qumran yahad, and to a lesser degree, also the Damascus Covenant, were (again, using Wilson's typology) an introversionist sect. The problem of unrighteous behavior led them to separate themselves from the entire Jewish society and to condemn anybody who did not join them. 

Interestingly, the fact that most of the early (Jewish-) Christians lived in a more "open" movement than the "close" sectarian movement of the Qumranites is reflected in their different attitudes towards the Temple. It may be surprising, but the Qumranic views of the Temple were much more radical than most of the early Christian views. In fact, I see a certain relationship between the perceptions of each of the two movements concerning the Temple and the problem of unrighteous behavior. The Qumranites, who set themselves apart from the morally corrupted society ignored the Temple of Jerusalem and hoped for the proper sacrificial cult at the "end of days". In contrast, many Jewish Christians (probably Jesus himself) were committed to the Temple cult and did not feel that an unrighteous behavior by a multitude of people among Israel blemished the sanctity or the efficacy of the Temple rite. It seems that they simply, did not regard the Temple as a point of debate, although most of them believed that there is a new additional mode of atonement.

In summary, I have tried to make a case for viewing the Qumran sectarians as more radical than the early Christians in terms of their ideas concerning the Temple; whereas the early Christians were more revolutionary in terms of their ideas of righteousness, namely, accepting sinners and immersing anybody who is ready to believe in Jesus. It is interesting to conclude this paper with the thought that this new early Christian paradigm of righteousness and elimination of sin, the openness to accept almost anybody, contributed to the development of a new religion out of the early Christian movement. 

APPENDIX: 

Jesus' "Cleansing" of the Temple and the Defiling Force of Money

According to the tradition in Mark, Jesus drove out from the Temple Mount's market those who were selling and buying, overturned the tables of the money-changers of the half-shekel tribute and the chairs of those who were selling doves for sacrifices, and also would not allow anyone to carry vessels through the Temple. His zealous act was directed towards the commercial aspect of the Temple cult that was placed not in the Temple court itself, but on the margins (both spatial and religious) of the Temple Mount. His protest was directed against the money that was involved in the public buying and selling of sacrifices.

This scene, the only case in which Jesus was driven to act violently, has always puzzled scholars. Two types of interpretations have been suggested. Some followed John 2.16 and saw a real religious or halakhic problem regarding the central role of money in the sacrificial cult, namely, contaminating its holiness. Other scholars understood it as a symbolic ("prophetic") act, that may have bore one of the following messages: foreseeing the destruction of the Temple or the coming of the Kingdom of God, proclaiming that the Temple cult should be open to non-Jews, protesting against the greedy priests, or protesting against the politicization of the Temple by the Herodian dynasty.

Both alternatives, however, raise difficulties. The first type of interpretation is problematic since there is no clue in Jewish sources as to the impropriety of money in buying sacrifices. One cannot imagine a Temple without money rolling around. If, according to the tradition incorporated in Mark, something caused Jesus' fury, it was not the general combination of trade and worship, but a particular problem that was related to it. Moreover, there is no attestation in the New Testament to the opposition to commerce on the Temple mount.

The symbolic interpretations included in the second type lack direct support from the early Jesus traditions. Most of the general cultic or political ideologies that were read into this short description in Mark might have been characteristic of certain radical Jewish (viz. the zealots) or later Christian circles. However, there is scarcely an indication in other early Christian traditions (such as Q) that Jesus held such views. Furthermore, in this symbolic interpretation the relationship between Jesus' act towards money, on the one hand, and its religious or political meaning, on the other hand, is rather indirect: the money symbolizes the cult that symbolizes the acceptance of the Roman/Herodian rule or the exclusion of gentiles, etc. Such interpretations do not explain why did Jesus focused on the money issue.

I think, however, that the fact that Jesus' act was directed against the financial aspect of the Temple cult is merely a coincidence. Such an awareness of the connection between wealth, piety and the Temple money is attested to elsewhere in the saying about the donation of the poor widow (Mark 12:41-44//Luke 21:1-4). Surprisingly, most of the explanations mentioned above were not grounded in actual traditions about Jesus' teachings. Is it possible that the peak of Jesus career was so remote from the detailed descriptions of his own preaching? 

I would like to suggest a new interpretation that aims to avoid all these difficulties. The Markan tradition actually reflects an act that was directed not just against the trading outside the Temple, but specifically against money that was related to injustice and corruption. The corrupted wealth was morally impure, in a metaphorical sense, and had a blemishing effect on the sacrificial rite. It therefore violated the sanctity of sacrifices and rituals that were financed by this money. The problem was the money itself, before it was used for financing the sacrifices and offerings, before it was delivered to priestly officials. Jesus actions were directed towards the lay people who were selling and buying, the money-changers and the doves sellers, without any hint for anti-priestly polemic.

Thus, this tradition actually presents Jesus as protesting not against the Temple itself or the priests, but against the more abstract unrighteousness that was transformed into the related corrupted money. Indeed this seems to be the same abstract immorality against which Jesus preached over and over again without pointing to specific group or class. The reason for his protest in the Temple court was that when this money was used for buying sacrifices, it threatened the moral (not ritual!) impurity of the Temple cult. As Mark 11:15 testifies, Jesus action pertained to both the sellers/money changers and the buyers. I suppose that the reason that he attacked the sellers was that it was easier to overturn their tables and chairs than to disperse the coins of the individual buyers, and also because he was more concerned with the moral pollution of the Temple than with the unrighteousness of the buyers.

This interpretation is supported by the early traditions concerning Jesus' teachings of the corruption of wealth and moral impurity (see above). It also gains additional support from the Qumranic notion that corrupted wealth polluted the Jerusalem Temple in CD already discussed above. 

I propose that in the "cleansing" of the Temple, the concept of corrupting wealth was interwoven with the other idea of the defiling force of sin. Although there is no direct attestation to the combination of the two, namely, that the money of the wicked is metaphorically defiled with their moral impurity, I maintain that such a perception is quite apparent. If wickedness is defiling, then its subject or "product", namely, the money, may be contaminated.

The idea that wealth is not only corrupting, but can also be defiled by wicked deeds, is supported by several texts from Qumran (although in Qumran money bares substantive pollution - not just metaphorical - and is ritually defiling). In these texts, wealth (hon) is contaminated by the evil deeds of its possessor, as emphasized in the Community Rule (1QS), in two passages in the Hahbbkuk pesher (1QpHab), and in the Thanksgiving Hymns Scroll (1QHa). However, the most detailed text is the Damascus Document 6:13-17 cited above, which concerns the Temple impurity. Here the explicit cause of the Temple's impurity is the fact that the money that was donated to the Temple was "money of wickedness". It seems that the more one considers certain acts or people as corrupt, the more one tends to declare their money taboo.

This new suggestion may be significant for those who are interested in the Historical Jesus. However, my aim is only to indicate that at least in one tradition the problem of moral impurity was confronted actively, in a way that affected the attitude towards the Temple. In any event, this was not the typical early Christian means of coping with sin and its defiling force.